OpenAI Puts Advertisers Third in ChatGPT Ad Ranking

Fifty-plus ad tech, measurement and agency partners have signed on with OpenAI in less than a year of its advertising business — but advertisers themselves rank third in the company's stated pecking order, behind user trust and user value.

That hierarchy came straight from Benji Shomair, OpenAI's VP of monetization, who laid it out during an on-stage conversation with LUMA Partners CEO Terry Kawaja at LUMA's Digital Media Summit in New York City on Monday.

"In my experience, ads or commercial messages haven't ever been introduced into as intimate an environment as ChatGPT," Shomair said. "Just think about the things that people are sharing with ChatGPT."

Why does OpenAI even need ads?

The answer, according to Shomair, traces back to the company's charter: bringing the benefits of artificial general intelligence (AGI — AI that can match or outdo people at intellectual tasks) to all of humanity.

Kawaja couldn't resist the obvious joke. "Asterisk, without killing us," he quipped on stage.

The serious point underneath the laugh is scale. Far more people will use ChatGPT than will ever pay for it, so fulfilling the mission, in Shomair's words, "actually requires [us] to build an ad business." He added: "We believe this technology is so beneficial, so incremental, so powerful, that we need to create economic means to make it available to everyone."

Put plainly: ads are the subsidy that keeps ChatGPT free for the masses.

What are the rules of engagement?

Five principles guide every advertising decision at OpenAI, and the company wrote them before it ever tested ads internally:

• Mission alignment (the bring-AGI-to-the-masses mandate)
• Answer independence
• Conversation privacy
• Choice and control
• Prioritizing user trust and user experience over revenue

"We reference these principles on a pretty consistent basis," Shomair said, "and we use this as a way to communicate to our audiences how we're thinking about trust."

The principles aren't decorative. Shomair admitted that partners sometimes push for things OpenAI won't do. "There are places where I think our partners would like us to do certain things that we just can't," he said, "and that's because of how we think about making decisions."

On partner recruitment, he framed the open-door approach as pragmatism, not ideology: "We're taking a partner-first approach. We can't do it all ourselves; it's pragmatic."

Why is everyone joking about this?

Ads inside AI chats remain an easy punchline. Anthropic's Super Bowl spots for Claude earlier this year leaned into the mockery hard.

In one, a scrawny guy asks a buff trainer how to get a six-pack fast, and the trainer starts hawking height-boosting insoles. In another, a man asks his therapist how to communicate better with his mom, and the therapist plugs a dating site connecting "sensitive cubs" with "roaring cougars."

The jokes landed commercially, too. Claude's daily downloads jumped from roughly 63,000 in January to a peak of about 225,000 in mid-February, per Appfigures. Daily active users rose 11% after the game, according to BNP Paribas.

Shomair conceded the ads were funny. But they don't mirror OpenAI's approach, he argued, because in ChatGPT the answers "are separate from the ads and not influenced by the ads."

What should an ad in a chatbot even be?

Here the map goes blank, and Shomair knows it. What does advertising look like when a consumer talks to a brand's AI agent? When their own agent shops for them? When two agents simply talk to each other?

He doesn't pretend to know. Even the people building these systems are experimenting.

"It's hard to forecast beyond six to 12 months," Shomair said. "The products I was working with 12 months ago versus the products I'm working on now — it's like night and day."

Shomair joined OpenAI last December after helping build Meta's ads business, and he said new modes of consumer engagement are part of what drew him: they force advertisers to rethink the format from scratch.

His advice to advertisers watching from the sidelines was blunt: "You've got to get your hands dirty. You've got to jump in and play with it."

The bottom line: OpenAI is building an ads business on its own restrictive terms, and it's telling advertisers that waiting for the playbook to mature isn't an option.