Marketers seek ways to influence AI chatbots as OpenAI pitches ads

OpenAI used Cannes Lions to sell advertisers on a new kind of placement inside ChatGPT. Brand placement inside ChatGPT depends on what the AI chooses to surface, not search results. The pitch landed at the 2026 festival in Cannes, France, where the industry gathered from June 22 to 26 around the same question: how to market to people through AI intermediaries without breaking trust.

The festival featured an OpenAI session titled Advertising in the Age of AI, added new AI Craft subcategories, and introduced the Creative Brand Lion, a category recognizing the systems and capabilities that make strong work repeatable. It drew 20,050 awards submissions from 92 countries, more than 300 global jurors gathered in Cannes, 10% of submissions came from brands, up from 8% in 2025, and nearly a third of entries came from independents.

OpenAI plans to test ads in ChatGPT for logged-in adults on the Free and Go tiers in the United States, then expand the pilot to the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from organic answers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts will not have ads, and its ad policy bars sensitive conversations and other prohibited contexts from serving ads.

The industry is shifting from a media operating model to an intelligence operating model, where the answer itself can become the gatekeeper for discovery. That raises the pressure on brands to understand how they appear in chatbot responses, on publishers that may lose direct traffic when users stop clicking through, and on platforms that will be judged not only on reach but on whether their answers remain useful.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report put global trust in news from AI chatbots at 20%.