OpenAI Opens the Door to Advertising: A Shift Set to Redefine the Relationship Between Brands and Consumers

For more than two decades, digital marketing has revolved around two dominant models: search engines and social media platforms. Today, however, the rise of generative artificial intelligence is introducing a third way for people and businesses to interact: conversation.

With the launch of its first advertising tests within ChatGPT, OpenAI is ushering in a new phase in the evolution of the web, one in which users are no longer simply searching for information but engaging in dialogue with an intelligent assistant that helps them discover, evaluate, and choose products and services.

This represents a fundamental shift, with the potential to be as transformative as Google’s impact in the early 2000s, when it fundamentally changed the way people accessed information online.

How Advertising Works on ChatGPT

After outlining the principles that will guide its advertising model, OpenAI launched its first advertising tests in the United States on February 9, 2026. The program has since expanded to additional international markets through a series of pilot initiatives.

Ads are displayed exclusively to adult users on the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers continue to enjoy a completely ad-free experience.

The most important aspect of the new system is that advertising does not influence ChatGPT’s responses in any way. OpenAI has established a clear separation between informational content and sponsored content.

Specifically:

• ChatGPT responses are generated solely based on what is most helpful to the user;
• advertisements are clearly labeled as sponsored content;
• ads are visually separated from the conversation;
• advertisers cannot modify or influence the assistant’s responses.

In other words, ChatGPT maintains its role as an independent information tool rather than becoming a disguised advertising platform.

From Keywords to Conversational Intent

The real revolution lies not in the presence of ads, but in the criteria used to display them.

Google built its success around the concept of keywords: users entered a word or phrase, and the system delivered advertisements related to that search query.

ChatGPT introduces a model based instead on conversational context.

OpenAI describes this approach as a form of matching driven by the topics and intentions expressed by users during a conversation. Businesses are no longer thinking solely in terms of keywords but in terms of needs, interests, and real-world situations.

If someone is discussing nutrition, travel, photography, professional education, or technology purchases, the system can understand the broader context of the conversation and present relevant advertisements.

For example, a user exploring a creative career path might be shown ads for specialized training programs, master’s degrees, or professional services related to that field.

The focus therefore shifts from individual keywords to the broader need expressed throughout the conversation.

Privacy and User Protection

One of the most sensitive aspects of any advertising platform is, naturally, data privacy.

OpenAI has stated that advertisers do not have access to conversations, chat history, memory data, or personally identifiable information.

Advertisers cannot access names, email addresses, conversation content, or any other personal user data. Instead, they receive only aggregated campaign performance metrics such as impressions, interactions, and clicks.

The system also includes specific safeguards:

• advertising is excluded for underage users;
• ads are not shown alongside sensitive topics such as health, mental health, or politics;
• users can manage ad personalization preferences;
• users can delete advertising-related data at any time.

OpenAI’s stated objective is to build an advertising ecosystem that maintains high standards of security, transparency, and user control.

From Large Agencies to the Self-Serve Model

Throughout 2026, OpenAI has gradually expanded its advertising program by introducing tools designed for advertisers and opening the platform to a growing number of businesses.

Among the most significant developments are the self-serve Ads Manager and conversion measurement systems that allow advertisers to evaluate campaign effectiveness through privacy-conscious, aggregated metrics.

The long-term goal is to develop an advertising ecosystem capable of supporting multiple formats, objectives, and purchasing models while maintaining a clear distinction between sponsored content and AI-generated responses

International Expansion and the Italian Market

Following its U.S. launch, OpenAI progressively expanded advertising tests to additional markets, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Pilot programs were later announced for the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea, with the aim of gathering insights and real-world feedback before a broader rollout.

At the time of writing, no official date has been announced for the introduction of ChatGPT advertising in Italy.

However, the company has stated its intention to gradually expand the program into additional international markets while maintaining a cautious, data-driven approach based on results from countries already participating in the pilot.

How Brands Should Prepare Today

The temporary absence of the service in the Italian market should not lead businesses into a wait-and-see approach.

Artificial intelligence is already changing how people discover products, services, and educational opportunities.

Increasingly, users are asking conversational AI assistants which profession to pursue, which software to adopt, which camera to purchase, which consultant to hire, or which school to attend.

In this environment, content quality and brand authority are becoming increasingly important.

Organizations that succeed within these emerging conversational ecosystems will be those capable of building strong reputations supported by genuine expertise, high-quality content, and recognition from authoritative sources.

From Search Engine Optimization to AI Optimization

The arrival of advertising on ChatGPT is part of a broader transformation already reshaping digital marketing.

An increasing number of companies are investing in AI Optimization (AIO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a set of practices designed to make content, websites, and publications easier for generative AI models to discover, interpret, and cite.

According to many industry analysts, this evolution could represent a shift comparable to the emergence of SEO in the early 2000s.

In a world where millions of people are beginning to seek advice directly from artificial intelligence, visibility no longer depends solely on search engine rankings.

It is becoming increasingly important to be recognized as an authoritative, trustworthy, and up-to-date source within the information ecosystems used by conversational assistants.

Industry experts generally agree that the organizations most likely to benefit will be those capable of demonstrating strong signals of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — the well-known E-E-A-T principles that are becoming increasingly relevant within the AI ecosystem as well.

A New Frontier for Digital Communication

For more than twenty years, marketers have learned how to communicate with the algorithms that power search engines and social media platforms. Today, a new chapter is beginning: communicating with conversational algorithms.

The difference is substantial. In traditional search environments, brands primarily competed for clicks. In the age of artificial intelligence, they compete for trust, authority, and relevance within a conversation.

Advertising on ChatGPT represents only the first step in a transformation that is set to redefine the relationship between people, content, and businesses.

For professionals working in communication, marketing, and education, understanding these dynamics is not about preparing for a distant future. It is about correctly interpreting a transformation that is already underway.

As with every major technological revolution, the greatest advantages will belong to those who adapt first—not simply by purchasing advertising space, but by building authority, credibility, and genuine value within an ecosystem increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

In Simple Terms

Until recently, being found online largely meant appearing among Google’s top search results. Today, more and more people are doing something different: instead of searching, they are asking. They ask artificial intelligence which course to take, which product to buy, or who they should turn to for advice.

OpenAI has begun introducing advertising into these conversations, but only for users on the Free and Go plans, and without allowing ads to influence the assistant’s responses.

For businesses, this changes the rules of the game. Paying for visibility or winning a click will no longer be enough. Increasingly, success will depend on being recognized as a reliable, knowledgeable, and authoritative source, because these are the signals that AI systems tend to regard as the most relevant.

Advertising on ChatGPT is not yet available in Italy, but companies that begin building reputation, authority, and high-quality content today may find themselves in a strong competitive position when this new channel eventually arrives.

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A significant strand of contemporary European photography no longer revolves around the event itself, but rather around persistence. Not the occurrence, but what remains after disappearance: traces, residues, surfaces marked by time. It is a form of photography that renounces the immediacy of the spectacular image in order to investigate what time consumes, alters, or erases. It is within this trajectory that the work of

Observing her practice, one often has the impression that the image does not emerge from a desire to represent reality, but rather from a confrontation with absence. Her photographs seem to interrogate what survives: places that have exhausted their original function, forgotten archives, marginal identities, biographical fragments rescued from oblivion. At the centre of the image there is almost always a form of lack. It is precisely this tension that removes her work from the more conventional categories of contemporary reportage.

Although De Rosa’s background includes photojournalism and documentary practice, her visual language gradually moves away from reportage and toward a more complex reflection on memory as a fragile, incomplete, constantly rewritten material. In this sense, the expression “a past time, a suspended time” — a phrase the artist herself uses to define her work — does not function merely as a poetic suggestion, but as a precise methodological statement. In her images, time never unfolds linearly: past and present coexist within an ambiguous and stratified space, where photography does not simply document what has been, but places tension upon what continues to re-emerge.

Crazy God and the Ethics of Subtraction

This dimension emerges with particular force in Crazy God, a project born out of the volunteer experience De Rosa undertook during the 1990s in a psychiatric hospital in Southern Italy. Returning to the site after its closure, the artist consciously avoids any aestheticisation of ruin or mental suffering. The asylum is never transformed into a spectacular device. Instead, the space appears suspended, rarefied, inhabited by a residual memory that continues to manifest itself through abandoned objects, writings on the walls, and personal belongings left behind as the final traces of erased lives.

What is most striking is the rejection of visual emphasis. The images never attempt to impose themselves as definitive symbols. The light is restrained, opaque, often dusty; interiors seem to emerge slowly from the very substance of time itself. Objects cease to function as scenographic elements and instead become clues, indices of absence. It is a photography that works through subtraction, and precisely through subtraction constructs its own ethical density.

The Archive as Critical Space

For this reason, the work of Yvonne De Rosa naturally enters into dialogue with some of the most significant reflections within contemporary image theory. It is difficult not to think of Georges Didi-Huberman when photography is treated as a form of “survival”, as the re-emergence of what history had expelled. Likewise, one can sense an affinity with Christian Boltanski, particularly in the use of the archive as an emotional and collective space rather than a purely documentary one.

Yet the true core of De Rosa’s research is probably the archive itself.

In recent years, contemporary photography has developed an almost obsessive relationship with archival material: anonymous photographs, rediscovered negatives, letters, family images, residual fragments of the past. Too often, this process has resulted in a merely nostalgic aestheticisation of memory. In De Rosa’s work, however, the archive is never a decoration of lost time. It becomes instead a critical space, a place where the past continues to interrogate the present.

In Corrispondenze, constructed through photographs and letters belonging to twentieth-century couples, the image completely loses its status as evidence. Photography ceases to guarantee authenticity and instead becomes distance, echo, fragment. The dialogue with Roland Barthes is particularly evident here. If in Camera Lucida every photograph implicitly contains the testimony of a future disappearance, in De Rosa’s work this awareness becomes even more radical: the images seem to reveal not so much what has been, but rather the impossibility of ever fully recovering it.

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The Temporality of the Analogue

The use of analogue photography also acquires a precise meaning within this context. It is neither technical nostalgia nor fetishisation of the darkroom. The analogue process introduces a different experience of time and waiting. In a system dominated by the compulsive production of images, the slowness of chemical development becomes almost a form of cultural resistance. Photography regains weight, density, and physicality.

Naples, Memory, and Stratification

Even De Rosa’s relationship with Naples escapes the most predictable stereotypes. In her images, the city is never reduced to folklore or to a surface of identity-based narratives. Naples appears instead as a geography of stratification, a place constructed through continuous overlaps of memory and erasure, where the past repeatedly returns in unexpected forms.

It is significant, then, that an important part of her practice also materialised in the founding of Magazzini Fotografici. Not simply a gallery, but an independent space conceived to foster critical reflection around contemporary photography. In a city historically lacking institutions dedicated to the photographic medium, Magazzini Fotografici has represented something more than an exhibition venue: an attempt to construct cultural community, critical thought around images, and an education of the gaze.

Perhaps it is precisely here that the position of Yvonne De Rosa within contemporary Italian photography can be fully understood. Her work does not seek immediate consensus or rapid aesthetic recognition. Her images remain deliberately open, incomplete, permeated by doubt. In an era dominated by visual saturation and excess of presence, her research restores centrality to absence, emptiness, and trace.

More than producing images, Yvonne De Rosa seems to continually question what images are no longer capable of retaining.

Biographical Note

Yvonne De Rosa is a photographer, founder, and artistic director of the independent space Magazzini Fotografici in Naples. She teaches photography at ILAS Academy and at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, and collaborates with the University of Naples Federico II in the fields of visual sociology and contemporary photography. Her research investigates the photographic medium as a narrative device, constructing an ongoing dialogue between memory, time, and contemporaneity. She has published monographs including Crazy God, Hidden Identities, Sguardo Sensibile, A mia madre, and Corrispondenze, receiving international recognition such as the IPA Award, Kodak Young Award, the RPS – Royal Photographic Society, and the MILOTA Foundation Award at the Bratislava Photo Festival. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including ARCO Madrid, The Armory New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

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To truly understand Fabio Donato, it is better to begin with a gesture, not with a photograph.

Naples, 1969, Teatro Mediterraneo. The Living Theatre is staging Paradise Now: Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s company, which in those years was dismantling the boundary between stage and audience. Donato is just over twenty, studying Architecture, politically active, and not yet a professional photographer. He enters the theatre, walks down the stairs and then — instead of taking a seat among the audience — does something no stage photographer would do: he steps onto the stage and turns towards the auditorium.

When the actors arrive, they position themselves between him and the audience, then lie down on the floor. Donato does not photograph the performance. He photographs the reversal of the performance: the new relationship between those who look and those who are looked at.

He would recount this many years later, and it remains one of the most important statements for understanding his work. He was not interested in simply documenting the performance, but in “recording this new relationship between the actors and the audience”. Having photographed not the show itself, but the theoretical idea that sustained it — he would later say — was the moment he understood he had become a photographer.

It is worth remembering that physical position: the photographer turned towards the auditorium rather than towards the stage. Because that gesture already contains the whole of his poetics.

Fabio Donato has rarely photographed the object in itself. Almost always, he has photographed the field of relationships that passes through it.

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The exact opposite of silence

Fabio Donato’s photography is born from a radical trust in presence. It does not seek emptiness, does not isolate things until they become motionless emblems, does not remove the human figure in order to let space speak alone. On the contrary: it enters places when they are inhabited, crossed, charged with tension by bodies, voices, gazes, gestures.

His material is co-presence. Bodies, gazes, tensions, artists at work, a theatre audience, the precise moment in which two people share a space and something happens between them.

Donato never photographs only what stands before the lens. He photographs what happens between people, between bodies and space, between the artist and the audience, between the work and the context that brings it to life.

“Taking a photograph is not a technical act. A photograph is a story,” he has said. And it is precisely this narrative idea that makes his gaze so recognisable: the image not as pure recording, but as the telling of a relationship.

His interest is not the abstract eternity of forms, but the present at the very moment it takes shape. Donato pursues what happens before it vanishes: a posture, a conversation, a theatre rehearsal, an encounter, a threshold, a cultural scene at the exact instant in which it manifests itself.

It is no coincidence that Donato came from Architecture. In his images there is always a construction of space, a precise awareness of the internal forces within the frame. Even when he photographs the instant, the instant appears thought through. Nothing has the casual immediacy of a stolen photograph.

For this reason, his shots never give the impression that we have simply “stumbled into” them. They seem, rather, the result of an extremely attentive presence, almost choreographic in nature.

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The witness to an unrepeatable season

The good fortune — and at the same time the risk — of an author such as Donato is that he was in the right place for more than half a century.

His archive, which comprises more than four hundred thousand frames, is one of the great visual diaries of cultural Naples from the 1960s to the 2000s. Almost everything passes through it: theatre, music, the visual arts, the international avant-gardes, a city changing its face.

There is Lucio Amelio and his gallery, the true epicentre of European contemporary art in Southern Italy. There are Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, who met in Naples in 1980 around the idea of that “new creativity of the Mezzogiorno” which, after the earthquake, would flow into the Terrae Motus collection. There are Hermann Nitsch, Vito Acconci, Marcel Marceau, Chet Baker, Pino Daniele, Roberto Benigni.

And then there is theatre.

Eduardo De Filippo, whom Donato followed from 1976 onwards, up to the photograph now displayed in the Naples metro. The first productions by Mario Martone. The young Toni Servillo and Antonio Neiwiller. The experimental Neapolitan theatre of the 1970s and 1980s at the very moment it was coming into being.

But here we must be careful not to make the easiest mistake: reducing Donato to a mere archivist of reality, a fortunate chronicler who “was there”.

That would be unfair and, above all, wrong.

Because the difference between a documentarian and an author does not lie in the event being photographed, but in the way it is seen. And Donato has never looked at an event simply for what it was. He has looked at it for the relational tension running through it.

Exactly as he did that evening on the stage of the Teatro Mediterraneo

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Photography desperately needs to return to the people, away from the often dusty dynamics of institutional circuits. The Neapolitan response to this need is called #Photographic Invasion, a completely independent and self-managed festival that this Sunday, May 24, 2026, will transform the city into a massive collective darkroom. No sponsorships, no entrance fees, no white-walled galleries: the visual scene reclaims urban space.

The spirit of the project is both provocative and poetic. For an entire day, participating photographers will showcase their works using decidedly unconventional supports. We will see large prints hanging from the balconies of historic buildings as if they were sheets drying in the sun, prints worn by creatives walking through the alleys like sandwich men, and digital screens temporarily integrated among shop windows.

A visual short circuit that will compel passersby to stop, look, and question the power of images.

A new way to create visual community

For those involved in communication and visual arts, this event represents a spontaneous case study of great interest. It demonstrates how the community of photographers feels the need to reclaim the medium, transforming Naples into the capital of street photography, understood not only as a genre but as a physical space for sharing.

The organizers' goal is clear: to democratize the gaze, break down barriers between author and viewer, and demonstrate that visual culture lives and breathes especially where it meets the everyday lives of people.

If you are in Naples this Sunday, let yourself be swept away by the flow of images. It will be a wonderful opportunity to observe closely how photography can redefine, even if only for a few hours, the visual identity of an entire territory.

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On Mimmo Jodice, and on why his slowness concerns us now more than it did then

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There are photographers who are measured by the number of images they have made, and photographers who are measured by the ones they chose not to take. Mimmo Jodice belonged to the second kind, now almost extinct.

“I do not have an easy shutter,” he used to say. Coming from anyone else, it might have sounded like affectation; in his case it was a statement of method, almost a profession of faith. He would return to the same place several times, wait for the light to change, observe the way a shadow shifted by a few centimetres over the course of an afternoon. Then, perhaps, he would photograph.

This stubbornness — because stubbornness is what it was — is the key to rereading him today, a few months after his death in Naples on 28 October 2025, at the age of ninety-one. Not as yet another “master of black and white” to be turned into a commemorative formula, but as one of the last great European photographers to have made slowness an aesthetic and moral position.

It is a thesis that asks to be defended, not merely proclaimed. Let us try.

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Time as matter, not as theme

It is often said that Jodice “stopped time”. He said it himself, with that beautiful and slightly threatening phrase: time must be stopped before it notices and takes revenge. But the phrase, through constant repetition, has almost been emptied of meaning. It is worth taking seriously and asking how time can be stopped in a photograph, because that is where Jodice truly parts company with almost everyone else.

He did not stop it by choosing motionless subjects. He stopped it within the very body of the image.

His decision to print by hand, to the very end, on silver-gelatin baryta paper is often filed away as artisanal nostalgia: the charming resistance of an old master against the digital tide. That is a lazy reading. For Jodice, analogue printing was not a mannerism: it was a position taken on time.

A file tends to erase its own age; a silver-gelatin print, by contrast, preserves it. The material that sustains it — the paper, the silver, the black slowly deposited during development — ages together with the world it represents. Jodice did not simply photograph ruin: he produced images that seem to belong to ruin itself.

His prints do not represent suspended time; they contain it.

That is why Jodice’s photographs, when seen in person, do not seem simply printed: they seem to have surfaced. They emerge from the black like relics from water. It is an effect achieved not through the subject, but through the hand.

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One coherence, not two periods

Critical shorthand often divides Jodice in two.

On one side there is the politically engaged photographer of the 1970s: cholera, psychiatric hospitals, working-class outskirts, the devotees of Chi è devoto (1974), the book made with texts by Roberto De Simone and a foreword by Carlo Levi. On the other, the metaphysical photographer of the 1980s and 1990s: empty squares, statues, seas, the suspended cities of Vedute di Napoli.

Maturation, people say. An ascent towards the universal.

It is a convenient narrative and, I believe, a partial one.

Because one only has to really look at the images from the politically engaged years to realise that the gaze is already entirely there. Jodice was not seeking the event, he was not constructing the rhetoric of denunciation, he was not turning poverty into spectacle. He was seeking the silent presence, the tension that inhabits a room an instant before or after something happens. Even in the crowded alleys of the Sanità or in the popular festivals of Campania, his gaze already seemed to be working by subtraction.

The social photographer of the 1970s and the metaphysical poet of the 1980s are not two different men. They are the same eye which, over time, learned to remove: first the anecdote, then the chronicle, and finally the human figure itself.

The abandonment of the social, then, is not a betrayal. It is a progressive act of subtraction carried out always in the same direction.

Jodice spent his life polishing away from the image everything he did not consider essential, until only space, light and time remained.

The deserted squares of Vedute di Napoli are the logical consequence of the crowded alleys of Chi è devoto: in both cases, what matters is not who is there, but what remains.

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Naples as method, de Chirico as alibi

The name of Giorgio de Chirico inevitably returns whenever Jodice is discussed. The squares, the shadows, the arches, the statues: the metaphysical lineage is clear, and Jodice never denied it.

But if left at that, the comparison risks becoming reductive.

De Chirico invented imaginary cities; Jodice photographed Piazza del Plebiscito, which truly exists, and forced it to become unreal while remaining perfectly itself. De Chirico’s metaphysics is born of invention; Jodice’s is born of subtraction.

His Naples is never a theatrical set, nor postcard folklore. It is a method of knowledge.

The city mattered to him because it is one of the places in Europe where the present rests most visibly upon the past, where time does not seem to flow but to settle. To photograph Naples, then, meant photographing stratification itself: the proof that time does not disappear, it accumulates.

The series Anamnesi is perhaps the clearest formulation of this idea. The faces of the statues in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples are photographed as though they were returning the gaze of the person looking at them. They do not seem like artefacts: they seem like memories resurfacing.

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Slowness as diagnosis

Here lies the reason why it is still worth writing about Jodice — and doing so seriously.

Jodice worked for sixty years within a world that produced relatively few images and made them last. He died in a world that produces billions of them every day and makes almost none of them endure.

His slowness, which in his own time might have seemed a matter of character or temperament, now appears for what it was: a diagnosis.

Because the point is not that we take too many photographs. It is that we no longer look at any of them.

The contemporary image has become an act of scrolling: something we pass through, not something we inhabit. Jodice spent his life demonstrating the opposite. That an image can be a place in which to stop, and that stopping has become one of the most difficult and necessary things of all.

His photographs ask for the time we no longer have. And that is precisely why they still manage to give it back to us.

They are images against the current: they push in the opposite direction to the one in which everything today drags us.

There is a word that often returned in his vocabulary: waiting. But in Jodice, waiting had nothing passive about it. It derives from the Latin ad-tendere: to stretch towards. To wait for the light meant to build a tension towards what was not yet visible.

In this sense, more than a photographer of the past, Jodice was a photographer of our missed present. He showed us the way of looking we were losing at the very moment we were losing it.

Not, then, the last master of an outdated technique, but one of the last artists to have believed that the world, if observed long enough, will eventually reveal itself.

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A legacy that continues to look back at us

In recent years, Jodice’s international consecration had become definitive: the Louvre, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the major Italian retrospectives. But institutional recognition is not the point. What matters is that his work continues to exert an underground influence on entire generations of photographers and visual artists.

Not least because his lesson was never merely technical.

Jodice taught a way of standing before things. The patience to wait for light to reveal what was already there. The conviction that looking does not mean consuming images, but allowing images slowly to consume us.

Beside him, throughout his life, was his wife Angela — a graduate in English literature, his interlocutor and companion in every choice. Where there was Mimmo, there was Angela. This too, in the end, belongs to his idea of duration.

Jodice stopped time, as he promised. And time, at least with him, did not take revenge. For once, it merely allowed itself to be looked at.

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Domenico “Mimmo” Jodice (Naples, 29 March 1934 – Naples, 28 October 2025).

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