The ChatGPT ads pilot just got a little bigger.

OpenAI is allowing a group of financial services brands, a highly regulated vertical, to test ads in the pilot, the company confirmed to Marketing Brew. Financial services brands like Robinhood and BestMoney are already running ads on ChatGPT, according to ads served to Marketing Brew on the platform.

Find your feet: OpenAI has been running an ad pilot since February for logged-in adult users of the ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers.

• Early on, the pilot contained numerous travel brands, making the vertical crowded, two agency executives previously told Marketing Brew.
• While the pilot rolled out with $60 CPMs, the fees have become more flexible since then; OpenAI debuted cost-per-click bidding and a self-serve ads manager platform earlier this month.
• It has also announced partnerships with ad-tech companies including Kargo and Pacvue.

As it continues its ads business buildout, OpenAI is also hiring multiple ad executives around the world, including a creative director in Latin America. (It hired Meta alum David Dugan to run its ads business as VP and head of global ads solutions back in March.)

“We’re expanding the pilot deliberately, with a focus on learning and getting the experience right for users,” Asad Awan, head of monetization at OpenAI, told Marketing Brew in an email last month.—JS

If anyone needed an extra reason to have a drink over the summer, there’s about to be 39 days worth of World Cup matches played in North America for the first time in more than 30 years.

For advertisers, the tournament is shaping up to be essentially the Super Bowl of soccer, but even bigger. And while beverage brands have been duking it out on the Super Bowl ad stage for decades, with increasing competition in recent years, this summer, they’re taking the battle to the international stage.

“Everything we’re doing around the World Cup is going above and beyond,” Ricardo Marques, SVP of marketing for Michelob Ultra, told Marketing Brew, later adding that the tournament marks the brand’s biggest retail push in history.

Michelob Ultra isn’t the only alcohol brand going all-in on the World Cup, even during a year that’s already included an international sporting event in the Winter Olympics. For sports stalwarts like brewers and spirits brands, certain marketing tactics remain event-agnostic, but a World Cup on US soil calls for some unprecedented moves.

Summertime madness: Summer is a “key selling season” for beer brands, Marques told us, and this summer is especially important. The beer industry has experienced sales struggles in recent years as alternatives like hard seltzer, combined with consumers who drink less alcohol in general, have put downward pressure on the category.

Keep reading here.—AM

Max Albert never expected to become an ad tech founder—but that’s where the 30-year-old CEO of startup Adrenaline Interactive’s decades-long passion for gaming led him.

That passion sparked at age nine, when Albert’s mom started taking him to Mario Kart tournaments at their local library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The prize was the stuff of any game-loving nine-year-old’s dreams: a GameStop gift card.

“I basically never lost. For two years, I played every month,” Albert told us.

Before long, he was programming his own games. He later carried on his family’s tradition of attending the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a computer science degree. He continued creating games, including an NFL-themed game in which he helped brands place ads.

“I’d work with them to create these authentic product placement campaigns inside the game. And I saw the real power of it: My gamers loved it, the advertisers loved it, and it was really lucrative for my studio,” Albert recalled.

“But the problem with these product placement campaigns was that it was entirely manual. And so the whole thesis of Adrenaline is, how can we create software to automate the process of product placement within games?”

Pitch me: It was this experience helping brands with in-game product placements that inspired Albert and his co-founders to launch Adrenaline, which offers a platform called Brand Fusion AI that helps advertisers with in-game product placements for games like Fortnite and Roblox.

Keep reading here.—JG

Five years later and marketers still voluntarily gather in one place to talk attribution, AI, brand strategy, creator marketing, and whatever the algorithm is doing this week. Honestly inspiring. Join us for the anniversary edition of Marketing Brew Summit—our biggest year yet featuring industry leaders, actionable insights, networking, and the kind of conversations you’ll reference in meetings for months afterward. Early registration is now open.

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Vulture wrote about the stealth marketing tactics fueling everything from “viral” songs to influencer feuds to political campaigns.
• The New York Times wrote about why the word “whimsy” is everywhere.
• The Hollywood Reporter wrote about Disney’s failed Mandalorian fan encounter.

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• Brand Partnerships Coordinator at Just Salad
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