Amazon Is Becoming a Gateway to ChatGPT Ads
Amazon Ads has announced a partnership with OpenAI, letting select U.S. advertisers extend their existing Amazon campaigns directly into ChatGPT, Amazon said.
How does it work? Advertisers buy the placements through Amazon DSP, Amazon’s programmatic ad platform, without having to negotiate directly with OpenAI, and Delta Vacations is among the first brands testing the pilot. “Conversational ads represent the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences,” said Chris Conetta, Amazon DSP’s director of omnichannel supply.
The mechanics split responsibility cleanly between the two companies. Amazon sets up and manages the campaigns; OpenAI’s own ad system still decides which ads actually appear and where, CNBC reported. The ads show up as text or images beneath a ChatGPT response, clearly labeled as sponsored; a user asking for marathon training tips, for instance, might see an ad for running shoes sold on Amazon. The deal marks a reversal for Amazon, which had previously kept ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini from tapping into its own retail ecosystem even as it built competing AI shopping tools of its own, Quartz reported.
OpenAI Gets Amazon’s Sales Machinery, Not Just Its Reach
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What Amazon actually brings isn’t just audience. ChatGPT already has hundreds of millions of users. What it does bring is a fully built advertiser relationship and buying infrastructure OpenAI doesn’t have to construct from scratch. OpenAI’s ad business crossed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in early September, but the company is privately targeting $100 billion in advertising revenue by 2030, a pace that would require sustained growth above 200% a year, PYMNTS reported. Against that ambition, the gap between OpenAI’s current ad operation and a mature one is real.
“They’re still trying to build out even many of the basics of a functional ad sales operation,” Nate Elliott, principal analyst at eMarketer, told PPC Land.
That gap is exactly what the Amazon deal fills. Until now, advertisers could buy ChatGPT ads only directly from OpenAI or through smaller ad-tech intermediaries including Criteo and Kargo. Amazon’s advertising segment alone generated more than $70 billion on a trailing 12-month basis this year, dwarfing the scale of those existing partners and giving OpenAI access to advertiser relationships, budgets and campaign infrastructure Amazon has spent two decades building.
What Actually Changed Is Who’s Selling
Every prior expansion of ChatGPT advertising, the self-serve ads manager, new country rollouts, falling minimum spend thresholds, involved OpenAI selling its own inventory directly. What changed now is an advertiser can now buy ChatGPT ad space without ever setting up a direct relationship with OpenAI at all, routing the entire transaction through infrastructure Amazon already owns.
For Amazon, the arrangement extends its advertising reach onto a surface it doesn’t own, host or fully control end to end, a notable concession for a company that has guarded its retail data closely. For OpenAI, it’s a bet that the fastest way to scale a $1 billion ad business into a $100 billion one isn’t building a sales operation from the ground up, it’s plugging into infrastructure another company already built at massive scale, even if that means sharing control over exactly who gets to advertise on ChatGPT and how.
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