How Black Friday and Cyber Monday could ‘fast track’ OpenAI’s ad plan

In August, the tech behemoth scooped up Instacart’s former CEO Fidji Simo as its new CEO of Applications. Then in September, OpenAI had taken the first steps in agentic commerce with Instant Checkout. Last week, Simo told Wired, “The important thing before we ever consider ads is making sure that our commerce experience is fantastic…” To marketers, all signs point to an ad business and the upcoming holiday shopping season may be when the wheels start turning.

“This Black Friday, if all goes well, I’d say it’s probably going to fast track it potentially quicker,” said Digiday platforms reporter Krystal Scanlon, who joined the Digiday Podcast to breakdown what OpenAI ad products could look like. 

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Prerequisites for an ads business

[Simo’s comments in Wired] definitely came across like they need to have three things in order before they can look to have an ads business. It’s the issues around data privacy, because they do have a wealth of data under their belts, and obviously that’s going to be what advertisers want. They need to have the commerce proposition fully netted out and really working well. Then obviously, once they’ve got those things in place, which are kind of the material ideas they need [the person] to be able to sell those ads.

Learning from others’ mistakes

They’re consulting with a lot of brands and advertisers at the moment. From a consulting perspective, talking about their compute and trying to help them be able to work better behind the scenes, internally with their own teams. So already, if they’re forging those relationships, they’re learning what those types of businesses want if they’re going to be selling to them ultimately. They’re not going to go into it blind because they’ve seen how other businesses have crashed and burned with it.

OpenAI’s rodeo circuit schedule 

When I did meet them [OpenAI], they said they weren’t doing CES. Whether that changes again, since things seem to change, there a lot is TBD [to be determined]. One place they did say they are considering, and already in talks about is [Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity] next year. To my mind, you’re going to want to have some form of product before you show up there.

Because if we compare them again to Perplexity, Perplexity was at Cannes this year, but it was very under the radar, very quiet meetings. There was one lunch. And still, the message was coming from those individuals as, “Ads [are] not really going to be a real money maker for at least the next five years. We’re still putting our feelers out.”  It doesn’t seem like OpenAI would ever take that approach. They’re doing all of their groundwork and foundational work now.