Ads Inside AI: The Next Media Channel Marketers Can't Ignore

As hundreds of millions of users shift their attention from search boxes and social feeds to conversational assistants, a new category of ad inventory is opening up inside the large language models that power them. OpenAI's ChatGPT ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers now buying across more than 40 countries.

"Imagine being in the early days of the Google ads, Facebook ads, TikTok ads," Tortella told Beet.TV. "You have this net new supply, new ad real estate that is being monetized."

Two phases of AI in advertising

Tortella described 2025 as the first act — using AI to improve existing advertising processes: generative video, smarter bidding, better measurement. The second act, now underway, is about placing ads directly inside LLM environments themselves.

"2026, we're seeing actual ads entering LLMs," he said. "ChatGPT launched advertising, other LLMs now have advertising."

Emarketer forecasts that US AI ad spending will reach $68.25 billion by 2030, more than doubling over five years. The firm notes that more than 80% of that spending in 2026 will appear adjacent to AI-generated content — like Google AI Overviews — rather than inside pure chatbot conversations. Standalone chatbot ad spending alone is still expected to hit $0.96 billion in 2026, up more than 1,600% year over year.

Context is the new cookie

As third-party cookies fade, Tortella argued that contextual data — not behavioral tracking — will become the foundation of effective targeting inside AI conversations.

"My take is that the future of the cookie is actually context," he said. "Now that agents can actually take action, I want to give as much information as possible to those agents."

The logic: LLMs expose rich, real-time intent signals whenever a user asks for a recommendation, a comparison, or a decision — creating an opportunity, but also a risk if advertising compromises trust. OpenAI has published ad policies requiring clear labeling and independence from answers, a principle Thrad's own native ad formats — four formats built specifically for conversational environments, launched in June — were designed around from the outset.

Agentic AI meets media planning

Beyond the buying side, Tortella sees AI agents transforming the planning phase of marketing itself — researching regulations, demographics, and cultural nuances a human team might miss when entering a new market.

"If I'm a brand selling fitness products in the UK and I'm trying to enter Germany, that's a very different profile," he said. "Maybe there's some regulation that prevents me to position my brand and say some things that I'm saying here that I can't say there. And so having AI actually help me, protect me in those kind of settings, I think that that's incredible."

Gartner predicts 60% of brands will use agentic AI for streamlined one-to-one interactions by 2028. IAB's 2026 Outlook found 96% of buyers are already aware of agentic AI for ad buying and campaign execution — though confidence remains higher for performance analysis and creative optimization than for deal negotiation.

Separating hype from reality

Asked to separate hype from substance, Tortella pointed first to the automation of existing workflows as the most immediate payoff — but returned to the bigger structural shift under way.

"We're seeing the fastest emerging channel being LLMs, ads in LLMs," he said. "That's the net new inventory that is emerging. That's where eyeballs are shifting to."

Whether that shift will rival the early days of Google or Facebook remains to be seen. But for marketers watching attention migrate into conversational interfaces, the message from this conversation is straightforward: a new surface is being monetized, and the land grab is underway.

Watch the full interview and read Beet.TV's original coverage here. To see how Thrad is building the infrastructure for this new channel, explore Thrad for brands.