OpenAI Pushes ChatGPT Ads at Cannes Amid Plummeting CPMs

OpenAI made its first appearance at the Cannes Lions advertising festival this week, but the company deliberately avoided the flashy beach clubs occupied by Meta, Amazon, and Google. Instead, it gathered reporters and agency executives in a quiet villa near the harbor, a choice that subtly underscores its position: OpenAI is entering the ad business, but on its own terms, not by mimicking the established players.

David Dugan, a former Meta executive who spent over twelve years as vice president of global clients and agencies before becoming OpenAI’s VP of advertising earlier this year, led the pitch. He revealed that the company has already attracted “thousands of advertisers,” with the strongest performance coming from travel, retail, health, beauty, and financial services.

The financial stakes are enormous. OpenAI began testing sponsored links at the bottom of ChatGPT responses on February 10, initially for free-tier and Go-plan users in the US. The ads have since expanded to seven countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, with Brazil and Mexico slated to join in the coming weeks. According to an April report from Axios, OpenAI has projected $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026, climbing to $11 billion by 2027 and an ambitious $100 billion by 2030. Dugan declined to comment on these figures at Cannes.

To hit that target, OpenAI would need to capture roughly one-tenth of the global digital advertising market within four years, a space currently dominated by Google, Meta, and Amazon. The company’s core pitch is straightforward: chatbot users volunteer exactly what they want, making ChatGPT potentially the highest-intent ad surface on the internet.

Early data, however, reveals a more complex reality. OpenAI launched its ad pilot at a $60 CPM, a premium rate reflecting scarcity and novelty. Within ten weeks, that figure dropped to as low as $25, forcing the company to shift to a cost-per-click bidding model with bids between $3 and $5. The ad pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months with fewer than 600 advertisers. OpenAI opened a self-serve ads manager on May 5 with no minimum spend, a move designed to scale advertiser volume but also signaling that its initial premium pricing could not hold.

At Cannes, agency reactions were polite but cautious. Michael Cohen, an executive at Horizon Media, said the firm is “still in the early stages of investment” and that the focus is “a little bit less on maximising performance today and more on learning alongside OpenAI as the platform evolves.”

Benji Shomair, OpenAI’s vice president of monetisation and another former Meta executive, noted that the company is already experimenting with ad formats beyond sponsored links, though he declined to announce specifics. He offered a hypothetical: a user asking how to fix a squeaking door might benefit from a video ad for a hinge lubricant. “If there’s a product like a grease for the hinge, actually would a video explaining how it works be helpful? Maybe,” he said.

The gap between that vision and what agencies can currently buy is substantial. Paolo Yuvienco, Omnicom’s chief technology officer, described OpenAI’s ad effort as “relatively successful” but “immature to a certain degree,” pointing out that agencies buy ad placements in milliseconds while it still takes seconds to generate an AI response.

OpenAI’s move into advertising breaks a tacit consensus among AI companies that chatbot ads are premature. Anthropic used a Super Bowl ad in February to declare that Claude would remain ad-free, framing the decision as a matter of trust: “Users shouldn’t have to second-guess whether an AI is genuinely helping them or subtly steering the conversation towards something monetisable.” Google has denied current plans to bring ads to its Gemini chatbot, though SVP Nick Fox has since said the possibility is “not ruled out.” The company already runs ads in AI Overviews and is testing them in AI Mode, meaning the question is not whether Google will monetize AI-assisted search but how quickly it moves beyond its existing surfaces.

The advertising push is inseparable from OpenAI’s path to a public listing. The company spent $34 billion in 2025 against $13 billion in revenue and does not expect to reach profitability until 2030. It filed confidentially with the SEC on June 8, targeting an autumn debut at a valuation that could exceed $1 trillion. Advertising revenue is the lever OpenAI needs to convince public-market investors that it has multiple revenue streams beyond subscriptions and API access. ChatGPT’s user base, which crossed one billion weekly active users in May 2026, provides the scale. What it lacks is proof that the ad model converts at rates justifying the projections.

The $100 billion target assumes ChatGPT’s products will reach 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030, nearly triple the current figure, and that the AI advertising market will grow large enough for a newcomer to take a meaningful share from Google and Meta.

The deeper challenge is whether advertising inside a conversational AI degrades the product itself. OpenAI says it will not allow money to influence ChatGPT’s answers and will keep conversations private from advertisers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers will remain ad-free. But the company’s own pricing trajectory suggests the market is still working out what a ChatGPT ad is actually worth. A CPM that halves in ten weeks is not the behavior of a product that has found its fit. It is the behavior of a product still searching for it, from a villa hidden behind the bushes at the industry’s biggest party.