OpenAI tells marketers intent beats identity, and its ad business is scaling fast

At Advertising Week New York, OpenAI's Samantha Jacobson reminded the room why ChatGPT carries ads: "so that all of humanity could benefit from AGI." The substance was her view of data. Asked whether the first-party data the industry spent years accumulating still matters, OpenAI's VP of monetisation partnerships said "knowing who the person is, I think matters less," arguing that what someone is asking at that moment beats the demographic profile, and describing past personalisation as something that "felt really creepy." There is a commercial logic underneath: OpenAI's published ad principles promise to keep conversations private from advertisers and never sell user data, so a platform that has ruled out handing over granular audience data needs buyers to believe intent beats identity. The scale is moving fast. OpenAI started selling ads in ChatGPT in February, opened a self-serve Ads manager in the U.S. in May, and said at the end of August that ChatGPT ads had hit a $1 billion annualised run rate with tens of thousands of advertisers in more than 40 countries, reportedly targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030. The piece does not take the pledge at face value: it notes Meta's 2011 Federal Trade Commission settlement and the Cambridge Analytica affair, and Google's "Don't be evil" era, and concludes that the people asked to take OpenAI's word on faith "have watched earlier ones age and they'll judge this one by what the ads business does when its $2.5 billion revenue target gets harder to hit."

The crux

OpenAI is arguing that intent signals can replace the identity graph, but the promise that advertisers never get user data is also the thing that forces it to sell that argument, so the pledge gets tested the first time ad revenue growth and privacy commitments pull in opposite directions.

Sell-side read

If intent-based buying really does devalue the identity graph, the premium publishers built on authenticated, first-party audiences is at risk from a platform that needs no cookies to target. The counter is that contextual and attention signals still favour editorial environments, which is where publishers should push the argument.

Watch

the first credible measurement of whether ChatGPT intent targeting out-converts profile-based buying on comparable objectives.