Honasa Consumer has partnered with commerce media company Criteo to advertise its flagship beauty and personal care brand Mamaearth on ChatGPT, as brands begin experimenting with advertising within conversational AI platforms.
Honasa Consumer co-founder Ghazal Alagh announced the development, describing the company as the first Indian advertiser on ChatGPT. The move comes as OpenAI expands its advertising business to India and other international markets.
Through its integration with OpenAI, Criteo provides advertisers access to ChatGPT advertising inventory as part of their broader digital campaigns. For Mamaearth, the initiative extends its advertising presence into an environment where consumers are increasingly using AI assistants to research products, compare options and seek recommendations.
Alagh said the company's decision was linked to changes in how consumers discover brands. She noted that questions previously directed towards search engines and other digital platforms are increasingly moving into AI conversations, creating a new point of interaction between consumers and businesses.
Rather than viewing ChatGPT solely as another advertising channel, Honasa is using the initiative to understand how conversational AI could affect product and brand discovery. The partnership with Criteo will allow the company to experiment with the format as the advertising ecosystem around generative AI develops.
OpenAI has been expanding ChatGPT Ads internationally and recently made its Ads Manager available to advertisers in India alongside markets across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The company said its advertising business has reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch and is being used by tens of thousands of advertisers globally.
ChatGPT ads can appear to eligible adult users on the Free and Go plans. OpenAI says its paid Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu plans remain ad-free.
The company has also drawn a distinction between advertisements and the answers generated by ChatGPT. Ads are labelled and displayed separately, while OpenAI says advertisers cannot influence ChatGPT's responses. It also says conversations are kept private from advertisers and that user data is not sold to advertisers.
For Mamaearth, the campaign marks an early experiment with conversational AI as an advertising environment. As ChatGPT's advertising business expands into India, the development also gives marketers another channel to assess how AI-led conversations may fit alongside search, social media and other forms of digital product discovery.
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