ChatGPT Ads are finally here.

And if you make money from advertising in any capacity, whether you own an agency, buy media, run marketing for a company, own the company, or simply want to understand where paid media is going, this is worth paying attention to.

A brand new advertising channel does not come along very often.

Most of us entered Google and Meta after somebody else had already figured out a large part of the game. There were years of campaign data, case studies, best practices, benchmarks, experts, courses, tools, and opinions waiting for us. You could argue with the advice, and plenty of it eventually became outdated, but at least there was a body of knowledge to work from.

We don't have that luxury with ChatGPT Ads.

The platform is new. Businesses are starting to spend money. OpenAI is developing the product. Campaigns are generating data. And a lot of the things people will eventually take for granted about advertising inside ChatGPT are being figured out right now.

We are in the middle of that every day.

We’ve been running ChatGPT Ads for businesses. We’ve built campaigns, developed creative, made targeting and conversational context decisions, set up conversion tracking, watched performance, troubleshooted problems, we follow what OpenAI releases, and we pay attention to what is happening across the market.

This Playbook is where we take all of that and answer a much simpler question:

What do you need to know about the latest in ChatGPT Ads?

Because you could spend an absurd amount of time trying to keep up with this yourself. You could follow every OpenAI announcement, read every opinion, watch what other agencies are doing, study every new feature, run your own campaigns, spend your own money learning what works, and slowly build your own understanding of the channel.

Or you can let us spend our days inside all of that and give you the useful parts every week, through a lens of great marketing and advertising.

That is why this Playbook exists.

There is going to be a tremendous amount of attention paid to the fact that ChatGPT Ads are new, different, and powered by one of the most important technology platforms in the world.

Fine.

At the end of the day, they're still ads.

A business puts money into advertising because it wants to get more money back. Somewhere between those two points, somebody has to click, call, book an appointment, submit a lead, make a purchase, become a client, or take whatever action ultimately creates value for the business.

Everything else is in service of that.

This is worth saying because advertising platforms are very good at giving us hundreds of other things to think about. We can spend all day discussing marketing metrics, targeting, conversational context, creative formats, attribution, optimization, campaign structure, conversion events, and whatever else gets added to the platform over the next few years.

Some of those things will matter enormously.

Some will matter a little.

Some will give people something to talk about on LinkedIn while having almost no effect on whether anyone makes money.

Our job is to know the difference.

If a new creative approach gets more clicks but those clicks don't convert, we need to understand that. If a targeting decision increases CPC but produces significantly better customers, we need to understand that too. If OpenAI releases a feature that sounds impressive but does nothing meaningful for campaign performance, you probably don't need a twelve-page analysis of it.

New platforms make it especially easy to lose sight of this because everything feels important when nobody has seen it before. Every metric is interesting. Every feature is new. Every campaign teaches us something.

But we know that interesting and useful are not the same thing.

We care about the things that help you understand how ChatGPT Ads can be used to acquire customers. That means we will absolutely get into the weeds when the weeds matter. Then we will come back and tell you what all of it means for the business paying the ad bill.

That’s our filter.

If you have been around paid media long enough, you already know one of its more awkward characteristics:

Good advice expires, sometimes daily.

Think about how much Meta advertising has changed over the years. There are things very smart media buyers would have told you to do five years ago that they would never recommend today. The advice was not necessarily bad at the time. The environment just changed.

Targeting changed. Optimization changed. Creative changed. Competition changed. Automation changed. User behavior changed. The platform got smarter in some places, more restrictive in others, and the strategies advertisers used had to change with it.

There is no reason to believe ChatGPT Ads will be different.

In fact, because we are so early, we expect the rate of change to be even higher for a while.

OpenAI will release new capabilities. More businesses will enter the platform. More money will compete for inventory. People will become more accustomed to seeing ads inside ChatGPT. Creative conventions will develop. Measurement will improve. Some early tactics will continue working, while others will quietly stop being useful.

Which means knowing what worked at some point in the history of ChatGPT Ads is not enough.

You need to know what matters now.

If the platform changes, we watch and test in our own campaigns. If new information comes out, we test again, watch results, and we tell you about it. If something that looked promising turns out to be a dead end, we stop treating it like the next big thing. And if something continues working across different campaigns, businesses, and changes to the platform, we start taking it more seriously.

This Playbook tells you what we would do today.

That’s why we will publish weekly.

There’s another reason we wrote this Playbook.

Our company, City AI Ads, is an agency that manages ChatGPT Ads for businesses. We also manage Meta Ads, so we spend our days inside paid advertising. We’re not trying to learn advertising at the same time we’re learning ChatGPT Ads. We already know the game: the offer matters, the creative matters, the targeting matters, the tracking needs to work, and eventually the ads need to produce customers at a number that makes sense.

Now we get to take everything we already know about paid media and apply it to ChatGPT Ads.

Through City AI Ads, we’re building campaigns, creating ads, working with targeting and conversational context, setting up tracking, watching conversions, and dealing with all the weird little problems that only show up once we start spending money.

It’s one thing to have an opinion about how ChatGPT Ads should work, it’s another thing when there’s a business paying you to make them work.

The agency is the laboratory. This Playbook is where we bring you what comes out of it.

This Playbook is for people who have a business reason to understand ChatGPT Ads.

If you own an agency, there is a decent chance clients are going to ask you about this channel. Maybe they already have. You may eventually decide to offer ChatGPT Ads yourself, or you may simply need to know enough to have an intelligent conversation when a client asks whether they should be spending money there.

Either way, “I saw a few posts about it” probably isn't where you want your expertise to end.

If you are a media buyer or performance marketer, you already understand the game. The platform mechanics may be different, but the job is familiar: find the right people, put the right message in front of them, get them to take action, measure what happened, and make the economics work.

What you need is a faster way to understand how that game is being played inside ChatGPT.

If you own a business or run marketing for one, your question may be even more straightforward:

Should we be spending money here?

And if the answer becomes yes, what should we be doing?

You do not need to know every button inside the platform. You do need enough understanding to evaluate the opportunity, make good decisions about your budget, and know whether the person managing your campaigns understands the channel.

And maybe you’re an early adopter and just curious about ChatGPT Ads.

You believe ChatGPT Ads are going to matter, and you would rather start understanding the channel now than wait until everyone else has decided it matters too.

Good.

You're in the right place.

The job titles are different, but the reason for subscribing is the same: ChatGPT Ads matter enough to your business, your clients, or your career that you want to know what is going on.

That is who this Playbook is for.

Every edition starts with one question:

What’s the latest in ChatGPT Ads and how can I structure my campaigns to get more customers?

Then we build the edition around the answer.

Some weeks, the most useful thing we can show you will come from a campaign we are running. We may break down how we approached it, what happened, what surprised us, what the results mean, and what we would do next.

Another week, it may be creative. Or targeting. Or conversational context. Or conversion tracking. Or an implementation problem that cost us three hours and can now save you those same three hours.

When we find something useful enough to become a repeatable approach, we will turn it into a Play you can use. When OpenAI releases something important, we will tell you what it means instead of rewriting the press release. When something changes our approach, we will explain the change. When something gets a lot of attention and we think it barely matters, we'll tell you that too.

And we are not limiting ourselves to our own campaigns.

We pay attention to what other agencies, businesses, and media buyers are reporting. We follow the tools being built around the platform. We look at case studies and benchmarks as they appear. We watch the ideas spreading through the market because somebody else is inevitably going to discover something useful before we do.

We want to know about it.

Then we want to figure out whether you need to know about it.

This Playbook is not a collection of links and tools. We’re also not going to dump everything we found that week into your inbox and pat ourselves on the back.

There will be far too much information for that approach to be useful.

Our value is in the filter: Marketing Usefuleness.

If something helps you understand ChatGPT Ads, make a better decision, improve a campaign, avoid a mistake, recognize an opportunity, or understand where the channel is going, it deserves our attention.

If it doesn't, we will leave it alone.

You can study and research all of this yourself.

But you probably have other shit to do.

We’re in ChatGPT Ads every day, so you don’t have to be.

This Playbook gives you the benefit of that immersion without requiring you to duplicate it. Every week, you get the information we believe is worth knowing, the context behind it, and our current view of what it means.

ChatGPT Ads will look different a year from now. There will be more businesses, more money, more competition, more data, better tools, and much stronger answers to many of the questions people have today.

There will also be a completely new set of questions.

We'll be there for those too.

Welcome to The AI Ads Playbook.

If you’d like to follow along, become a paid subscriber and get your new edition every week.

If you decide to subscribe, I’ll see you in the next edition.

Lauren
City AI Ads