OpenAI will host its first event at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity on Monday, using the industry's most prominent annual gathering to preview its advertising business to a global audience of marketers and agency executives.
The company has set a target of $100 billion in ad revenue by the end of the decade, a figure that would represent roughly half of Meta's current advertising revenue, achieved within three years.
Over the past month, OpenAI rolled out a self-serve advertising platform, began testing ads in Japan, and updated its ad tools documentation to include AI-powered creative capabilities covering generation, optimisation, localisation and translation of ad materials.
Denise Dresser, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, is expected to speak at the Monday event alongside a demonstration of the company's new ad products.
The arrival comes as AI tools are already compressing margins across the holding companies that dominate media buying, and as AI-generated search summaries from Google and ChatGPT have cut into the web traffic that ecommerce and digital media depend on.
David Droga, founder of Droga5, told Semafor that formulaic creative work is the most exposed: "The majority of stuff done in marketing, advertising, entertainment, music, journalism, is pretty formulaic and average. So have at it. Get rid of that."
