The news: Criteo is pitching marketers on ChatGPT ads, positioning AI-assisted shopping as the next major performance channel.
- Criteo is pointing to the potential of conversational advertising. The pitch deck emphasizes ChatGPT’s role as the leading source of AI-driven traffic, generating 70% of AI assistant traffic—indicating that marketers are missing a major opportunity for conversational campaigns.
- Criteo notes that the majority of consumers already use AI assistants for shopping; 63% for discovery and research and 53% for consideration.
- Our own forecast shows that 23.5% of the US population will be AI-assisted digital shoppers this year, growing 19% YoY.
- The pitch deck argues that ChatGPT is becoming a must-have channel for commerce marketers. Criteo argues that it is the ideal partner for ChatGPT’s ad pilot, allowing marketers to go live with ChatGPT campaigns “in days” through Criteo’s ecosystem.
- Ad pilots will allow Criteo advertisers to include as many as 50 products per campaign; marketers can update their product feed once campaigns are set up, and Criteo’s OneTag feature will track referrals to simplify measurement.
Zooming out: The pitch comes just days after OpenAI tapped Criteo as its first adtech partner, integrating the company into its ad pilot for Free and Go users.
Criteo pointed to encouraging performance signals to explain the partnership. February Criteo data showed that US clients saw traffic referred from LLM platforms convert at roughly 1.5 times the rate of other referral sources.