Colgate, Ford and Persil Are Already Buying Ads Inside ChatGPT - Here's What WPP Learned
Updated: 1 day ago
WPP Media ran Germany's first pilot ChatGPT ad campaigns for five named advertisers, reported 21 October 2026, after ChatGPT Ads launched locally in August 2026.
The first brands inside the chatbot
It took less than ten weeks. OpenAI opened ChatGPT Ads in Germany in August 2026, and by 21 October WPP Media confirmed it had already run the country's first pilot campaigns inside the assistant for five named advertisers: Colgate-Palmolive, Ford, Henkel's Persil, RTL Deutschland and the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken banking group.
Each name tells a slightly different story. Ford describes the work as its first paid-search test on ChatGPT, a direct bet that intent-driven advertising can migrate from Google into a conversational interface. The consumer-goods players, Colgate and Persil, are testing whether a toothpaste or a detergent can meaningfully surface when a user asks an assistant for a recommendation rather than typing a query into a search box.
WPP frames the whole exercise carefully as a complement to classic search, not a replacement. That framing matters: it signals to clients that nobody is being asked to move budget wholesale, only to reserve a seat at a table that is still being built.
Why 'promising' is not the same as proven
Here is the detail every marketer should sit with. The brands involved call the results promising, but not one of them has published a performance figure. The measurement available at this stage is reach and clicks, the same currency the industry was using two decades ago, not sales, incrementality or return on ad spend.
That gap is the real headline. A brand-new, closed advertising surface controlled by a single platform is being sold on the language of optimism before there is an agreed way to count what it delivers. When the only metrics on offer are impressions and clicks, 'promising' is a vibe, not a verdict.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who lived through the first wave of social and retail-media advertising. Early adopters buy access and learning, and they pay for it in uncertainty. The brands here are effectively renting a front-row view of how consumers behave inside an assistant, and treating the media cost as tuition.
The transferable playbook
For any marketer outside Germany, the lesson is about posture rather than channel. The right move toward an unproven surface is a ring-fenced test budget, a named learning objective and a hard rule that you do not scale on reach and clicks alone. You scale when you can tie spend to an outcome.
It is also a reminder that agencies still earn their fee at the frontier. WPP's value here is not a clever creative idea; it is being first through the door, negotiating access, and building the measurement scaffolding that clients cannot build alone. In a year of relentless in-housing, this is the counter-argument.
Watch what happens when the first real numbers arrive. If conversational ad formats can be tied to sales, the 'complement to search' language will quietly disappear and the budget conversation will change fast. Until then, treat every pilot result as a hypothesis, not a case study.
There is a competitive clock running underneath all of this. The five advertisers in the beta are not just buying reach; they are buying the right to be early to a format competitors have not yet learned to use. When a new surface opens, the first movers accumulate operational knowledge that rivals cannot buy later at any price, and that head start is often the real asset being accrued. The mix of names here, a toothpaste maker, a carmaker, a detergent, a broadcaster and a banking group, is also telling: OpenAI is deliberately seeding its ad product across categories to learn where conversational advertising actually fits, and the brands are learning the same thing in parallel. Both sides are running an experiment on the other.
Quick FAQ
Which brands ran ads inside ChatGPT in Germany?
WPP Media ran pilot campaigns for five named advertisers: Colgate-Palmolive, Ford, Henkel's Persil, RTL Deutschland and the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken group. Ford called it its first paid-search test on ChatGPT.
When did ChatGPT advertising launch in Germany?
OpenAI opened ChatGPT Ads in Germany in August 2026, and WPP Media's first pilot campaigns were reported on 21 October 2026.
Did the campaigns work?
Brands called the results promising but published no performance figures. The only measurement available so far is reach and clicks, not sales or return on ad spend.
The brands buying into ChatGPT ads right now are not buying performance, they are buying a front-row seat. That is a legitimate reason to spend, but only if you ring-fence the budget, name what you are trying to learn, and refuse to scale until someone can finally count something other than clicks. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
On an unproven ad surface, early access is worth paying for, but only against a learning budget you refuse to scale on reach and clicks alone.
Would you reserve a test budget for ads inside an AI assistant before anyone can prove what they sell?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: Horizont, W&V, Meedia
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
