OpenAI may be cosying up to ad tech vendors to get its ads business off the ground, but they’re already a means to an end – the real goal is for OpenAI to own the stack itself.
The company is currently hiring a monetization infrastructure engineer to build its ads systems from the ground up, an engineering manager to lead the team, a product designer to define what advertising looks like inside its AI assistant, a senior manager to own ad revenue accounting and a trust and safety hire dedicated specifically to the ads product – all based at its headquarters in San Francisco, all full time.
None of which is stopping OpenAI from leaning on Criteo to bring advertisers into ChatGPT in the meantime, or reportedly holding talks with The Trade Desk to do the same at scale. For now, these moves could solve a real problem: OpenAI has no advertiser relationships, no measurement history and no agency integrations. Criteo and The Trade Desk have all three. But companies don’t build out an internal ads org – let alone pay up to $385,000 to do it – if they’re planning to rely on outside vendors forever. Those are the compensation bands of a company building something it intends to own, not rent.
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