The CPM Era for OpenAI Ads Is Already Ending
Last week I wrote that LLM ads were in their CPM era — crude inventory, crude targeting, and outsized returns for operators who show up before the sophistication does. I compared it to Meta standing up its ads platform, and guessed the maturation arc would take a tenth of the time.
It seems I should revise that estimate because it turns out it’s moving even faster...like, a lot faster.
When our team set up early ChatGPT Ads campaigns a month or so ago, conversion events didn’t even exist yet. (For those non-marketers out there, these are the most basic building blocks for any digital ad campaign. They confirm a purchase had been made, a form has been filled, or some other final action has been taken. They are used to inform ad platforms about what’s working and what’s not). Instead, users of ChatGPT Ads optimized to clicks, because clicks were what was available. Account access was its own adventure — permissions ran through the OpenAI API account, not the ChatGPT one, which you found out by trying. This is what the ground floor of a brand-new ad platform looks like, and anyone who bought Facebook ads in the late aughts just felt a flicker of recognition, nostalgia, and myriad other emotions I won’t get into here :-)
That was hardly three weeks ago. This week’s product notes from OpenAI are a big leap forward:
- Custom audiences — upload a customer list, include or suppress it, set bid multipliers against it.
- An account-health dashboard with recommended optimizations.
- Suggested ad drafts.
- A refreshed ad format.
- Campaigns live in global markets.
Meanwhile OpenAI showed up at Cannes for the first time and called itself an ad business, noting that roughly one in five ChatGPT queries carries commercial intent — and Guideline began tracking verified, transaction-level ad spend on ChatGPT and Perplexity. To me, this is the moment a channel stops being an experiment and starts being a line item.
Custom audiences took Meta years. This platform went from no conversion events to first-party targeting in roughly a month. And it’s delivering results: we’re seeing leads for our agencies and clients come in from OpenAI ads and from ChatGPT organically.
The window I described last week — where the learning itself is the edge because everyone is starting from zero — is real, but it’s re-sizing and moving quickly. The operators treating LLM ads as a 2027 planning item are going to arrive at a platform that already has auctions, optimization, and settled playbooks, which is another way of saying they’ll miss any first or early mover advantage.
It still feels like the Wild West. But things are becoming civilized faster than I’d originally thought — and we’re planning accordingly.
