OpenAI has hired David Dugan, a longtime ads leader at Meta, as the AI firm’s vice president and head of global ads solutions, a move that signals a more deliberate push into building out its ads business as it looks to scale revenue beyond subscriptions.
Dugan, who spent more than a decade at Meta, most recently as vice president of Meta’s global clients and agencies division, announced the move in a LinkedIn post. He will report to Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Framing the opportunity, Dugan pointed to the scale and sensitivity of advertising inside ChatGPT. “This is a brand new model that’s going to re-shape the industry” he wrote, adding that the ads experience will be “governed by clear principles” and designed to be additive rather than disruptive. Early efforts will center on ad solutions within ChatGPT’s consumer product, which is currently in alpha testing.
The hire lands as OpenAI quietly assembles the infrastructure for an ads business. The company has been building out its adtech stack, including an ads manager, as previously reported by ADWEEK. Holding companies like Omnicom, WPP, and Dentsu are already lining up to test inventory on ChatGPT, which the company says has more than 900 million weekly active users. Early brand partners—including AppLovin, WIRED, and Best Buy—have begun running ads in pilot programs.
Those placements don’t come cheap. OpenAI has asked for a minimum commitment of $200,000 from brands looking to run ads inside ChatGPT, ADWEEK previously reported. The company has also emphasized that ads will not influence the chatbot’s responses, and that user conversations won’t be sold to advertisers.
Dugan’s remit is likely to extend beyond product into relationships. He brings with him deep ties across the ad industry—connections that could prove critical as OpenAI attempts to translate early curiosity into sustained media spend.
The hire also follows the appointment of Fidji Simo, the former Facebook executive who now leads OpenAI’s product and business teams as CEO of applications—another signal that the company is pulling seasoned operators from big tech to shape its commercial playbook.
OpenAI directed ADWEEK to Dugan’s LinkedIn post when asked for further comment.
As artificial intelligence pushes brands to bring more of the creative processes in-house, agency talent is feeling the existential pressure on their jobs—and many are leaving storied organizations to chart their own paths.
According to new survey data fielded by NewtonX for ADWEEK, 32% of brands expect to handle nearly all creative in-house within 12 months, while another 23% expect to bring at least half of their creative work in-house in that timeframe.
Meanwhile, more than half (54%) of agency leaders surveyed said they’re somewhat or very likely to start their own firm within the next two years.
What Marketers Can Do to Improve the Fragmented Patient Journey
This post was created in partnership with PulsePoint
AI and digital search are fundamentally changing the patient journey. Before a patient even sees a doctor, they have often encountered a mountain of health information that can be as helpful as it is confusing. When what they find online conflicts with what a clinician says in person, credibility begins to erode.
During an ADWEEK House panel co-hosted with PulsePoint, industry leaders discussed how to align healthcare and marketing teams around a shared story. The goal is to build a cohesive ecosystem where patient and provider experiences are synchronized across every touchpoint.
The chaos of the health journey
Konrad Gerszke, CEO of PulsePoint, set the stage by describing the often-contradictory experience of a patient in the digital age. He noted that the disconnect between online search and clinical advice can actually lead to worse health outcomes.
“If you are a patient, oftentimes you research a health condition for yourself or a relative before you go to the doctor,” Gerszke said. “You are exposed to search results and what creators or influencers are telling you. You probably also chat with an AI, and you are looking at YouTube videos. Then you are going to the doctor, and the doctor is saying something completely different in the 35 seconds he has with you.”
The disconnect between a doctor’s diagnosis and fragmented online information leads to confusion and ultimately erodes trust in online healthcare content and marketing, he said. This disconnect can also “lead to worse health outcomes, adherence problems, and treatment problems,” Gerszke explained.
Moving toward discovery
Andrea Palmer, CEO of Publicis Health Media, suggested that brands should view this fragmented environment not as a hurdle, but as a tool for connecting with patients when they are most active. She described the patient experience as a perpetual state of seeking answers.
“People are on this never-ending journey of discovery, and they’re using the media as a discovery tool,” Palmer explained. For marketers, their job is “to connect those dots” from different media sources.
As technology evolves, the way patients ask questions is changing. According to Gerske, when doctors or patients use traditional search, they tend to enter just two or three words. In an AI-powered chat, that expands to roughly six to eight words. It may seem like a small shift, but it represents a significant jump in how clearly their intent is expressed and understood. More importantly, AI-supported chats tend to include additional language and context, which can lead to better answers and ultimately better healthcare outcomes.
Authenticity in a scaled world
While data and automation are critical for efficiency, they cannot replace the core of health marketing. Jason Young, VP of integrated marketing at Novartis, emphasized that the ultimate goal is to use technology to create space for more meaningful human interactions.
AI and automation are critical because “it gives us more time to do the other things better, to go deeper,” Young explained. The next step is asking: “How do you convert science and messaging into deep, impactful narratives and storytelling? There’s a human component to this that you cannot dismiss.”
How Brands Find a Human Touch in a World of Algorithms
This post was created in partnership with Manifest
AI is rapidly changing how content is produced and how brands connect with customers. It’s also helping behind the scenes, providing better asset tracking and automating manual tasks.
During an ADWEEK House Austin panel co-hosted with Manifest, industry leaders discussed how brands can use technology to deepen emotional resonance rather than just simulating it.
The duel vs. the duet
Laura Kowalski, SVP of strategy at Manifest, kicked off the conversation, suggesting that brands should view AI as an orchestrator for human creativity.
“We aren’t thinking of human intelligence vs. artificial intelligence as this great duel. It’s much more of a duet,” Kowalski said. “We see that, together, these two forces need to cooperate. And we are the wonderful orchestrators that can create beautiful music if we harness the power and accelerant of AI with our human thinking.”
As automation scales content, a brand’s story has to be strong enough to stand out. Steve Slivka, chief experience officer at Manifest, emphasized that “having a strong point of view, a strong story, a strong signal that you’re trying to get out into the world becomes more and more important because we are able to iterate that almost infinitely.”
“So for me, my focus is strong, potent stories that we can tell, that can hold together as we scale these stories in a myriad of different ways,” Slivka explained.
Beating the BS detector
This need for authenticity is extremely important in high-stakes industries like healthcare. D.J. Willard, senior director of strategic marketing at Priority Health, noted that consumers have a sharp intuition for inauthentic automation.
“I think, in general, consumers—our members—are incredible BS detectors. They’ll automatically be able to recognize when you’re not being authentic or you’re not being true to the brand that you pretend to be, and they will help define it for you,” Willard said.
Kowalski predicted that as the industry leans into synthetic data, the pendulum will swing back toward traditional human research.
“I think what’s going to happen is we are going to go back to some of those foundational elements that we’ve relied on in the past, like ethnographic research,” she explained. “We can have these personas evaluating creative, but it’s all synthetic, and there has to be a way to get at new, rich insights.”
Beyond remarkably average
To survive in an automated world, brands are moving beyond good enough content. Slivka noted that “earnest storytelling” is backed by real behavior.
“As you create those stories, you have to also take shots at it. You have to be a detractor and figure out ways that it’s not going to work and make it stronger,” Slivka explained. “It has to have that strength and be born of actual truth and actual belief that’s backed up by action for it to work.”
Willard concluded by reminding the audience that technology has to follow strategy.
“When you have the AI hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he shared. “So, you want to find a way to utilize AI across every single different business process or creative asset that you potentially have.”
Using the tool allows for a better understanding of a business’s objective. “Or, as I like to ask my team: What is the business problem we’re trying to solve, and can AI really be a tool that helps us do that?” Williard said.
“In some cases, the answer may actually be no. But then it’s also helping the organization understand that the answer can be no here because what’s worse is spending toward a goal, thinking that AI is the answer, and it ends up not being the answer,” he explained.
Musk’s tactic of blaming users for Grok sex images may be foiled by EU law
Why officials want to go after platforms, not users
Officials “want to introduce a new ban on so-called ‘nudifier’ systems that use AI to create or manipulate images that are sexually explicit or intimate and resemble an identifiable real person without that person’s consent,” the press release explained. However, “the ban would not apply to AI systems with effective safety measures preventing users from creating such images,” officials said.
As Bloomberg noted, the ban would radically shift the EU’s approach to regulating explicit deepfakes, moving beyond just prosecuting users to also punishing platforms. The Grok scandal “epitomized” why such a regulatory shift was needed, Bloomberg reported, noting that “this amendment is the first” EU policy “to specifically target AI platforms” that produce and allow sharing of “sexual material without the subject’s consent.”
While EU officials did not directly mention Grok in the press release, regulators had already been probing the AI system while pondering the implications of xAI’s controversy for other, less visible nudify apps. Submitting questions to the European Commission earlier this year, lawmakers warned:
Recent shocking reports of AI-powered nudity applications, such as Grok on X, but also other tools that are freely available online, highlight an increase in AI-driven tools that allow users to generate manipulated intimate images of individuals without their consent, facilitating gender-based cyberviolence and the creation of child sexual abuse material.
“These systems should be banned from the EU market,” lawmakers urged, particularly since “individual perpetrators”—who “can often be punished under national criminal law”—“are often hard to find.” A more proactive plan, lawmakers suggested, would be to “prevent widespread image-based sexual violence from the outset.”
With apparent backing from Parliament members, the amendment’s likely passage is sure to frustrate Musk, who is also facing legal challenges in the US seeking injunctions against Grok’s nudify outputs. In January, a mother of one of Musk’s children, Ashley St. Clair, became one of the first victims to file a lawsuit. And more recently, three young girls in Tennessee filed a proposed class action representing all children harmed by Grok’s alleged CSAM outputs.
In the EU, similar public pressure is mounting for regulators to intervene, as xAI seems unwilling to prevent Grok from undressing real people. A civil liberties committee member, Michael McNamara, said in the press release that he believes the proposal to ban nudify apps “is something that our citizens expect.”
EXCLUSIVE: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Butts Heads With Former FTC CTO Over AI Regulation
In a heated discussion with leading AI scholars Tuesday evening, Eric Schmidt, the American businessman who held the top post at Google from 2001 to 2011, argued that AI systems can develop unexpected behaviors thatlimit the extent to which companies like Google can implement preemptive safety and governance mechanisms into their products.
A central “problem” with regulating frontier AI models, is that, sometimes, “a new feature emerges in these systems that is not tested, testable,” Schmidt said onstage at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in Manhattan.
“We can stop [the emergence of new features or behaviors], and therefore stop all progress, by law, by banning larger models,” he said, “but as long as you have this new emergent power, you have deep reasoning, deep capabilities, and they will make mistakes. You have to be tolerant.”
Schmidt—who also served as chairman of Google’s parent Alphabet from 2015 and 2017 and advised Alphabet for three years after that—supported the 2014 acquisition of DeepMind, the unit that now houses Google’s most cutting-edge AI research.
Schmidt said that AI developers, like Google and others “should be held accountable” if they’re found in violation of the law, but emphasized that AI developers frequently have to ship AI products and retroactively correct bad behaviors they didn’t predict as the models evolve.
“I went through this when I was at Google, in earlier versions of [Google’s AI] technology, where the system would actually do something that was wrong, and we fixed it. And we fixed it as fast as we could, because we had to, because it was the right thing to do,” he said.
Google did not respond with an on-the-record statement by press time.
Schmidt was challenged by Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government and technology at Harvard and the former chief technology officer at the Federal Trade Commission, who cast doubt on the suggestion that AI leaders would happily comply with regulations. She said that leading tech companies have proven time and again to ignore key regulations or attempt to bend the law to their commercial interests.
Sweeney is not off base. Just last year, U.S. federal judges found Google guilty of operating not one but two illegal monopolies—one in adtech and one in online search. The decisions came six years after Meta, then Facebook, was forced to cough up $5 billion to the FTC and modify its business practices after it was found to have mishandled reams of user data in the now infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal.
“Technology just ignores [laws] and rewrites them. That’s true in social media. It’s true in AI as well,” Sweeney said to Schmidt. “We already have laws [that] address issues of bias, consumer protection, and so forth. None of those are enforced online.”
Sweeney suggested that mitigating the risks associated with AI, including algorithmic harms and biases encoded into AI systems from their training data, requires more foundational changes rather than ex-post-facto fixes.
“There are questions about existential harms in the future, but there are a lot of harms happening right now. And it doesn’t have to be that way….It depends on who this AI is servicing, and in particular, the design of the technology—the decisions made in that design is really determining what our values will be,” she said.
Schmidt pushed back on the implication that all harms could be preempted with better design and training, arguing that leading AI programs are not simple machinery but complex, non-linear systems that often develop unforeseen capabilities. But he agreed with Sweeney’s assertion that Silicon Valley leaders have at times “rushed” products to market, adding, “They’ve found all sorts of problems, and then they’re busy correcting them. I think that’s the cycle, and it’s very hard.”
Luckily, he said, AI developers have evaluation cards and safety testing teams in place to mitigate as much risk as possible in advance.
But these measures are insufficient for protecting humanity, according to another panelist, Nate Soares. Soares is president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California and co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a 2025 book on the existential risks posed by AI.
In leading AI labs, the primary focus areas for safety and governance today are interpretability research, or “trying to figure out what’s going on inside the AIs’ heads,” and model evaluation cards, “which are trying to figure out how dangerous the AIs are,” as Soares explained.
He likened these efforts to a comically inadequate attempt to curtail nuclear disasters. “If someone was making a nuclear power plant in your hometown, and you went to them and you said, ‘Hey, I hear that this uranium stuff can have lots of energy benefits, but also can melt down when things go badly. What have you guys got that makes you think you’re going to get the benefits and not the pitfalls?’ If the engineers say—‘Oh yeah, we’ve got two crack teams working on this; the first team is trying to figure out what the heck is going on inside, and the second team is trying to measure whether it’s currently exploding’—that’s not a good sign.”
Soares expressed urgent concern about the future of AI for the same reason Schmidt found the technology to be too difficult to govern: because frontier AI models tend toact in ways their makers didn’t explicitly design or even anticipate.
Schmidt argued that the benefits of AI will ultimately outweigh the risks, disagreeing with arguments made by Sweeney, Soares, and other academics onstage.
“The companies that are doing this work are well aware of the dangers, and I know this because I work with them on this, and we spend an awful lot of time talking about them,” Schmidt said. “We can talk about some of them, but that is not to take away from the enormous benefit of these technologies.”
Schmidt, deGrasse, Sweeney, and Soares were joined onstage by Kate Crawford, a professor of AI at the University of Southern California, Chris Callison-Burch, a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor, and Cindy Rush, a statistician who teaches at Columbia University.
AI Is Everywhere at SXSW, but Humanity Still Leads
AI is ubiquitous at South by Southwest. It underpins hallway conversations, happy hours, onstage discussions, keynotes, and coffee meetups. The reality is that generative AI is changing everything, fast.
That’s as true for marketing as it is for any industry. AI is transforming workflows, speeding up creative production, upending predictable marketing funnels, and creating personalized targeting and product discovery.
A group of high-level brand and agency executives gathered at ADWEEK House at SXSW to discuss how they’re implementing and experimenting with new tech without losing human connection and creativity.
AI isn’t always going to save time
AI can bring efficiencies to workflows, but that doesn’t always mean that you’re going to save time overall, executives said. There’s a lot of legwork involved in adding new tech into an organization.
“You can’t take an AI capability and just put it on top of old processes, old technology, and expect that the people move—and expect that all of a sudden, your company culture is going to shift,” said Ndidi Oteh, global CEO of Accenture Song.
“How do we think about talent, or how do we make sure we have an operating level that supports that? How do we make sure we have a workbench that is more than a point solution, but transforms the way that we work?”
Stephanie Mencarelli, vp of design for Adobe’s document cloud, pointed to a study showing that about 15% of people working in tech are AI “power users.”
“The cognitive dissonance right now is real,” Mencarelli said. “What is the hype versus what is the reality?”
People using AI aren’t necessarily working less, noted Allison Stransky, CMO of Samsung. Instead, they’re actually putting in more hours. She said they’re energized by AI, and time saved is redeployed elsewhere.
Know AI’s boundaries
For marketers, it’s critical to understand where ethical guardrails need to be enforced, executives agreed.
“Connectedness matters more than ever,” said Attica Jaques, CMO at Ancestry. That’s especially true within companies, she said, highlighting the close collaboration that exists between tech, engineering, and marketing at Ancestry.
“Our CTO says, ‘We’re not going to make your ancestors dance,’” she continued. “That, inherently, is a principle of what we’re willing to do and not do, because AI can.”
Those guardrails are what will dictate the boundaries of the future, noted Kimberly Storin, CMO of Zoom.
“It’s going to be such an important part of where humanity goes,” Storin said.
Wesley ter Haar, co-founder and chief AI officer at Monks, added that marketers are finally able to make good on the promise of personalization on a massive scale in real time, thanks to these models.
“The models are clearly good enough to parse through massive amounts of data in close to real time, which means that there’s an unlock there,” he said.
But as the tech progresses, “everything is on the table,” ter Haar warned. “When it comes to things like taste as a human skill set—I think we all want that to be a human skill set. I think because of that, we will make it a predominantly human skill set for quite a few years to come.”
Know a brand’s value
Beyond guardrails, companies also need to know what their foundational values are, said Ray Kunik, head of digital at 3M.
“Transformation begins within, but trust is the currency of philosophy,” he said. “If you’re not centered on who you are and what you’re standing for, and think about that internally and external, then what are you building on?”
Reflecting on how much has changed over the last six months, participants also argued that leaders must stay flexible.
“As much as we need to have a vision for the future, every day, it changes,” said Josh Line, CMO at Yahoo.
As these changes revolutionize how people live their lives, it’s also important to stay rooted in the present, or risk leaving swaths of your customer base behind.
“Once upon a time, every single ad ended with, ‘Go to www dot…,’” said Stransky. “That’s gonna be AI very soon, but today we’re still in the education phase.”
OpenAI is Testing An Ads Manager, As Its New Ads Business Fights Growing Pains
OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads program is starting to take shape.
The company has begun testing an Ads Manager with a small group of partners and is gathering feedback, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to ADWEEK. The Ads Manager is a dashboard that lets marketers run, monitor, and optimize campaigns in real time.
The spokesperson also confirmed that testers currently get weekly Comma Separated Values (CSV) reports, which are spreadsheets with performance data like clicks or impressions.
But with OpenAI asking some early advertisers to commit at least $200,000, as ADWEEK previously reported, the AI firm needs to prove its ads drive results.
The Trade Desk Says It’s Testing AI Campaign Creation With Claude
The Trade Desk is testing whether advertisers can build campaigns on its platform using generative AI.
Speaking at Marketecture Live in New York City on Wednesday, CEO Jeff Green said the company is running a closed beta that allows some advertisers to create campaigns through Anthropic’s Claude—offering an early glimpse at how the company is exploring large language models to potentially reshape programmatic ad buying. Green stopped short of sharing further details about the test.
The effort follows The Trade Desk’s earnings last month, when Green hinted the company plans to launch an agentic AI framework for partners in 2026. At the panel, he argued programmatic advertising is especially well suited to automation given the scale and speed of campaign decisions.
“I don’t think that there is an industry in the world that is more conducive to AI than programmatic advertising,” Green said during a panel with Marketecture Media founder Ari Paparo. “We are looking at 20 million ad impression opportunities every single second, representing millions of ad campaigns and billions of users on the other side—and we have 10 milliseconds or less.”
Ad companies are in an arms race to deploy AI agents that could shake off old habits on building and managing campaigns. Rivals such as Amazon have already begun opening parts of their ad tech stack to AI agents, ADWEEK previously reported.
The Trade Desk’s efforts with Claude follow Green’s recent remarks suggesting that the company would gain access to chatbot inventory. While he did not confirm whether that includes AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, he also declined to comment on the company’s reported talks with OpenAI.
Instead, he suggested that the economics of generative AI will push many companies toward advertising as they search for sustainable revenue models.
“All of the AI companies have a serious problem,” Green said. “Their capex and valuations are massive, and they have really high expectations on the way that they’re going to make money.”
At the heart of the discussion was Amazon’s DSP offering. Green reiterated a view that has stirred debate across ad tech: that Amazon may eventually step back from operating a demand-side platform for the open internet.
The reason, he argued, is antitrust risk. Green pointed to Google’s ongoing regulatory battles as a cautionary tail, suggesting the company’s participation in open web ad tech has been the source of most of its legal troubles. Amazon, he added, has even more at stake because its advertising business intersects with retail, cloud infrastructure, and streaming video.
“It would be a strategic mistake for Amazon,” Green said. “Their role in the open internet will be shorter than Google’s, because of the macro impact on their business.”
Green also pointed to retail media as a major area of opportunity for programmatic platforms—even though The Trade Desk has yet to operate product listing ads at scale, he said. When pressed about whether agency groups such as Dentsu and WPP had moved away from OpenPath—a development previously reported by ADWEEK—Green declined to comment.
After complaints, Google will make it easier to disable gen AI search in Photos
Google has spent the past few years in a constant state of AI escalation, rolling out new versions of its Gemini models and integrating that technology into every feature possible. To say this has been an annoyance for Google’s userbase would be an understatement. Still, the AI-fueled evolution of Google products continues unabated—except for Google Photos. After waffling on how to handle changes to search in Photos, Google has relented and will add a simple toggle to bring back the classic search experience.
The rollout of the Gemini-powered Ask Photos search experience has not been smooth. According to Google Photos head Shimrit Ben-Yair, the company has heard the complaints. As a result, Google Photos will soon make it easy to go back to the traditional, non-Gemini search system.
If you weren’t using Google Photos from the start, it can be hard to understand just how revolutionary the search experience was. We went from painstakingly scrolling through timelines to find photos to being able to just search for what was in them. This application of artificial intelligence predates the current obsession with generative systems, and that’s why Google decided a few years ago it had to go.
Google launched the beta Ask Photos experience in 2024, rolling it out slowly in the Photos app while it gathered feedback. Google got a whole lot of feedback, most of it negative. Ask Photos is intended to better respond to natural language queries, but it’s much slower than the traditional search, and the way it chooses the pictures to display seems much more prone to error. It was so bad that Google had to pause the full rollout of Ask Photos in summer 2025 to make vital improvements, although it’s still not very good.
