02 / Advertising & ChatGPT Ads
Buy the attention where it actually is.
Your buyer used to type the question into Google. Now a billion people a week ask ChatGPT instead, and since August a European company can buy a place beside that answer. We run that, along with Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok. $5M of ad spend managed, $30M of client revenue, since 2020.
- ChatGPT Ads
- Google Ads
- Meta
- TikTok
- GA4
- Consent Mode
- Conversions API
ChatGPT ads, bought in euros, from inside the EU.
OpenAI started showing ads to European users on 24 August 2026 and opened self-serve buying across Europe a week later. We run our own account from Limassol, and every lead this website takes is reported back to OpenAI twice — once from the page, once from our server. Most agencies have never opened the Ads Manager.
- What it is
- A sponsored card under ChatGPT's answer, marked Sponsored. You supply a short headline, a line of copy, a square image and a landing page, and a relevance-weighted auction decides which conversations you turn up in. Only signed-in adults on the free and Go plans see ads, so the billion weekly users is not the audience you reach.
- Why now
- Because the auction is thin and it will not stay thin. Reported CPMs fell from around $60 at the US launch to $15–$45 by spring, and buyers still argue about where they sit now. The floor is €15 a day, there is no contract, and OpenAI passed a $1B annualised run rate inside 200 days.
- Who it suits
- Businesses whose customers ask before they buy. Professional services, B2B, considered purchases, anything with a research phase. Someone describing their problem to an assistant is further down the road than someone scrolling a feed. If your product sells on impulse and a good photograph, spend the money on Meta instead.
- What you can target in the EU
- Three levers, and no more. Where — country, so from a Cyprus account you buy Cyprus, not Limassol. What you bid. And context hints: plain-English sentences describing when your ad belongs in a conversation. Personalised ads are switched off across the EEA, which means no custom audiences, no retargeting, no age, no interests, no keywords.
Straight answer
It is still a young ad platform and OpenAI says so itself: the product is labelled beta, delivery swings from week to week, and OpenAI states plainly that it has no performance benchmarks across advertisers yet. Every confident cost-per-click table you find online was invented. Treat it as a cheap, measurable test with a number attached, not as a replacement for the channels already paying your bills.
Paid and cited
Two doors into the same answer.
An assistant does two jobs at once. It writes an answer out of sources it decided to trust, and it puts sponsored cards next to that answer. Buying the card takes an afternoon and stops the day you stop paying. Becoming one of the sources takes months and then keeps working for nothing. Most agencies sell you one door because it is the only one they know how to open. We do both, which is why the answer is sometimes “don’t buy the ad yet” — if the assistant will name you for free, your budget belongs somewhere else. The page you are reading is the working example: it was written to be quoted by an assistant, and it runs our own ChatGPT ads account.
Four platforms. Four different jobs.
Budgets get split across these without anyone saying out loud what each one is for, and then the wrong platform gets blamed for the wrong failure. They are not interchangeable. Here is the division of labour.
Google Ads
Demand that already exists
Someone typing “emergency dentist near me” has already decided; search ads buy that moment, and nothing else on this page competes with it for intent. Performance Max hands the targeting to Google across search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the display network at once — it rewards clean conversion data and guesses badly without it, which is why we wire the measurement before we turn it on. And in the twelve countries where Google has put ads inside AI Overviews, ordinary search and Shopping campaigns already serve there: you cannot opt out and there is no separate reporting. The EU is not one of the twelve yet.
- Search
- AI Max
- Performance Max
- Demand Gen
- Shopping
Fitsanyone whose customers already search for the problem, the category or the brand by name.Meta
Demand you have to create
Nobody opens Instagram intending to buy. Meta's job is to interrupt well, and the buying model now says so out loud: Advantage+ picks the audience off your conversion signal and treats your interests and lookalikes as suggestions it may spend past. In January 2026 it switched thousands of detailed-targeting options off outright, and ad sets still using them stopped delivering. What the ad says is the lever you have left. In the EU there is a second catch: the “less personalised ads” choice uses, by Meta’s own account, 90% less data.
- Advantage+ sales
- Advantage+ leads
- Retargeting
- Conversions API
Fitse-commerce, consumer brands and local services with something worth looking at.LinkedIn
The people, by name
The only platform where you can ask for finance directors at 200-to-1,000-person logistics firms in Germany and get exactly that. You pay for it: a single-image click runs into double-digit dollars where Meta’s is under two. It earns that when one customer is worth tens of thousands and wastes it when they are not. Lead Gen Forms fill themselves from the profile and roughly halve cost per lead against a landing page — but the friction you removed was also filtering, so watch what arrives. Two things to turn off on day one: automated bidding quietly bills per impression rather than per click, and the Audience Network is on by default, spending your budget off LinkedIn.
- Sponsored content
- Lead Gen Forms
- Thought leader ads
- Matched audiences
FitsB2B with a deal size big enough to survive the cost per click.TikTok
Creative volume, cheap reach
The feed punishes anything that looks like an ad and rewards anything that looks like a post, so the account that wins is the one shipping the most native video, not the one with the cleverest targeting. Spark Ads run from a real post — yours or a creator’s — so the comments, the follows and the credibility stay attached to it. It is also the cheapest reach of the big platforms. And the teenager stereotype is finished: Pew put 44% of American adults aged 30 to 49 on TikTok in 2026, and 30% of those aged 50 to 64. If you sell through TikTok Shop the decision is already made — GMV Max has been the only supported campaign type since July 2025.
- Spark Ads
- Smart+
- Search Ads
- GMV Max
Fitsbrands that can make video every week and are comfortable being informal.
How we actually run it.
Every one of these platforms has taken the lever out of your hands and given it to a model, then made the move permanent by switching the old controls off. What is left is the creative and the conversion signal. Six years and $5M of spend says that is where accounts are won and lost.
- 01
Creative is the targeting
On Meta and TikTok the machine has already picked the audience. What the ad says is the last lever anyone holds, so we ship new angles weekly and cut the losers before they cost you a month. That loop is what took one store from 2.1x to 5.6x.
- 02
Conversions the platform can see
Browser pixels lose whatever ad blockers and Safari take. We send every lead and booking twice — once from the page, once server-side through the platform's own API, deduplicated on a shared event id — so the bidding learns from what really happened, not from what survived the browser.
- 03
Consent that holds up here
Tags fire from a tag manager behind Consent Mode, never hard-coded into the site, and nothing that tracks runs before the visitor consents. In the EU your legal position and your data quality are the same problem. We build them as one.
- 04
One number, agreed in week one
Cost per booked call, cost per order, or blended return. We pick it with you before the first euro is spent, put it on one dashboard, and end the argument about whose self-reported figure to believe.
Included
And because we are an AI agency, software does the watching. A media-buyer agent opens the ad accounts before anyone is in, moves budget off what is losing money, flags the cheap leads that were never going to buy, and leaves the morning note. It is running live on this site. Watch the media buyer work.
$5M spent. $30M returned.
Across 65 clients in 12 countries since 2020, and two billion impressions. The e-commerce account below is the one people ask about.
- $30M+client revenue generated
- $5M+ad spend managed
- 65+clients, 12 countries
- 2B+impressions
“ROAS went from 2.1x to 5.6x and revenue nearly doubled in three months.”
What people ask before they spend.
Can you advertise on ChatGPT?
Yes. OpenAI opened self-serve buying to European advertisers on 31 August 2026 and Cyprus is on the list. You write a headline and a line of copy, supply a square image, and your ad appears below ChatGPT’s answer, marked Sponsored, in conversations the system judges relevant. The floor is €15 a day.
How much do ChatGPT ads cost?
You bid in an auction, so the market sets the price. OpenAI suggests starting at $3 to $5 per click, and reported CPMs have fallen from about $60 at the US launch to $15–$45. OpenAI itself says it has no cross-advertiser benchmarks yet, so treat every cost table online as guesswork.
Which ad platform is best for B2B?
LinkedIn, if one customer is worth tens of thousands. It is the only platform that sells you a job title, a seniority and a company size and delivers exactly that, and its Lead Gen Forms roughly halve cost per lead against a landing page. Clicks cost several times Meta’s, so it only pays on large deals.
What’s the difference between Google and Meta ads?
Google captures demand that already exists: someone types what they want and you pay to be the answer. Meta creates demand by interrupting a feed nobody opened in order to buy, so the creative does the job the keyword does on Google. Most businesses need both, usually in that order.
Do AI search ads replace SEO?
No. They sit beside it. An assistant writes its answer from sources it trusts, then shows sponsored cards next to that answer. Paying puts you in the slot this week; being citeable puts you inside the answer itself, repeatedly, for nothing. Buy the placement while you earn the citation.
Who should run our ads?
Someone who owns the number rather than the report. Ask any agency what it optimises toward, whether conversions are sent server-side as well as from the browser, who writes the creative and how often it changes. If those three answers are vague, your spend is being administered, not improved.