1137 – A New Way to Advertise: Tom talks ChatGPT Ads

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

This podcast episode introduces what the host believes is a major early opportunity: advertising directly within ChatGPT. The main argument is that, just as early adopters of Google Ads and Facebook Ads had an advantage before those platforms became complex and crowded, ChatGPT Ads are now at that same early stage.
Key Points
1. ChatGPT Ads are brand new
• OpenAI has launched an advertising platform for ChatGPT.
• The host believes this is a "ground floor" opportunity because:
o competition is currently low,
o the interface is still relatively simple,
o advertisers who learn it early may gain an advantage before the platform matures.
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2. Traditional advertising platforms became too complicated
The host explains why he largely stopped using platforms like Facebook Ads:
• Interfaces constantly changed.
• New targeting features made them difficult for non-specialists.
• Agencies that managed ads daily gained an advantage.
• He believes ChatGPT Ads have not yet reached that level of complexity.
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3. ChatGPT Ads follow the familiar advertising structure
Like most advertising platforms, campaigns are organized into three levels:
• Campaign
o The overall goal.
o Example: promoting an online school.
• Ad Groups
o Different target audiences.
o Examples:
 homeschool parents
 retirees
 small business owners
 first responders
• Ads
o Individual advertisements customized for each audience.
o Different headlines
o Different descriptions
o Different images
This allows advertisers to tailor messaging to specific audiences rather than showing everyone the same ad.
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4. Current platform limitations
At the time of recording:
• Minimum daily budget:
o $25/day
• Pricing model:
o Pay-per-click (PPC)
• Conversion tracking:
o Not yet available.
Unlike mature advertising platforms, advertisers currently pay primarily for clicks rather than completed actions such as purchases or scheduled calls.
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5. Creating an ad is simple
To launch an ad, the platform requires:
• destination URL
• headline
o maximum 50 characters
• description
o maximum 100 characters
• square image
o minimum 256 × 256 pixels
The host notes that these requirements are intentionally straightforward.
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6. Use ChatGPT to create the advertisements
One of the more interesting suggestions is to use ChatGPT itself to generate:
• multiple headlines
• multiple descriptions
• image ideas
Example headlines ChatGPT produced included:
• "Before you spend $100,000 on college..."
• "Not every successful career starts with a four-year college."
The idea is to generate many ad variations quickly.
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7. A/B testing is encouraged
The host recommends testing many combinations:
• one image with multiple headlines
• different descriptions
• different images
After collecting data:
• stop poor-performing ads
• continue investing in successful ones
This is standard advertising optimization practice.
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8. Cost-per-click bidding
Current observations:
• Default suggested bid:
o approximately $3.50 per click
• Lower bids (around $2) may trigger warnings indicating that the ad may not receive delivery.
The host suspects, based on experience with earlier advertising platforms, that actual competitive bids may eventually settle lower than the suggested default once advertisers experiment.
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9. AI-powered targeting
The host believes one of ChatGPT Ads' biggest advantages is AI-driven targeting.
Instead of selecting rigid demographic filters, advertisers simply describe the audience or topic (for example, "homeschool parents").
The expectation is that ChatGPT's AI will:
• infer related interests,
• find appropriate users,
• continually improve targeting based on response rates.
The host views this as a potentially significant improvement over traditional interest-based targeting systems.
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10. Current placement
According to the episode:
Advertisements appear beneath ChatGPT responses and include:
• headline
• description
• square image
Users who click are taken to the advertiser's website.
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11. Recommendation
The host strongly recommends:
• creating an advertising account now,
• becoming familiar with the platform,
• experimenting before competition increases.
He argues that early adoption has historically been profitable on other advertising platforms.
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Overall Assessment
The episode is not a tutorial on how to optimize ChatGPT Ads. Instead, it is an argument that advertisers should pay attention to a new advertising channel while it is still in its infancy.
The central thesis is:
• Early ad platforms tend to be simpler.
• Lower competition can mean lower advertising costs and greater visibility.
• AI-driven audience targeting could reduce some of the complexity found in traditional advertising systems.
• Businesses willing to experiment now may gain experience before the platform becomes more competitive.
In short, the podcast encourages entrepreneurs and marketers to explore ChatGPT Ads early, viewing the platform as analogous to the early days of Google Ads or Facebook Ads, when the learning curve was lower and opportunities were greater.

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Episode 1137 – ChatGPT Ads
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1137 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we've got a ground floor opportunity for you. We're going to talk about ChatGPT ads, a brand new thing just coming out. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 1136. That was YouTube community posts. This is a very underutilized part of YouTube that can up your game a little bit on your YouTube action, maybe 10%. One of the former YouTube employees talked about that on a podcast, and I did a whole episode on it. So anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com/then the episode number. YouTube community posts was 1136. And pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Free version 3.0 is the latest, but I'm halfway done with version 4.0, which is going to just add to 3.0. So you may as well take 3.0 now. And when you see 4.0 come out grab it too. All right. Check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And my school IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. Okay. So we got a ground floor opportunity for you that's not saturated. And this is not opposite to my practice of using what we call dull edge technology. All right. I don't usually jump on bandwagons until all the bugs are out and so forth. This is a little bit different. Advertising is all over. Just about every platform has an advertising thing and they know how to run it and it works and so forth. It doesn't mean you'll make money doing it. Okay. But the problem was, is they all started out simple and I jumped all over it and made money with ads.
[00:02:26] And then they kept adding new features to target more precisely, and all these different things you could do with them. And unless you were an agency that worked at every day, you couldn't figure it out anymore. I kind of quit because it got too complicated. And I mean, there was times when I would be working on the ad interface, like I think they call ad managers, you know, in these different places, Facebook and everything. I'd be working on it one day and the next day I'd come back the literally next day and everything was moved around. And this happened over and over and over again. It wasn't just one time, so it was very difficult. But I made a lot of money by being there in the early days when the when it wasn't so massively difficult to operate. So that's where we are with ChatGPT ads. We're right at the beginning within a matter of weeks, and they pretty much start out the same way as the other ones, and they have the same format. All virtually all ad platforms have what they call the campaign, and then ad groups, and then ads campaigns are like the big umbrella. Like in my case, the example we'll use today is I'm promoting my school, the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's a distance learning school and certified to operate. You know, it's, you know, the whole bit, you know, it's got all the creds.
[00:04:01] So that would be the campaign. All right. I'm going to promote the school, the ad groups, by the way, you can use what I'm telling you right now in all the different ad platforms. Ad groups are specific targeting under this campaign. So one would be home school parents, one would be small business owners. You know, it's different things that I would say to a home school parent that's thinking about and their kids thinking about, what do we do next after homeschooling high school graduation, say, but a small business owner is thinking completely different. So there's the ads would be different, everything would be different. So ad groups are who you're targeting and also the budget you're willing to spend. And then the next level under that is the ads for that particular ad group. So the ads that I'll create for home schoolers would be different from people, you know, retirees or small business owners or whoever I'm targeting next, or first responders and police and things like that. So all of those are different ad groups with different ads under them. So it's campaign ad group, which you can have all you want, and then ads for that particular ad group, which probably going to be different. Currently, though, the daily budget is a minimum of $25 and they don't have what they call conversion tracking yet. So you can bid on you pay when they deliver a conversion. A conversion might be somebody books a phone call, you know, so those kinds of things are conversions.
[00:05:47] But right now it's basically clicks. It's pay per click, you know, get them to go somewhere. And all you have to do to prepare for this is to have a link where you want them to go create a A headline, 50 characters or less, and a description of 100 characters or less, and a square image. At least 256 by 256 pixels. Well, that's low resolution. You probably want a nicer one than that, and anything you create is going to probably be nicer than that. Now the cool part is you can get ChatGPT to create the ad for you. All right. So so I went over to chat regular ChatGPT and I said, hey, I'm going to put an ad in your ad platform. I'm going to target homeschool parents and thinking about, you know, you're basically putting a prompt in there thinking about what their kid's going to do after high school, homeschooled high school. And I need several headlines and several descriptions to test in your ad platform along with a square image. And so it kicked out headlines like before you spend $100,000 on college. Look at this. That's the headline. Another headline. Not every successful career starts with a four year college, you know? So it kicked out a bunch of headlines. And so you can, in your ad group, have a whole bunch of different ads with different headlines and different images. And the tests, you know, this is very typical advertising thing where you run ads against each other and then stop the ads that aren't performing and keep the ones that are.
[00:07:35] So I could have the same image with ten different headlines, different descriptions, different images. You know, you can test all kinds of stuff and you cut off the ones that aren't working and keep the ones that are. Now with that cost per click, they as of today, when we're doing this, like I said, the minimum daily budget is $25 and the cost per click is anywhere from 0 to $100, I think. But in the box, the default is $3.50 per click. And then to the right of that, there's a like a meter that says, okay, for $3.50, you'll get very strong delivery. They'll deliver your ad to a lot of people. And basically it's going to show up at the bottom of the answer to somebody's query on ChatGPT, and it'll be the headline that the description and the image. So if you put the cost per click down to like $2 or something, a red thing comes up and says may not deliver at all. Now, this is kind of funny because all of the other programs that started out advertising would do this. They would suggest a large amount of money per click, but only charge you for the highest. You know, if you were a higher bidder than somebody else. And typically we could reduce the the bid quite a bit and it would still deliver. And then if it didn't deliver at all, you would up the bid a little bit. Most of it was still way below their suggested bid.
[00:09:30] All right. So they want to make money off you see. And I haven't seen any evidence that they they reduced the click cost. If nobody else is bidding I haven't seen evidence of that yet. This is a highly emerging field. Right. But anyway, it's not saturated. So you likely would be one of the few people that are advertising in your particular niche. Right. And then it doesn't just randomly show your ad, it shows it to the people interested in what you told them when you set up the ad group, like, for instance, I put in home schooling school at home, home school instead of home schooling, although it's probably smart enough to put those two together. But anything with regard to home schooling is what I put in. Now, I haven't run the ad yet. I'm just telling you about this. This is so new. So one of the big differences is between this and all the other ad platforms besides it being simple now is that when you put in the box of who you're, you're targeting or who should be interested in your ad, it's AI already, you're right in the AI thing. So they want you to keep advertising. So it's very likely they're going to show your ad to the people most likely to respond over time. When you put in a new ad, Nobody knows. You don't have any track record yet, but, uh, most of the other places make you pick a specific thing out of a list. Like, I want business owners in Boise, Idaho, you know, something like that, where this is showing ads to people where you or that are interest that should be interested in whatever you tell them it's about, but it's smart enough to expand that and then watch to see which is working better for you because they want it to work better for you so that you keep advertising.
[00:11:40] All right. So that makes sense. So anyway, that's a brand new thing just happening. You can go to ads.openai.com and just sign up for account. And look what I'm telling you. It costs you nothing to do that. I don't think you even put your credit card in until after you create a campaign. Right. So, So check it out. But like it's not oversaturated now. And I said, I remember being able to make money when these new ad platforms came out in the beginning. And then it got harder and harder and harder over time. So this is the place now in 2026 where you have a new ad platform that's that's probably going to go crazy shortly. So I'd say jump on it. Now, if you do advertise any of your stuff and give it a shot. Okay, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.