In this op-ed, Andrew Raso, founder and global CEO of Online Marketing Gurus, expalins why AI-driven advertising marks a fundamental shift in how brands influence decisions, and argues that success will depend less on buying visibility and more on building a presence that can stand up to real-time scrutiny and conversation.
I’ve been in search marketing long enough to have sat across from clients during every major platform shift. Each time, the industry declared the old rules obsolete. Each time, the smart operators adapted quietly while everyone else was still debating whether it was real.
This one is real. And I say that as someone who has built a business on helping brands get found, and who is now watching the rules of that game change faster than most agencies are willing to admit.
When OpenAI begins running ads in Australia (and we are only a few weeks out), most boardrooms will go into reactive mode. Budgets will be reallocated. Someone will ask whether competitors are already in. Someone else will pull up a spreadsheet and ask what the new ROAS looks like. The conversation will be almost entirely about whether to play, how fast to move, and how not to be left behind.
All of that is understandable. None of it is the right question.
Because the interesting thing isn’t that brands are paying to appear in ChatGPT. It’s what happens after they appear.
Paid placement isn’t new. Brands have always bought their way into the moment a consumer is looking for a solution. Google Ads. Influencer sponsorships. Affiliate content. Paid roundups on comparison sites. Sponsored editorial in publications. The entire model of modern marketing is built on showing up when someone raises their hand and says “I need this.” Nobody is pretending otherwise.
But every one of those placements has something in common. Once the ad has made its case, it stops. It sits there. You can ignore it, click past it, or open another tab and look for a second opinion. The ad is inert.
For the first time in the history of advertising, that is no longer true. The ad can talk back.
If ChatGPT recommends a brand (paid or otherwise) and you ask a follow-up question, the same system answers it. Ask it to compare that brand to a competitor, it will. Ask it why that brand is the right choice for your specific situation, it will explain. The recommendation doesn’t just sit there. It actively participates in persuading you. It becomes an advocate.
No advertorial has ever been able to do that. No Google Ad has ever been able to do that. This is genuinely new.
The second new thing is what happens when you try to get a second opinion.
Traditionally, a consumer could form conclusions by undertaking research. You’d see a sponsored result, feel sceptical, open three other tabs, read a forum, check a review site. The commercial message was one input among many. You were the editor of your own research process.
In an AI conversation, that process collapses. The system that made the recommendation is the same system you’re asking for clarification. The same system you’re using to weigh
up alternatives. The same system fielding every follow-up question. If that system has been commercially influenced, even partially, even transparently, you have no clean way to cross-examine it independently. The referee and the advocate are the same entity.
That’s a structural shift in how commercial influence works. And the industry isn’t talking about it seriously enough.
The third thing, and this is the one that should keep brand strategists up at night, is the quality of the moment.
When someone types a query into ChatGPT, they are not passively scrolling. They are not half-watching an ad in between the finale of MAFS. They are in a genuine moment of need, articulating their problem in their own words, with full context. “I’m a small business owner in Sydney, I need accounting software that integrates with Shopify and doesn’t cost a fortune.” That is a richer commercial signal than any cookie, any demographic segment, any keyword auction has ever captured. And it is delivered at exactly the moment a decision is forming.
Advertising has always chased that moment and now AI advertising lives inside it.
None of this means AI advertising is inherently wrong. Brands need to reach customers. Platforms need revenue. Those things were true before ChatGPT, and they’ll be true after. But the combination of these three factors; an ad that advocates, A system that can’t be independently cross-examined, and a placement that lands inside a declared moment of need, creates a commercial dynamic that is more intimate and more powerful than anything the industry has managed before.
I run a global marketing company. My job is to help brands get found at the right moment by the right person. In that sense, AI advertising is the most powerful environment we’ve ever had access to.
But I’ve also watched agencies get this kind of shift badly wrong, not because they moved too slowly, but because they treated a fundamental change in consumer behaviour like a new line item in a media plan.
Brands need to start asking questions they probably haven’t asked yet.
Is your brand something an AI can actually validate, or is your digital presence too thin and inconsistent to surface with confidence? Because buying your way into a ChatGPT response won’t compensate for a brand the system can’t verify.
And when your brand is recommended and the user asks a follow-up question, what happens next? Do you know? Because that conversation is now part of your brand experience, whether you’ve designed it or not.
This shift is coming whether the industry is ready or not. The boardroom conversations about ROAS and competitor positioning aren’t wrong, they’re just not the whole picture.
And the most powerful advertising environment ever built deserves more than a reactive media plan.
