Happy Monday!
Six months ago, the ads were an American problem. You could read about them, have an opinion, and carry on.
That ends this week. OpenAI confirmed on 18 August that ChatGPT Ads is expanding into 31 European countries, naming Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. The wording is “next week”, which is now.
You cannot buy it yourself. Access runs through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners, with self service through Ads Manager “later this summer”. The channel opens in your market before the buying interface does, so the first European advertisers in ChatGPT are whoever already has an agency that has one.
Ads appear for Free and Go users only. Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay clean.
If your 2026 plan has a line item for this, it starts as a conversation, not a login.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Umesh Sachdev, writing on marketing is not a data problem.
Which is the correct question and about four years late. The data hoarding era produced warehouses nobody queries.
NUMBERS MATTER
82%. That is the share of Association of National Advertisers members now running in-house operations, up from 55% in 2013. Twelve years to move twenty seven points.
The agency relationship you are about to need for ChatGPT Ads is the one most of your peers spent a decade dismantling.
DAILY PROMPT
Use this when a channel opens in a market before you have any read on it, which is exactly what happened to European teams this week. It forces the boring questions about demand, competition, and cost of entry before somebody books budget on novelty.
You can watch Instagram impressions climb all week while Spotify does absolutely nothing, because the number that actually triggers Radio and Discover Weekly is a popularity score you never see inside Spotify for Artists.
Intellijend runs Meta campaigns against that hidden score — tracking the thresholds and shifting spend in real time, front-loading budget into the first days of a release when the algorithm is still deciding what to do with you.
New users get 10% off for life through our link.
CMO CORNER
If your presence is the only source of clarity, you are not leading. You are babysitting.
You will feel this the moment a new channel opens. Somebody asks whether to test ChatGPT Ads, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and the room waits for you to say it. If the only way that decision gets made is with you in the meeting, you have not built a marketing team. You have built a queue with your name on it. Write down what a test has to prove and what it costs before you would kill it. Then let them run it.
We provide CMOs with AI strategy consulting for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.
If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.
TOOL UPGRADE
A channel arrives before the buying interface does. Three for the paid side while you wait:
Unbounce — best for the landing pages you will need when a new channel sends traffic you have never seen before. Try Unbounce here →
Birch — best for automating rules across Meta, Google and TikTok so nobody is babysitting bids while you learn a fourth platform. Try Birch here →
Accelerated Growth Studio — best for teams who just read the words “agency partners” and realized they no longer have one. Try AGS here →
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LEARN THIS
For the meeting where somebody asks what the ChatGPT Ads test returned and you need an answer better than “impressions”: AI Marketing ROI.
It covers what to measure when a channel is too new to have benchmarks, and how to say “we do not know yet” in a way that keeps the budget. For leaders who have to defend a test before it has results.
We publish free workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Google put its Nano Banana image generator inside Google Earth, and pulled it the following day.
Inside that single day, people had used it to fabricate a nuclear plant in Iran, refugees at the US border, and a bomb crater beside a hospital in Gaza.
The model was not the failure. Google Earth’s whole promise is that it shows you the real world, and somebody shipped a generate button into it anyway.
Before you add generation to your own product, say out loud what that product implicitly promises. If the answer is “this is true”, you have a problem no prompt fixes.
That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
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