As generative AI platforms become essential tools for work, research, and consumer queries, marketers in financial services are asking the question: Can you buy your way into the conversation on AI engines? 

This potential shift for finance brands could disrupt established digital ad strategies and offer early-mover opportunities—or force a rethinking of how to gain AI visibility.

Are paid ads available on mainstream AI platforms?

ChatGPT
As of 2025, traditional display or search-style pay-per-click ads are not available within ChatGPT. You cannot pay to have your brand featured explicitly in responses or to appear in the answer feed. 

ChatGPT’s answers are driven by its training data, live web integrations (for pro users), and references to trusted online sources, not sponsorships or paid placements in the Google Ads sense. 

The focus is on not breaking user trust and ensuring answers remain neutral and data-driven.

However, there are indications ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI will include ads in 2026. OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, has shifted from calling advertising a “last resort” to stating, as reported in Mashable “We haven’t done any advertising product yet… I’m not totally against it… I think ads on Instagram are kind of cool… It would take a lot of care to get right,” Altman said.

Reports indicate OpenAI is forecasting major new revenue from “free user monetisation” with ads targeting non-subscription users. The model is expected to borrow mechanisms from Google Ads and Facebook, featuring familiar bidding, targeting, and creative tools.

Google
Google has a couple of approaches being trialled right now. Its AI Mode is similar to ChatGPT where users applying conversational prompt. Inclusion in answers is governed by the model’s algorithms, which reference trusted sources and sites with high topical authority.

At present, advertisers cannot purchase ad placements or sponsored responses directly within AI Mode. There is no bidding system and no ad auction—meaning brands must rely on organic visibility driven by quality content and recognised authority.

On the flipside, AI Overviews appear within the standard Google Search results as summaries generated by AI at the top of the search page and are determined by the algorithm for now.

However, Google has confirmed it is experimenting with sponsored answers inside AI Overviews, blending paid listings with AI summaries.  According to Search Engine Land, Google is running pilot programs where sponsored products or services appear contextually within AI answers, marked with clear labels. 

This hybrid model could redefine paid search by merging generative responses with ad placement, potentially creating the most influential paid media real estate in digital history.

Claude (Anthropic)
There is currently no direct ad product, paid search, or traditional sponsorship within the Claude platform. 

Claude instead has piloted an influencer marketing program, supporting sponsored posts from creators showing how to use Claude for things like LinkedIn workflow tutorials or solving industry challenges. 

These influencer partnerships are shaping how the brand is perceived by professionals, allowing brands to influence conversation indirectly via “influencer adjacencies” rather than direct platform placements.

Anthropic recently launched a web search API for Claude which some marketers are using for search strategy and trend monitoring, but not for paid listing or ads.

Perplexity AI
Perplexity is the first mainstream AI search engine to offer direct, in-platform ad opportunities. In 2025, it’s testing two primary formats:

• Sponsored questions: Appear as follow-up prompts to a user’s query, labelled as “sponsored.” Clicking generates a new response tied to the partner brand’s message.

According to Perplexity’s VP Business Development, Ryan Foutty, “Sponsored follow-up questions are a really incredible brand advertorial. It’s additive because you’re helping users figure out the next question, … (not) just putting something in their face.”

• Media ads: Video placements in the app’s sidebar, visible but not interruptive.

Perplexity’s ad model is built for contextual relevance and charged on a CPM basis. Targeting is based on keyword associations, but ad content cannot alter the platform’s neutral AI-generated answers. 

The system is still in closed beta, but it signals the direction conversational advertising is heading.

Microsoft Co-Pilot, Gemini, and Others
As of September 2025, these platforms do not offer commercial paid sponsorships or native ad placements. Like ChatGPT, they are exploring influencer/ambassador programs and are likely watching Perplexity’s early-mover tests closely.

How can brands get visibility now?
Since direct advertising may not be generally available, most brands are focusing on:

• Building digital authority: Earning mentions in reputable articles, news, and databases that AI models crawl for citations.
• Optimising for AI mentions: Cleaning up schema, ensuring consistent entity linking, and earning references in industry news and expert lists.
• Influencer/integrated content programs: Partnering with thought leaders, creators, and professionals who publish workflows and tips that trigger model responses.

The Head of Paid Media at The Dubs Agency, Tara Cimino, said while finance brands can’t run broad advertising yet on AI search platforms they can optimise their brand to show up in answers.

“Gaining AI visibility should absolutely be a focus of finance brands right now,” Cimino said. “Key to this is prioritising top quality content that gets you trusted mentions and builds brand reputation.”

“Going forward marketing strategies will change too. Pure placement approaches driven by just bid price will have to make room for authority built by authentic content,” Cimono said.

So what comes next?
Paid placement within generative AI is emerging, but the open, self-service ad ecosystems marketers know from Google and Meta remain 1–2 years away for most platforms. 

Perplexity is forging ahead with contextual ad experiments, while OpenAI is preparing to monetise free user ad units by 2026. 

The lessons for financial marketers right now should be to focus on building authoritative, reference-worthy content and exploring influencer partnerships that align with AI discovery models. 

Those who learn to ethically earn AI mentions will have the biggest head start as the new paid media channels mature.

If you liked this article and want to know more contact The Dubs Agency we’d love to help.

[For full disclosure: The author used Perplexity to research this article while the podcast was created using ElevenLabs] 

The post Can marketers run paid advertising on AI platforms? The state of play in 2025. appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The ins and outs of paid advertising

As algorithms change and people spend more time online, it pays to get your paid advertising strategy right. Paid advertising is a method of marketing where you pay for an ad to be displayed on relevant online platforms. Known as pay-per-click, paid advertising methods drive traffic to your site.

As Tara Cimino, Head of Social Media at The Dubs, states, “To decide on the most suitable strategy, it’s essential for finance brands to identify a key outcome.” She continues, “This will set out clear KPIs which will impact the content created, the channels used and budgets allocated.”

According to one study, paid advertisements have a 200% ROI. A paid advertising strategy can help you reach beyond your organic following and target new clients. But it has a number of other benefits:

• Increase brand awareness (ads can increase brand awareness by 80%)
• Improve leads
• Drive higher engagement
• Target specific demographics or geographic locations

There are several different types of paid advertising strategies including:

• Social media
• Paid search
• Display ads
• Native ads

Social media advertising

81% of financial marketers have picked up new leads via social media advertising, making it a great paid media marketing strategy. A paid social media strategy can be effective in amplifying your social content, enabling you to reach your target audience and nurture them down the customer acquisition funnel.

Ensuring you create content right for each social platform is where a successful social media strategy gets tricky. Remember to cater the content and ad to the platform and the audience you’re targeting.

Pros and cons
Social media advertising is a great way to improve brand performance online and reach beyond your organic following. With over 4.9 billion people in the world owning a social media account, it pays to have your brand’s ads visible to them.

Tara explains, “There are many pros to paid advertising, such as enhancing your organic following, generating new leads and scaling to as many markets as possible.”

However, while social media advertising is an effective marketing tactic, there are some areas of concern. If your target audience isn’t on social media or your campaign doesn’t resonate with them it can be a waste of time.

“On the other hand, if the content isn’t resonating with your target audiences or your strategy isn’t well produced or delivered, it could be costly for the business, with low ROI,” shares Tara.

Paid search advertising

Paid search advertising (AKA search engine marketing), is when you pay to have your ad show up on search engine results whether that’s Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. It’s one of the most common types of paid advertising strategies and one of the simplest to set up.

While SEO remains critical to any financial marketing strategy, paid search advertising can be beneficial to gaining those necessary clicks. PPC has been seen to generate twice the number of visitors compared to SEO.

Pros and cons
The best aspect of paid search advertising is you can effectively target the right audiences. A great example of this is the ability to remarket your site and brand to people who have previously visited your website, helping to nurture leads and improve brand awareness.

Another aspect is you always are one of the first options in search engine rankings. This can improve your leads and gain traffic to your website. In addition, paid search advertising offers easy analytics so you can track its effectiveness and make the necessary adjustments.

Paid search advertising isn’t perfect, however, and there are drawbacks to consider. The lack of visual accompaniments means your ad can sometimes not be seen of generate the same brand awareness or impact. Further, they can be costly and you have to pay each time a user clicks your ad.

Display ads

Display ads combine text and images that link to a URL where users can find out more information about your finance brand and services. While text with images is the usual go-to for display ads, they can also feature moving images and videos (also known as rich media ads). The most common form of display ads is banner ads.

Pros and cons
Display advertising can ensure your finance brand gets noticed and enable you to connect with prospective clients. It offers precise targeting, reaching the right audience based on demographics and interests.

Further, it increases brand visibility and awareness by appearing on relevant platforms. In addition, it also offers creative flexibility to your finance brand enabling you to showcase your unique value propositions.

Display advertising for finance brands has a couple of caveats to consider. Ad fatigue and accidental clicks are potential challenges, but with engaging creatives and clear visuals, these can be overcome. Ad blockers can also pose some hurdles.

Native ads

When done well, you may not even notice when you’ve seen a native ad. Native ads are designed to blend into the content they are surrounded by. So, if this is on a social platform, they will pose as a regular post while continuing to promote users to click and follow through to your site.

The aim of a native ad is to look organic helping to make it look more authentic and grab the attention of users.

Pros and cons
One of the strongest aspects of native advertising is that by their nature, native ads aren’t intrusive but they can still capture your audience’s attention. Their visual nature and targeted content also enable greater click through rates and audience impact.
“Native advertising can drive better campaign performance when compared with other ad formats, helping drive conversions,” Tara explains. “Native ads can also be contextually targeted towards target audiences, meaning there is a higher chance of interactions and engagement.”

One drawback is it can be difficult to monitor and evaluate their effectiveness. Tara notes, “However, measuring performance can be complex if your campaign goals and audiences are not considered properly from the start.”

The bottom line of paid advertising

In a study by MailChimp, it was identified digital advertising would soon make up 75% of all media spending by 2025. As digital advertising is increasing in importance it’s critical your finance brand understands how best to measure if it’s working.

Tara shares, “To optimise and measure your paid media strategy, you need to consistently analyse your social and website metrics.” She goes on, “Look past platform metrics such as likes, but identify how your media strategy influences web conversion rates to understand what is successful about your strategy and what isn’t.”

Just like with any marketing strategy, it requires constant monitoring to ensure it’s optimised for your KPIs and targets.

The post How to choose the right paid advertising strategy appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Perelman’s metaphor rang true for a lot of us; and it’s a lesson we’ve had reinforced over and over in the process of working with our clients, in the UK and in Australia.

It’s one thing to know it though, and another to actually develop your distribution framework, testing and measuring the success of your content as you go. Here are my top tips for content amplification based on our experiences at The Dubs.

Your amplification framework 101

For any content marketing programme to be effective and deliver commercial returns it needs to do more than just sit there and look pretty – it needs to reach its intended audience. But as the effectiveness of traditional channels like print and display advertising declines, we can no longer rely on them for media distribution.

So financial businesses are seeing the need to evolve their content strategies, incorporating sustainable distribution channels such as social media and paid amplification, to reach targeted audiences at scale.

Choosing your distribution channels

Choosing the most appropriate channels for distribution is key, both to access your intended audience but also to do it in a sustained and cost-appropriate way. For example, if you were to decide that printing newspapers is the best way to reach your audience, you might find the cost overhead in print machinery, staff, and trucks to drive newspapers to the audience would not make it a viable approach, especially when scaled to a global audience.

Any distribution strategy needs to work for both the business and its audience.

Social media offers cost efficiencies and a means to meet the needs of both the audience and the business. It also supports the long-term strategy of building a direct, constant and valued relationship with the audience, as opposed to a ‘pay-to-engage’ model of traditional advertising (which stops delivering engagement when you stop paying).

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The role of social amplification

Amplification is the bedrock of any distribution strategy.

Initially, when your social media channel reach is small, any organic distribution of content will be limited. Amplifying content by paying to reach targeted audiences will deliver much greater reach and therefore can start to deliver engagement from day one. You can also use it to amplify the social channels themselves (paying to attract more followers), which will, over time, increase the scale of the audiences who follow those channels and the reach of any organic activity.

The upshot for a brand is that any amplification of content is executed only on pay-for-engagement models such as CPC (cost per click), meaning the business only pays for activity that is driving return. This is the complete opposite of many traditional media buys where impressions are the standard.

Measuring content performance

Performance needs to be judged across many criteria and at different points within the maturity of a content programme. Expecting commercial ROI from day one should not be the goal; instead, building credibility as a source of valued information (the reason your audience returns for more) becomes your holy grail. This needs to be tracked through base channel metrics such as followers, content reads, subscribers, likes/re-tweets, etc.

However, as the business matures (year one+) in its content strategy and the scale of its audience expands (thus proving itself to be a credible source of content), goal-oriented, commercial measures should be implemented, such as analytic conversion goals and leads pushed into the sales funnel.

Let me use an example

The global content programme for our client Aberdeen Asset Management – ‘Thinking aloud’ – launched in early 2015 in the UK and US with associated social media channels and a continuous amplification strategy. Since then, it has scaled to 25 markets across the globe and publishes and distributes content on a daily basis. Thanks to the amplification of its channels and content, Thinking aloud now has 100,000 X followers, 45,000 LinkedIn followers and over 4.5M video views.

More importantly, as the programme has matured over the past two years, commercial goal measures have been implemented allowing all content consumption to be tracked against business needs and commercial sales.

[Full disclosure: Aberdeen Asset Management is a client of The Dubs]

My 3 main take-outs for a financial brand

1. The production and publishing of content is pointless if it’s not being distributed to the intended audience.
2. Expecting immediate commercial returns is not realistic. Being seen as a credible source of information is; from there commercial measures can be implemented.
3. The quality and sustained frequency of content is key to growing an audience and therefore maximising any organic distribution or amplification. If you can’t provide the content when you say you will, why should the audience follow you for more.

Case Study: Aberdeen On Thinking Aloud – A Global Content Marketing Strategy

Related Article: How Aberdeen Wins With Owned And Paid Content

Related Article: Aberdeen On India – The Giant Awakens – What It Takes to Go Viral

Related Article: Aberdeen Asset Management – Zero To Hero Content Journey

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The 2017 forecast

In a recent Content Marketing Institute (CMI) podcast, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose brought to light both Facebook and Google’s move into content and media. The two tech giants are recognising gaps in content and are actively pursuing well-known, but as yet undisclosed, brands to create content to fill these holes.

Although Facebook still insists it’s a tech company (according to the podcast, tech shares are worth more than media shares), the platform is already one of the world’s largest content distributors. As Forbes’ Howard Homonoff writes, “Facebook is a massive distributor of content. Every minute, Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content”. Does this mean Facebook is already one of the world’s largest media companies?

With both companies moving into content creation in 2017, does this mean the social media kingpins are morphing into media empires?

The CMI podcast reveals Google also recently approached a major brand to create original content for its platform; content that Google will own. At time of publication, no details were available on the brands involved in Google and Facebook’s new efforts.

Facebook focuses on video content

Separate to pursuing this mysterious brand-created content, Recode states Facebook have also engaged Vox Media to produce exclusive live content. Facebook’s Ricky Van Veen says, “Earlier this year, we started rolling out the Video tab, a dedicated place for video on Facebook. Our goal is to kick start an ecosystem of partner content for the tab”.

The takeaway? Facebook wants to own content rather than serve merely as a portal to freely distribute the content of others.

Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising

In a recent Business Insider article, Jeff Desjardins says Google and Facebook control 57.6% of the digital ad market, and this figure is growing. Brands have often managed to get around having to pay for digital advertising by sharing content via Facebook, and gaining exposure through organic search in Google, but with both companies now looking to publish content for their own financial gain, relying on free or even paid advertising may become increasingly risky.

It seems the dynamic duo seek to control both digital advertising and content marketing, but are yet to make it clear how they will monetise their newfound content. Paid advertising is still likely to yield results, but brands may soon be competing against the content owned by these two companies, which will undoubtedly be given preference by their cryptic algorithm rankings.

How finance companies can capitalise

It’s probably unwise for finance brands to place all their advertising goals in the hands of Google and/or Facebook (outlets they don’t control – don’t build a house on land you don’t own), they are now in a position to leverage some deals.

With both companies hungry to acquire content, financial services can look to fill content gaps and receive either monetary payment, or preferential treatment in return for original content. The CMI suggest, with Google, this could mean priority placement in search without having to pay for the privilege, and possibly the same with Facebook advertising.

While pursuing their own content marketing strategies independent of Facebook and Google, finance companies have a unique opening to gain an edge over the competition. Now is the time for finance brands to team up with a great content marketing company and tap into this wealth of new opportunities.

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The post What are Google and Facebook doing with content in 2017? appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The first TV ad went to air 75 years ago this year. It was a black and white beauty by watchmakers Bulova and was a grainy 10-second image that would have reached an audience of thousands.

Looking back at this anniversary, it’s interesting to see how the once proud giant that was television advertising is adapting to the new fragmented landscape it finds itself in. According to a study by Interpublic Group’s Magna Global, digital is predicted to completely overtake television ad spending by the end of 2017, while others predict 2018 will be the year of the digital ad takeover. In Australia, investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts TV ad spend will plateau by 2020, and after that will see a steady decline in the face of streaming and online TV services. In 2015 total Australian free-to-air ad revenue fell by 1.2%.

That said, television still commands a sizable chunk of the global advertising spend. Hillary Clinton’s camp just dropped a cool $US80 million buying television ads (okay, so it’s not an annual event, but it still says something of the power of television). We also saw the reach and stir television ads provide firsthand from our own election this year, with the Liberal Party’s “fake tradie” ad – and the subsequent social media uptake and scorn it evoked. And let’s not overlook the fact LinkedIn bought its first TV ad this year, which aired during the Oscars. Television ads still get our attention, for better or worse.

NBC’s Saturday Night Live will be cutting ads by 30% and introducing six branded content pods per year

In the US, brands and networks are working to make this relationship work for them by introducing integrative advertising in their shows. NBC’s comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live will be cutting ads by 30% (that is, two commercial breaks each show) next season and introducing six branded content pods per year.

Programmatic buying is also hitting television world, with media buyers using data to market more specifically. Think of it as a hybrid between digital and television. Instead of merely basing ads on gender and age, the introduction of algorithms that can target specific consumers and react to the success of the campaign sees TV adopting digital’s tactics. It might not be as targeted as digital, but that’s TVs trump card over its digital competitors – the broad reach it commands.

As for the future, TV will have to hope its new adapt-or-die strategies work because the 3rd annual Advertising Channels With the Largest Purchase Influence on Consumers report reveals that from 2011 to 2016, traditional TV viewing by Americans aged 18-24 dropped by more than 10 hours per week – and that in just five years, almost 40% of this coveted demographic shifted its viewing habits to other activities.

Screen stacking, anyone?

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