Advertisers are flying blind on ChatGPT ads — Adthena wants to change that

“We know with a high degree of confidence these budgets will come from search somewhere, we’ve had people say that on a customer advisory bureau,” Fletcher said. “So the best place to start is with your mature Google Ads campaigns.”

Adthena has already had six customer calls last week, that Fletcher defined as being “large enterprise brands that are part of the trial” who have been testing AdBridge. From their perspective, he said, “it’s about scaling [ChatGPT ads] for them.”

The product has almost certainly been shaped by what Adthena is hearing from clients already testing ads inside the chatbot — a cohort that, for now, remains small but is growing fast. The same will be true of the broader ChatGPT ads suite Adthena is building toward a launch later next month. Alongside AdBridge will be Arlo — Adthena’s AI assistant which lets advertisers query their account data and draw direct comparisons between their ChatGPT and search ads performance.

“We want to get all of the advertisers ready so their campaigns can go straight in,” said Adthena’s CMO Ashley Fletcher. “The hypothesis is, Google Ads has Adwords editor, where you work with CSVs. Bing, you can upload or ingest CSVs. Meta can ingest CSV. So we feel there will be an appropriate place to work with that. But again, we’re keen to roll out the alpha [of ChatGPT AdBridge] as quickly as possible. Whilst it’s a simple solution, I think it will help scale.”

It was always a matter of when, not if, companies started building their own tech stack around ChatGPT advertising. Few would have predicted it would move this fast. OpenAI has already quietly launched its first ads manager iteration, partnered with Criteo, Smartly and StackAdapt. And in the space of a few weeks, dramatically lowered the barrier to entry — the minimum commitment has dropped from $250,000 to $50,000, the static $60CPM has given way to a $25 to $45 range, there’s a pixel, and CPC campaigns are now on the table. For advertisers who balked at the original price tag, the door is opening.

The ecosystem is following. It always does around fast-growing platform-turned-ads businesses. Around Google, a whole industry of bid managers and search intelligence platforms emerged to help advertisers navigate its complexity. Meta spawned its own layer of audience, targeting and creative tools. Amazon did the same for retail media. Each time, the platform moved first and the tooling followed. ChatGPT is next, and it’s happening faster than any of them did.

John Barham, managing partner at ROAST said he believes that advertisers do want this functionality in ChatGPT ads because it “makes life easier.”

“ChatGPT has clearly recognised that the most effective route to stealing Google search budget is to accept that the majority of advertisers will already have a Google Ads account,” he said. “If you can easily replicate this established and optimised set up on your own platform, the brands and ad spend will soon follow.”