Monday Briefing: ChatGPT Wants to Keep Your Click

Good morning, it's James here. Last week I wrote about Amazon selling ads inside ChatGPT. This week OpenAI changed what happens when someone clicks one.

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The Lead: ChatGPT Wants to Keep Your Click

What happened. OpenAI has put a new ad format in front of select clients, Wayfair among them. The call to action reads something like "Chat with us," and clicking it opens "a branded chat within ChatGPT, where they can interact with the brand's AI agent" (Digiday). The user never reaches your site. CFO Sarah Friar had previewed it at a Goldman Sachs conference on Sept. 8, saying, "This is all before we've really launched a format that feels truly endemic to AI."

Why CMOs should care. For as long as most of us have worked in this industry, the ad's job was to deliver a visitor to a page you controlled. In this format the landing page is an agent that answers questions in your name, inside someone else's product. Publishers got their version of the news the same week. At Digiday's Publishing Summit an executive told the room, "Google search traffic is not coming back" (Digiday).

The take. Buyers are not sold yet. Zeno Group's Shamsul Chowdhury told Digiday that on ChatGPT ads so far, "the ROI just hasn't been there for the most part." OpenAI has shared no pricing or measurement. I would not move budget on this. I would ask one question in your next staff meeting: if a customer could talk to our brand agent tomorrow, who owns what it says? In most companies it is the support bot, trained by the service team on return policies. Start with that bot. It already talks to customers in your name.

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Channel Shift: Meta Starts Charging for the Dashboard

Meta launched Meta One last Tuesday, a paid tier for consumers, creators and businesses (Meta). Business plans run from $14.99 to $499 a month. The Advanced tier measures "the performance of up to 10 competitor brands" and lets you pull "audience history data beyond the existing 90-day threshold for Instagram insights" (Social Media Today).

Links in organic posts are now rationed by tier. Advanced gets links on four posts and four Reels a month, Expert gets eight, Max gets twelve.

Meta already takes your media budget. Now it wants a software line item from the same team. The competitor benchmark is the piece that could replace a tool you pay for today. Ask whoever owns social listening to put the $49.99 tier next to your current contract before renewal. If Meta's version covers your top competitors, bring it to the renewal meeting.

Consumer Signal: AI Shoppers Want Creators Cited

56%. That is the share of AI shoppers who say they favor recommendations that pull from creator or influencer reviews, per an IAB survey of 2,200 people across five countries who used AI tools to shop in the past three months (Marketing Dive). Among Gen Z and millennials it is 65%. Among boomers, 66% said they prefer AI answers that leave creator sources out.

The creators have noticed. Digiday reports creators now pitch their visibility in LLM answers in media kits, next to follower counts (Digiday). One creator's pitch reads, "my video about PFAS in your water shows up when you search it."

This matters for the Lead. If the assistant picks the answer, the sources it cites shape the pick. Add one line to your next creator brief. Ask the creator to show you where their past content appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI answers for your category.

Musical Chairs: Hilton's CMO Landed at Target

Last week's issue had Mark Weinstein leaving Hilton after 16 years with no destination named. Last Monday Target named him chief marketing and guest experience officer, effective immediately, reporting to CEO Michael Fiddelke (Target).

He runs guest experience, Roundel (Target's retail media network) and the Target+ marketplace. Target had gone without a dedicated chief marketer since Lisa Roath moved to merchandising early last year (Retail Dive). A CMO who also owns a media business and the store experience is a different job from the one most of us hold. If you sell through Target, expect Roundel's pitch to change.

The Reading List

• "Inside the complex anatomy of agency AI bills" (Digiday) One agency is testing billing AI tokens to clients "as materials." Read it before your next agency renewal.

• "Staples' CMO on introducing a Hard Button" (Marketing Dive) Bob Sherwin says, "We don't have an awareness problem, we have a perception problem." Built in-house.

• "Pinterest announces visual search ads" (Social Media Today) Ads inside image search results, in beta over the next few weeks.

• "PepsiCo launches first-ever brand portfolio campaign" (Marketing Week) PepsiCo says only 18% of consumers link it to brands beyond Pepsi. The fix is a social video of its brands pitching to take the company name.

One More Thing

More of your customer conversations now happen in systems someone else runs: a ChatGPT agent, an AI answer that cites a creator, a retailer's ad network. Pick one and give it an owner this week.

See you next Monday. Until then, make it count.

—James