• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

After 12 years working as an advertising and agency leader at Meta, executive David Dugan has entered a new role as vice president and head of global ads solutions at OpenAI, just days after the tech company announced it will begin rolling out ads on its ChatGPT app in the coming weeks.

Dugan -- bwho served as Meta's vice president of global clients and agencies -- is expected to build an advertising team at OpenAI, scaling its advertising business, connecting with industry leaders, and providing the company with a new revenue stream from non-paying users.

According to his post on LinkedIn Monday, Dugan will begin by incorporating ads solutions within the ChatGPT consumer experience, which is currently in its first phase of testing.

“Our approach will be AI native, and built in a fundamentally different way from other platforms given the new technologies that OpenAI has developed,” Dugan states.

OpenAI has been testing ads on ChatGPT -- an app with around 900 million weekly users – since the beginning of the year, attracting interest from major agencies like Dentsu, Omnicom and WPP, as well as brand partners such as Wired, Best Buy and AppLovin.

To run ads on ChatGPT, OpenAI has required that brands meet a minimum commitment of between $200,000 and $250,000 in spending, charging around $60 per 1,000 views -- a price that roughly triples what Meta currently charges advertisers.

Until now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed uncertainty with regard to the company's pursuit of ads.

“Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” Altman said two years ago, referring to ads “as a last resort for us for a business model.”

Ahead of its official ads rollout, OpenAI will not use ads to influence ChatGPT's responses to users, nor will user conversations be sold to advertisers, according to previous company statements.

Dugan is OpenAI’s second Meta hire in the past year.

Fidji Simo, the former head of Meta’s Facebook app, became OpenAI’s CEO of applications last year, leading the company’s product and business teams.