Ad tech is lining up behind OpenAI (it’s been here before)

“We ran a pilot just to make sure everything worked well, and that has been going well,” said Yang Han, co-founder and CTO. “So we’re actually releasing it wide this week — it’s broadly open on our platform for all our customers.”

That customer base runs to around 1,000 advertisers, with no minimum spend required. It follows OpenAI’s own decision to drop its spend threshold when it opened its ads manager to all applicable advertisers in the U.S. By removing the same barrier, StackAdapt is betting it can get more of its existing advertisers to test and eventually scale on the platform. Han confirmed as much: advertisers, he said, don’t come to StackAdapt for access to ChatGPT inventory alone. They come for what sits around it. Audiences, measurement, creative and the ability to see ChatGPT performance alongside every other channel in a single view.

“If you only want to run on ChatGPT in isolation, by all means it makes sense to go direct,” he said. “But advertisers with meaningful budgets are never going to be executing in one silo.”

Turns out, his view is shared across the ad tech industry right now. The agreed position on OpenAI is that it is a new channel, not a rival to fear. That’s the line anyway. It was on full display during the first quarter earnings call.

Criteo, which became OpenAI’s first ad tech partner earlier this year, reported more than 1,000 brands now live on ChatGPT through its platform with traffic converting at roughly one and a half times the rate of other referral channels. 

DoubleVerify cast itself as the inevitable trust layer — the same role it plays on social and streaming — arguing that brands won’t move beyond test budgets until third-party verification is in place. 

“Our enterprise customers and agency partners have made it clear to us that expanding beyond test budgets in AI environments will require even greater transparency and trust than is present today,” said the ad tech vendor’s CEO Mark Zagorski. “We are confident that, as we have shown on social and streaming platforms, our role as an essential trust layer will extend to this new ecosystem, and we are engaged in discussions with several LLMs that are leaning into ad-supported models.”

OpenAI is already moving in that direction, having announced third-party measurement partnerships are coming soon. Whether Doubleverify ends up at that table is another question. Zagorski added: “As AI drives digital advertising to become more automated, agentic, and opaque, and as AI slop becomes the must-avoid content category for advertisers, the need for independent verification, protection, and performance measurement has never been greater.”

The Trade Desk has no official deal with OpenAI either but that didn’t stop CEO Jeff Green from making the case that the platform is a net positive for ad tech companies positioned to benefit.

His argument comes down to financial reality. AI-powered chatbots have spent heavily on infrastructure and will need advertising to offset those costs, not unlike, he suggested, where Netflix was before it launched its own ads business, “A lot has been discussed about the amount of capex that has gone into these companies,” he told analysts on the call. “They have a very similar dilemma. They have very expensive content.”

The opportunity, in Green’s telling, is that LLM advertising won’t look like legacy search. AI prompts are longer and more specific than the two-word queries Google built its business around, which opens the door to full-funnel activity that search never accommodated. Where The Trade Desk fits into that picture, he wouldn’t say. He was, however, clear about who stands to benefit most: companies that have protected advertiser data rather than pooling it. A description, he applied, not incidentally, to his business. 

What none of these perspectives address directly is the most obvious historical precedent. The biggest scaled ad businesses — Google, Meta and Amazon — are walled gardens. They built proprietary infrastructure, kept data in-house and made third-party dependence optional at best. There is little reason to assume OpenAI’s endgame looks different. The fact that it recently hired senior exec from The Trade Desk Samantha Jacobson to lead its partnerships business suggests it understands the ecosystem well enough to know exactly what it eventually wants to replace.

“The partnerships with ad tech vendors (Criteo confirmed, TTD rumoured) aren’t the point,” said ad tech consultant Shirley Marschall. “They’re a bridge into the ads business. The actual goal is owning demand directly, and that’s already forming inside ChatGPT. The infrastructure is there. The users are there. Productising it now is just connecting the dots. The LLM ads window is genuinely open.”

For now, OpenAI needs ad tech partners. Its self-serve ads manager is new, its measurement infrastructure is nascent and its advertiser base is still being built.