Sam Altman’s recent announcement that OpenAI is beginning to test ads in ChatGPT marks a significant moment for both marketers and the wider tech industry. For businesses, it immediately sparks excitement.
History tells us that when a new platform opens up to advertising, early movers win. Costs are lower, competition is thinner, and attention is fresher and more valuable. We’ve seen this pattern repeat itself with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Those who invested early didn’t just benefit from cheaper CPMs, but also helped define how brands showed up on those platforms before they became crowded and noisy. ChatGPT could represent the next, and perhaps most powerful, version of that opportunity.
What makes ChatGPT different from every platform that came before it is the nature of the attention. This isn’t passive scrolling or background consumption. People open ChatGPT with intent. They are asking specific questions, trying to solve real problems, researching purchases and looking for clarity.
From a marketing perspective, that is exceptionally high-quality attention. If advertising is introduced carefully, it’s easy to see why brands would want to be there early. As Sam Altman has said, OpenAI’s intention is not to accept money to influence the answers ChatGPT gives, but to surface ads that are genuinely useful to users, similar to how Instagram can sometimes introduce products people didn’t know they wanted. For a limited period, ads in ChatGPT are also likely to be far cheaper than on saturated platforms like Meta or Google, at least until the probably inevitable mass adoption takes place.
However, this is where the opportunity becomes more complex. ChatGPT is not just another media channel; it is rapidly becoming infrastructure. People don’t just doom scroll on it, they trust it. They rely on it for explanations, guidance and reassurance in a way that is fundamentally different from social media or even search engines.
Introducing advertising into that environment carries a real risk of eroding that trust. Even if answers remain entirely uninfluenced, perception matters. If users begin to question whether commercial interests are shaping what they see, even subtly, the platform’s credibility could be weakened. Trust, once lost, is notoriously hard to rebuild.
This creates a challenge that few platforms have faced before. With social media and search, users have always understood the trade-off. With ChatGPT, the expectation has been neutrality, usefulness and honesty above all else. Ads that feel intrusive, irrelevant or poorly disclosed could undermine that expectation very quickly.
From a brands’ comms perspective, this makes early adoption both an opportunity and a responsibility. Those that succeed will be the ones that add value rather than noise, treating the platform as a space for genuinely helpful, relevant messaging rather than hard sells and gimmicks.
Done well, ChatGPT advertising could redefine how brands reach high-intent audiences. Done badly, it risks damaging the very trust that makes the platform so powerful in the first place. All eyes will be on how carefully that balance is managed, by OpenAI and by the brands that choose to move first.