Sam Page

The ability to target buyer intent is a huge opportunity for brands.

OpenAI has announced Ads to users in the US on a free plan (initially).

We’ve been predicting this at 7DOTS for some time – it was inevitable.

It follows closely on the heels of Google Gemini announcing the same thing a couple of weeks ago: https://lnkd.in/e6pYKdRU

LLMs and AI agents are quickly becoming the new battle ground for brands to reach customers in purchasing journeys. Especially as people user AI for research, to guide decision making and eventually purchase on their behalf.

And the TARGETTING potential is HUGE for brands.

LLMs have deep knowledge of people’s “intent”, far more advanced than keyword targeting. This should help to ensure advertising spend is reaching more relevant people.

After all, think of all the things people are discussing with LLMs which can give them mega insights. See my post on this based on the research: https://lnkd.in/eKqTAASe

It should also mean the LLMs start to open up access to their data. They will have to, to provide transparency and trust to advertisers.

But the brand opportunity aside, it does also signify the inevitable shift towards “enshittification” (Cory Doctorow). A pattern that describes how businesses degrade platform experience in pursuit of extracting value for the business.

Unfortunately this is business reality, especially when you have invested huge sums of money in infrastructure and VC money is tightening.

Can OpenAI and Google balance commercial necessity without losing user, or advertiser, trust?

Google have a 20 year head start on OpenAI in this space.
OpenAI need to do it overnight.

It’s not going to be easy when OpenAi are already on the back foot.