It is on newsstands today: the Friday 21 August edition of De Financiele Telegraaf, opening its business section with "Nieuwe machtsstrijd om reclamegelden" (a new power struggle over advertising money), on the arrival of ads in ChatGPT. We are proud that De Telegraaf, the Netherlands' largest daily newspaper, interviewed our founder Arjan ter Huurne as an AI marketing expert for this story. The article was published online on 19 August by Gabi Ouwerkerk.
The timing could not have been sharper. That same week, OpenAI officially announced that ChatGPT ads are coming to 31 European countries, including the Netherlands, with users of the free tiers seeing the first ads from the week of 24 August.
In the article, Arjan explains why this moment matters: OpenAI is not the first to allow ads in a chatbot, but it is the first to introduce them at scale in a general consumer chatbot with its own advertising platform. For advertisers it is still a learning process. We already run ChatGPT campaigns in the United States and the United Kingdom, which is exactly how we know what still needs figuring out: when does an ad add value, and when does it not? The most lucrative position, meanwhile, remains the organic one: when ChatGPT names your brand on its own in an answer. To users that reads as independent advice, and that is precisely what Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) works on.
Read the full article at De Telegraaf (in Dutch). And if you want to know what ChatGPT Ads mean for your brand, visit our ChatGPT Ads page or browse the European ChatGPT Ad Library, the public ad register we launched this week.