The news: OpenAI will bring its ChatGPT ad pilot to France, Germany, and Ireland as it looks to expand availability in Europe, Digiday reported Thursday. The announcement comes a few months after OpenAI announced plans to launch in the UK, Japan, and Brazil.

• OpenAI is seeking a regional manager of ad solutions in EMEA to scale its advertising ventures, according to its careers page.
• The company is also hiring executives across the EMEA region to scale its ad pilot, including roles for a regional client partner and customer success manager.
• Adding these regions brings OpenAI’s pilot to 10 global markets, helping the company achieve a presence in all major global advertising markets less than a year since launching its pilot, Digiday notes.

Why it matters: The expansion comes as OpenAI chases ambitious revenue goals and prepares for a highly anticipated IPO.

• OpenAI’s ad push is becoming more urgent as financial losses mount. The company raised $122 billion in a March tech funding round, but will burn through a similar amount in the next three years.
• Despite generating $13.07 billion in revenues last year, per leaked financials from the Financial Times, OpenAI lost $38.5 billion. That underscores how fair it remains from turning a profit and why advertising is necessary to help close that gap—especially given OpenAI’s lofty ad revenue ambitions of $2.4 billion this year and more than $100 billion by 2030.
• OpenAI is simultaneously dealing with chatbot clickthrough rates as low as 0.91%, per Adweek. That raises the stakes for ramping up the speed of its global expansion.
• OpenAI’s accelerated ad expansion could also be a way to strengthen its IPO proposal. A rumored delay of its public offering from the end of this year to 2027, per The New York Times, suggests the company may need more time to prove that ads can become a meaningful revenue engine—especially if its current performance metrics are still underwhelming.

Implications for marketers: Global expansion is making ChatGPT ads harder to ignore and more readily available to marketers. Foreign markets could help it build the scale and advertiser interest it needs to turn ads into a meaningful revenue driver ahead of its IPO.

OpenAI now has to go a step further; making ads widely available won’t be enough if it doesn’t address advertiser concerns and prove the effectiveness of its nascent offering.

• For ChatGPT to become a meaningful performance channel, OpenAI must demonstrate that it can increase clickthrough rates and drive more meaningful outcomes like conversions.
• If OpenAI continues to build out its ad infrastructure, improve its current self-service ads manager capabilities, and strike partnerships with familiar ad tech firms, it could give hesitant advertisers more confidence in its pilot.