Soundtrack:

Lots of people are trying to make the matter of OpenAI launching their ads program on the “premium” path something complicated, when it’s actually very simple.

OpenAI badly needs money, and the best kind of money is easy money.

The easiest money in advertising comes from wielders of large budgets who aren’t expected to demonstrate that any particular part of it had a strong positive impact on their company’s marketing effectiveness.

I am mostly talking about Celebrity CMOs, Persistent Panel Members, and other ad land power brokers who have realized that there’s always plenty of cushy jobs to go around for people who unwaveringly stay on the Do The New Thing Treadmill.

There’s also people with budgets so immense chucking $1 million at anything is completely meaningless, but these are the most boring people in the world unless you’re a sales rep and so we’ll leave them aside for now.

Here’s the situation in a nutshell:

The most powerful pretenders in the advertising world have never been more afraid of something than they are afraid of “getting left behind on generative AI,” nor have they ever understood the nature of a new technology less.

Whoever is handling the ads rollout for OpenAI knows this, and they’re ready for the money, please!

ChatGPT Is Kind Of Dusty And Washed, Though

“But Lee, ChatGPT is hardly a very new, cutting edge thing, nor would it be controversial to say it’s likely to be a major ad channel” I hear you already yelling.

You’re exactly right! I don’t think any of the Gen AI hyper-adopters have used an OpenAI product in ages, and I don’t think anyone on the more casual side is religious about using ChatGPT instead of Gemini or Claude or whatever.

It’s a little bit passe!

And that’s why it’s perfectly positioned to capture the ad dollars of the people viewed as “first movers” and “bold pioneers” in the advertising world.

Marketers “with their finger on the pulse” are already generally pretty far behind any kind of bleeding edge, especially in America in 2026, for two main reasons.

1. Our feudal techno-overlords in Silicon Valley decided marketers are low status wordcels and stopped caring what they think or trying to share spaces with them a long time ago.

2. Media fragmentation and political polarization have made it hard for anyone to understand the world, and marketers are not really doing much better at it than anyone else.

The thing is that paid advertising on the internet is always even farther behind the bleeding edge than marketing at large, due to one very simple and incontrovertible fact: revolutionary new ways to use the internet do not launch with an ads product.

They back into it very slowly, and while vocally expressing displeasure that they must do so, only as a last resort…exactly like ChatGPT are doing.

So anytime you hear someone talking about a new ad platform, you’re hearing someone talk about something that’s already kind of old news in an Internet Technology and Cultural sense, which makes it pretty weird to ascribe any merit to being aware of it.

I’m not saying there aren’t smart, forward thinking paid media people-there are!

They’re the people that did not try to tell you how Snap Ads would be the end of Instagram, or that BeReal was going to change the entire paradigm of mobile advertising, or some other nonsense like that.

The essence of being a smart, forward-thinking paid media investment person is knowing it’s best to be Right On Time and knowing how to properly measure and value advertising channels long before the market in general has a mature understanding of them.

OpenAI Ads Will Win Because Their Customers Can’t Lose

Let’s do a thought experiment:

Pretend you’re a marketer, and you’ve just been accepted into the OpenAI ads program, and your boss has approved the $1 million you need.

Explain to me how this could in any way be a net negative for your career.

Clarification: I am not asking about marketing ROI, or ads program effectiveness-I am asking how this does anything but increase your projected future career earnings.

I simply don’t think it’s possible for it to be a net loss.

Let me triple down: if your ads end up showing in lots of the absolute horror show content that causes people to become delusional, dangerous, and a potential harm to themselves and others that ChatGPT creates, I still think your career will be fine.

The reason I say that is marketers have not harmed their careers by continuing to incessantly talk about how much they use generative AI as all of these horror stories have accumulated in the news and on social media.

If your ads are part of the worst possible “brand suitability” fiasco or genuine consumer harm case imaginable, all that’s going to happen is some very admirable and well meaning industry watch dogs are going to write some bad things about you, and they’ll be right, but we’ll all move on and nothing will change and nobody will suffer any consequences.

What about in the more likely case that nothing truly awful happens, and you just run an ad campaign with no discernible impact?

Everyone you tell about it or finds out you did it will probably think you’re “smart” or at least “on top of it” and that you’ve got more juice than the average goose in terms of your industry connections because you got in on the first wave.

People will probably ask you about “the ROI” because they know they’re supposed to do this, but boy oh boy will that be an easy one to duck or fudge.

In short: you would be stupid NOT to run ads in the OpenAI pilot if you can, for the sake of advancing your career. It doesn’t matter what it actually does for the business you work on.

How Netflix Helped People Get Promoted

Any courteous Merchant of Fluff arms their clients with a satchel of magic totems to help them look good and defend themselves from any analytics goblins that appear to sully the beautiful dreams they dared to dream.

Netflix did this pretty well with their “premium” priced ads launch.

Not content to merely hang their hat on that old big streaming producer tentpole of “premium content,” they also brought the phrase “cultural moments” into the conversation and ensnared a bunch of media strategists with it.

The notion here is that running a CTV ad on a big, hot, heavily discussed Netflix show has vastly increased value versus running a CTV ad anywhere else.

This isn’t inherently true, and it’s silly to assume so, and I say this as someone who actually witnessed a brand capitalizing on a big Netflix cultural moment first hand-critically, not through running CTV ads.

Please indulge me for a moment while I illustrate what a real deep content partnership with meaningful integration looks like.

A Detour Into Skincare Industry Partnerships

Long ago I invested in a skincare brand called good light, and a few years ago we absolutely caught some lightning in a bottle and generated sales and long term brand value through a partnership with a Netflix show.

That show was Heartstopper, and we had a rich co-promotional package, an officially licensed Heartstoppers bundle of our products with exclusive custom made merchandising, and lots of social media cross-posting and all that jazz.

This also worked because the brand’s values are very aligned with this kind of media, and the show’s audience is largely the brand’s audience, and a lot of earnest hard work and consideration went into this opportunity.

It was kind of transformative for the brand; this is what Capturing A Cultural Moment of Netflix looks like.

I am sure that in the seasons of Heartstoppers that have run since Netflix introduced ads, companies like Colgate Palmolive have run toothpaste ads on it, and some pharma conglomerate has absolutely choked every ad pod with some sort of vague suggestion that you should ask your doctor about an injection called Boomfeely.

This is just running CTV ads, not “capitalizing on a cultural moment.” There is no strange X factor unless you can detect it in metrics.

People may be posting on TikTok 3.6x more about a show than the average piece of TV you could advertise on, but unless someone can show you a number that shows this means it is worth more specifically for brands simply running TV ads during it, that’s not a win.

The thing is, there is probably a non-$0 ROI to that, all other things being equal. But is is worth enough alone to carry your Netflix buy to high ROI?

Is it worth more than simple contextual alignment with TV content that isn’t currently trending, but is much cheaper? What is it worth, comparatively, to dozens of other parameters you could use to select what CTV programming you buy ads on?

Trick question: nobody cares! Netflix is a big name! Buy it!

If anyone tells you it was too expensive, say that you “signaled cultural relevance to consumers, captured first mover advantage, and invested in a long-term partnership with Netflix that delivered dividends over time.”

How Will OpenAI Sweeten The Story?

I actually don’t think they will, out of arrogance, and unfortunately they will probably be justified when a bunch of hogs line up to slurp that slop!

Admittedly, it’s hard for me to even guess what narrative element they could try and add to the equation. There are people who still believe them when they say they might accidentally build a god, how do you impress those people even more?

You can’t really say anything with 800,000,000 MAUs is a “premium audience.” Limiting it to logged in US users, as they are, still doesn’t get you there.

One could sell an audience segment that is purported to be “premium,” but before we even get to the problems with that-there’s not going to be any audience targeting!

Sure, it’s a logged-in environment. Is that something we even say anymore? I don’t know. So is Discord, what’s your point?

There’s no UGC to be worried about. Well, except it’s kind of all UGC. The user makes the prompt that makes the content.

I suppose for a prompt like “What shoes should I buy?” we’re not worried about that.

For prompts like “Advise me on how to launch a career as a full-time romantic fan fiction artist based on this short story I wrote about the troubled love triangle of Alan Cumming, Donna Kelce, and Fergus The Groundskeeper” I think we’re talking about something entirely different.

I don’t think running YouTube with minimal content restrictions is worse than what some of these prompts will put out. Hell, go ahead and sign up as the official Slur Sponsor for a problematic streamer’s Twitch Chat, it can’t be much worse.

Does This Mean ChatGPT Ads Will Be A Bad Value?

Not at all, and in this article, I’m not making an argument in either direction regarding if this will be a smart buy or not.

I’m talking about what kind of buyer it’s intended to attract, which is entirely different than what kind of outcomes I expect those buyers will actually get.

A funny thing is that these ads could be extremely effective, and then a bunch of you dorks that read this newsletter will get blown away in terms of advertising ROI by a bunch of conventionally hot people who think Tony Robbins is a business genius.

I mean, a $60 CPM would actually be very low for paid search, which is absolutely a valid way to think about this offering, especially when they do inevitably branch out into “performance marketing” oriented products.

Speaking of that…

They Will Offer Other Things Later

Taking this path now doesn’t mean they can’t craft parallel offerings very soon, and they will eventually make a run at their version of AdWords if they and their ad offering survive long enough.

Another reason this was the correct path is that making an ad platform, with true mass adoption, that serves both the most S of the SMBs up to the largest enterprise advertisers, is extremely difficult and takes a long time.

I briefly worked on growth for the ad platform for one of the world’s largest ad platforms (it’s bigger than every independent buying tool besides The Trade Desk) and have heard some people at Google with knowledge of the matter talk about when AdWords scaling got difficult, and anyone who tells you that they’re confident any company is certain to nail this is off their rocker.

I will say that they can probably do this better than most because this is an ad offering that may, much like Meta Ads, be something that’s very viable for business that have a terrible webpage or no webpage at all. Google cite this as a massive advantage Meta unsheathed against the market with Facebook Business entries, back when Google Ads still very much needed even physical businesses to have a good webpage.

Don’t They Need To Take A Huge Swing NOW, Though?

I know I said they badly need money at the top of this piece, but let me put one big caveat on that.

If they plan to continue operating in the framework of free market capitalism and competing to make a product that consumers use and somehow generate money for them, than sure, yes, they badly need money.

However, they’ve already broken basically all of the rules and order of that, and I guess they’re going to continue to do so.

As a socialist who is tired of asking capitalists if we’re still holding their favorite men and corporations to the standards of capitalism, all I really have here is to ask those of you who worship at that altar if you still believe in any of that stuff anymore.

If Ed Zitron is right, and he really may be, and someone really is going to come to the Microsoft + Oracle + OpenAI + CoreWeave money circle jerk and actually present anyone with a real bill they have to pay in real money, than yes, the music might be in danger of stopping and OpenAI might need to race to a Google Ads or Meta Ads sized megaproduct in order to avoid certain doom.

I don’t think American capitalists have the stones and teeth like they used to, though, and the stock market is now just “1001 Arabian Nights” in that everyone can live one more day so long as there’s a story told each night, and “we did ads” is a story.

In fact, I have a theory that I don’t think is too far fetched: I think Sam Altman holds out hope deep in his heart that they’re going to solve monetization in a different way, and the ads are not meant to succeed-they’re just a way to stall for time while he hopes something else saves them.

I don’t think that will work, by the way-even if my theory is true and the hope is the ads are temporary, that’s not how it ends up going.

What Does This Mean For ChatGPT At Large?

I don’t really know, and to be honest, I don’t really care.

I have never found this company, nor this product, nor its CEO to be nearly as interesting as most people do.

My general thoughts on our era of LLM mania are not very positive.

I think we were doing better things with machine learning before, and I am encouraged that some cooler and wiser heads seem to be moving us back towards a diversified portfolio of ML approaches we’re betting our future on.

Besides my general thoughts on LLMs, though-it just doesn’t seem like anyone, from The Gastown Man to even a lot of the most normal normies, seem to think ChatGPT is the most important one, or at least something they can’t live without.

Conclusions & Delusions

Will it make the internet and the future better if you send OpenAI money for ChatGPT ads? Almost certainly not.

Is it the right thing to do as per your fiduciary duty to drive maximum shareholder revenue for your employer by making smart media buys?

This depends entirely on your organization’s risk tolerance and testing standards. A useful shorthand, though, is that if this would be 0.5% of your total paid media budget, it’s probably a defensible idea, and those are exactly the kind of advertisers who are going to be let into this program.

Is it the right thing to do for your career?

Let me ask you this a slightly different way: do you want to spend the rest of your life showing people a bunch of boring numbers, just so you can vacation domestically and infrequently?

Or do you want to be on stage at POSSIBLE in matching HERMÈS bracelets dropping sublime wisdom like “people say that a vibe isn’t a plan and yet you can’t plan a vibe” and having an ecstatic out of body experience when you see Tony Robbins crack a slight smile in the third row?

Sign on the dotted line, kid. Hell is hot but so is Miami and I hear next year’s keynote is going to be Ye if he pulls off this redemption arc.