Monday Briefing: Amazon Is Now Selling ChatGPT Ads

Good morning, it's James here. Last week Amazon put its buying desk inside ChatGPT, and Meta shipped an agent that shops for you and, by its own account, tells the ad system nothing.

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The Lead: Amazon Is Now Selling ChatGPT Ads

What happened. On Thursday Amazon Ads announced a partnership with OpenAI that lets U.S. advertisers extend Amazon DSP campaigns into ChatGPT (Amazon Ads). It starts as a pilot with a select group of U.S. advertisers, Delta Vacations among them, and Amazon's team sets up and optimizes the campaigns. Ads run as text or image units under ChatGPT's answers, bought CPC or CPM, and an Amazon spokesperson told Marketing Dive that "OpenAI will control all ad delivery decisions through its own systems" (Marketing Dive). ChatGPT Ads crossed a $1 billion annualized run rate last month, and Ad Age's read is that Amazon "is now ChatGPT's biggest ad tech partner" (Ad Age).

Why CMOs should care. The buy point now sits inside the DSP that already carries Netflix, Roku, Spotify, Disney and ESPN inventory, a supply run Digiday traces back about 18 months (Digiday). Amazon's pitch is that its shopping signals shape who sees your ad inside a conversation. Delta Vacations president Katrin Koenig said the collaboration lets the brand use "deep consumer insights to inform how and when Delta Vacations appear within ChatGPT Ads experiences" (Amazon Ads). What is new is purchase history sitting next to a stated question in a chat window. That is the thing to test, more than the ad format.

The take. Do not confuse a pilot for a performance channel. eMarketer's Nate Elliott told Digiday that OpenAI is "still trying to build out even many of the basics of a functional ad sales operation, including their team, technology, vendor partnerships, ad formats, and pricing." I have sat inside enough managed-service pilots to know the pattern. The platform builds the campaign, the reporting arrives as a slide, and the first question your CFO asks is the one the slide does not answer. Treat this as a learning budget with a holdout. The IAB says 86% of buyers are already changing, or expect to change, how they measure media because of conversational AI and AI agents in the next 12 months (IAB 2026 forecast release). If you run Amazon DSP, ask your rep this week whether you qualify and what the reporting looks like. Better to learn on a test budget now than on a Q4 line item.

What I'm Watching: Meta Built a Shopper That Ignores Its Own Ads

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, a personal AI agent that "can open a browser, fill out forms, and negotiate on their behalf" (Meta). It runs in the U.S. on iOS, Android and muse.ai, free for most tasks, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month (TechCrunch). Users connect email, calendars and payment methods, and Muse handles bookings and purchases.

The line to read twice is in Meta's own post. "Muse doesn't share a person's conversations or the data in their VM with Meta's ad systems." Meta's business is knowing what people want and selling that knowledge to you, and it just built a product that learns exactly what people want while keeping the ad business out of the room. My bet is that wall gets a door within a year. The tell will be a "sponsored suggestions" toggle in Muse settings, defaulted on.

If a meaningful share of your buyers hand the comparison and the checkout to an agent, the thing choosing your brand is a model reading your product page. Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder put it plainly to The Drum last week. "We have to cater to the agents and build the tech stack that allows us to do that" (The Drum). Have someone check whether your top three product pages expose price, availability, shipping and return terms as plain text and structured data. Looking takes an afternoon, fixing it takes a sprint, so open the ticket now.

In Partnership with Roku

Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads

Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

Learn more

By The Numbers: 14%

Morning Consult tracked purchase consideration across 2,800 brands over the three months ended mid-August. Only 14% grew, against 94% in the same read last year, which is a five-year low (Morning Consult, Food Dive, Ad Age).

Same week, the IAB raised its 2026 U.S. ad spend growth forecast to 12.3%, up from the 9.5% it projected in January (IAB 2026 forecast release). Madison and Wall expects spend running through automated or AI campaign types to reach 12% of the U.S. market this year, up from 2% in 2023 (Digiday).

Spend is up double digits and the number of brands moving consumers collapsed. More money is chasing fewer minds, and a growing share of it is placed by the platforms' own automation. The brands that did grow, per Morning Consult, converted familiarity they already had into demand. Snickers and Hershey's posted some of the largest jumps (Food Dive), and Hershey, which holds the U.S. Cadbury license, projects a 30% year-over-year increase in brand investment to fuel 2026 and 2027 growth (Marketing Dive). When the next budget increase lands on your desk, ask what the last one bought. If you do not run a brand tracker, branded search volume and direct traffic are the free proxies. Flat on those while spend rose means you paid the inflation and someone else got the growth.

Musical Chairs: Workday Backfilled Its CMO in 48 Hours

Accenture named Emma Chalwin chief marketing officer on Tuesday, effective October 1, reporting to CEO Julie Sweet. She was Workday's CMO (Accenture).

Workday answered on Thursday. Sarah Kennedy Ellis, who ran global marketing for Google Cloud and Workspace and was CMO at Marketo before that, starts October 5. CEO Aneel Bhusri said she "has spent the last decade at the center of enterprise AI" (Workday). Two days between losing a CMO and naming one means the list existed before the vacancy did.

Hilton has the opposite problem. Global CMO Mark Weinstein said Thursday he is leaving after 16 years for a role "outside the travel industry," and Hilton has not named a successor (Marketing Dive). He took Hilton Honors from 25 million members to more than 250 million.

If you are a B2B CMO, ask a recruiter you trust this week what the Chalwin package looked like. That is the number your next conversation gets priced against.

The Reading List

• "Publicis Really Didn't Have to Choose Between Coke and Pepsi" (Adweek) Mark Ritson calls client conflict "an ancient, pointless custom from the Mad Men era, subsisting on client insecurity and agency pride." Timely, because Campaign reports Coca-Cola is now putting its roughly $700 million North America media account, which Publicis still holds, up for review (Campaign).

• "Molson Coors ditches its TV-era workflow to move at creator speed, quadrupling engagement" (Digiday) Legal in the loop from the start and looser briefs across 230 marketers and 100-plus brands. Molson Coors says engagement quadrupled, denominator undisclosed. Read it for the approval model.

• "Old Navy's MrBeast deal boosts engagement amid bigger bet on creators" (Marketing Dive) Gap reports a 22% jump in kids' assortment traffic in the days after launch, plus 100 million views and 1.4 billion impressions. The traffic number is the only one I would put in a board deck.

• "Google tests traditional Search campaigns in AI Mode" (Search Engine Land) Google is testing whether exact and phrase match keywords can serve text ads in AI Mode, per Ginny Marvin, where it identifies "explicit and direct user intent." Small experiment, and a path into AI Mode without AI Max or Performance Max. Ten minutes this week. Check whether your Search campaigns are opted into AI Mode surfaces and pull the AI Mode breakout in your network report.

• "Duolingo creates a fashion line for the brands you can't pronounce" (Adweek) "Air-mess" on a handbag, a pop-up where the currency is your streak, and a Duolingo-commissioned YouGov stat that 62% of Americans think they can say Hermès while 15% can.

One More Thing

Between Amazon selling the conversation and Meta automating the purchase, more of the buying decision is moving into software. The familiarity Morning Consult found in the 14% of brands that grew is the part software does not build. Spend this week on that part.

See you next Monday. Go check your product pages.

—James