OpenAI hires Meta’s former top advertising executive Dave Dugan: Read post on LinkedIn and why this hiring is important for ChatGPT-maker

OpenAI has hired Dave Dugan, a high-ranking veteran from Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – to lead its new global advertising division. Dugan has served as Meta’s Vice President of Global Clients and Agencies, and will now step in as OpenAI’s Vice President of Global Ad Solutions.

Dugan has confirmed the move in a post on LinkedIn. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, he will report directly to the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap.

Read Dave Dugan’s announcement post on LinkedIn

Excited to announce that I’m joining OpenAI to lead the global advertising solutions team. ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer app in history, now used by over 900 million people weekly. Its uses are as broad as the people and countries that OpenAI serves. For myself, I use it daily for the simple (“Make a grid converting treadmill MPH to mile pace”) and the critical (“What are good conversation starters for a family member with memory loss?”). It saves me time; it crosses things off my mental list; it supplements my own judgment. Many times, I’ve thought that a relevant, targeted offer that I could click to finish a task would help me even more. This is a brand new model that’s going to re-shape the industry, and I’m thrilled to be joining the ads team that’s building just that. I’ve been hugely impressed by the team at OpenAI, and joining a group of the world’s foremost experts that will bring new advertising solutions to the market. Users rely on ChatGPT as a trusted source delivered in a simple, clean experience, and our ads platform will respect those expectations, be governed by clear principles, and be additive to the user experience. The beginning will be ads solutions inside the ChatGPT consumer experience, which is currently in alpha testing. I’ve always enjoyed working across the full range of industry partners - delivering results for advertisers, and collaborating with agencies, consultancies, and other partners to do it together. Our approach will be AI native, and built in a fundamentally different way from other platforms given the new technologies that OpenAI has developed. We’ll be scaling this team quickly, and looking for passionate talent who are ready to roll up sleeves and be central players in this critical moment in the industry. We’ll build the culture and experience together. Let’s go!

Why this hiring matters for OpenAI

The hiring of Dugan is strategic as OpenAI plans to make money by introducing ads in free versions of ChatGPT. Developing powerful AI is incredibly expensive so to keep up with the massive costs of computing and research, OpenAI needs new ways to bring in cash beyond monthly subscriptions.

Dugan has spent over a decade at Meta and worked at major global ad agencies like Publicis. He has ‘connections’ needed to convince the world’s biggest brands to spend their money on an AI chatbot.The move toward ads is a surprising U-turn for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who two years ago, told a crowd at Harvard University that he found the idea of “Ads plus AI” to be “uniquely unsettling.” At the time, he called advertising a “last resort” for a business model.Altman’s main concern was user trust. He worried that if ChatGPT showed ads, users might think the chatbot’s answers were being influenced by companies paying for placement.