Amazon Ads on Wednesday announced a managed-service pilot with OpenAI that lets select U.S. advertisers extend their Amazon campaigns into ChatGPT, routing the buy through Amazon’s demand-side platform while OpenAI keeps control of every delivery decision.

The mechanics are deliberately conservative. Amazon reps set up and optimize campaigns, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC, and ChatGPT’s ads system decides what serves. Inventory transacts on CPC or CPM through Amazon DSP, with product-feed ads that generate creative from advertisers’ catalogs. Units appear as text or images beneath ChatGPT responses, carrying sponsored labels. Delta Vacations is named among the first participants.

“With access to ChatGPT Ads, advertisers can now extend their campaigns further into where their customers are actively spending time in conversational chat platforms,” said Chris Conetta, director of omnichannel supply at Amazon DSP.

The scale argument is doing the heavy lifting. OpenAI said in February that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users, and Marketing Dive reports the ads business hit a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate last month. That’s a supply pool Amazon plainly wants to intermediate before Google’s or Meta’s DSPs do.

For small marketing teams, the practical read is that a conversational-ad channel just became accessible through an existing Amazon buying relationship, with no separate OpenAI contract and no in-house programmatic staff required. The catch is eligibility: the pilot is limited to select U.S. brands, criteria undisclosed. It follows ChatGPT’s self-serve ad rollout in India, Europe and MENA and the platform’s earlier expansion across 40 markets.

Two ad businesses that once treated each other as strategic rivals are now, in effect, sharing a checkout lane. The pilot’s breadth will reveal whether that’s a truce or a template.

Sources