Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
B (0:10)
Hello. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone who's asked Chachi PT are you being paid to say this? I'm Kameka McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
A (0:21)
And I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor, Video and Audio Digital Media. What's up, Kamiko?
B (0:26)
Hi, how are you? Tim, I am indeed asking ChatGPT if it's being paid to say this. How are you?
A (0:32)
I'm not, because I'm on ChatGPT plus, which means I am not seeing ads. But I don't know how many people are seeing ads. But people are starting to see ads on ChatGPT, and so we are here to make sense of it. Well, maybe not so much you and I as our intrepid senior platforms reporter, Crystal Scanlon, who is with us back on the show today. Welcome back, Crystal.
C (0:56)
Good to be back, guys.
A (0:58)
All right, so Krystal, you have been all over this ChatGPT ad story for months now at this point. And finally, on February 9, after the super bowl, after Anthropic threw all the shade at ChatGPT for rolling out ads, ChatGPT has finally rolled out ads.
C (1:20)
It's like the beginning of the story that now is the next new story that we keep kind of going through.
A (1:27)
And so, Chris, like ChatGPT's initial ad product isn't super complex. It's like pretty limited. And there's precedent for this. Normally when platforms or streaming services like Netflix initially roll out their ad products, they're pretty basic. I imagine some of that is because they still have to figure out what works and what doesn't. Some of that is also to, like, manage expectations when it comes to performance. Can you give us a quick overview of what is this ad product that ChatGPT has rolled out?
C (2:04)
Yeah, of course. So basically they literally just sponsored ads or sponsored services that are literally just going to appear at the very bottom of the answers of ChatGPT. And the one thing that they've been very clear about is that they're going to be very clearly labeled and separate from the organic answer, because any messaging that we've seen from OpenAI is making the point that this is not going to influence what you're saying to ChatGPT and how they're going to help there, how it's going to respond to you. It's completely a very neutral. Well, ChatGPT is supposed to still remain neutral, but then the ads are obviously going to come in as and when it's relevant to whatever your conversation is within ChatGPT at that time, I'm curious.
