LiveRamp today said it has become a technology partner of ChatGPT Ads, allowing marketers to turn first-party data matched through its RampID identifier into Custom Audiences inside OpenAI's advertising platform. The connection covers 11 markets. OpenAI's own help centre lists 63 countries where its ads can be bought.

In Short

LiveRamp, a company that helps businesses recognise their own customers across different websites and apps, has plugged its system into the ads that appear inside ChatGPT. That means a business holding details of its own customers can now use LiveRamp to show ChatGPT ads to those people, or to keep ads away from them, in 11 countries. The route makes those audiences easier to build for LiveRamp clients, but it does not yet cover most of the countries where ChatGPT ads run, and no performance results have been published.

What LiveRamp put on the record

The announcement took the form of a post on LiveRamp's marketing blog, published today under the byline of Travis Clinger, the company's chief connectivity and ecosystem officer. It is short: five paragraphs, one customer quote and no figures on performance, pricing or match rates.

The core claim fits in a single sentence. LiveRamp "is now a technology partner of ChatGPT Ads," according to the post, and marketers can use RampID, the company's own identifier, to activate first-party audiences on OpenAI's platform. The data that can be routed this way is described broadly. According to LiveRamp, marketers can use CRM, loyalty, behavioural, web, app or other first-party data, and the resulting audiences can serve four purposes: sharper targeting, reach, suppression of people an advertiser wants to keep out of a campaign, and measurement and optimisation.

LiveRamp describes RampID as "the most durable identifier for connecting data in the ecosystem." The post offers no comparative data behind that description, which is the vendor's characterisation of its own product.

Geography is where the announcement is most precise and least complete. "This integration is now available in 11 major markets and over time will be expanded to every market where ChatGPT Ads are available," according to LiveRamp. The post does not name the 11 markets, give a date for further expansion, or include any statement from OpenAI.

One inconsistency sits inside the text itself. The headline and the first reference use OpenAI's product name, Custom Audiences. A later sentence says marketers can activate first-party data "as Customer Audiences on ChatGPT." OpenAI's feature is called Custom Audiences, and nothing in the post suggests a separate product; the second wording appears to be an error rather than a distinction.

How a customer file becomes a ChatGPT audience

Two sets of rules meet in this integration, and only one of them has been published in detail.

OpenAI's side of the match

Custom audience uploads first surfaced inside ChatGPT Ads Manager in a gated rollout on May 14, 2026, spotted through screenshots rather than disclosed by OpenAI. The operating rules followed two months later. OpenAI's help centre documentation, examined by PPC Land on July 14, set out a system built on email addresses and phone numbers, submitted raw or as 64-character SHA-256 hex digests, with phone numbers in E.164 format.

The constraints were specific. An audience could not be used in a campaign until it reached 25,000 matched users, and OpenAI separately recommended working with at least 100,000. Files were capped at 500,000,000 bytes and 5,000,000 identifiers, with one identifier type per upload. Processing usually took 20 to 30 minutes, and uploaded files were deleted after processing, usually within 24 hours. Audiences could be used to include or to exclude people at campaign level, or to raise and lower bids at ad group level.

Several of those rules have since moved. A product update circulated to beta advertisers in the week beginning August 31 removed the 25,000 floor for exclusion audiences, allowed members to be added, removed or replaced without rebuilding a list, permitted mixed identifier types in a single request, lifted audiences beyond 5 million members and added Google Advertising ID as an accepted identifier. The inclusion floor stayed at 25,000.

That asymmetry is directly relevant to what LiveRamp is selling. Suppression lists of a few thousand recent purchasers or lapsed donors could not clear the old threshold in either direction; since the end of August, they can be used to exclude people regardless of size. Targeting lists still cannot fall below 25,000 matched users.

RampID's side of the match

RampID is LiveRamp's pseudonymous identifier for a person and for the household that person belongs to. Its construction runs through two graphs: Acxiom's AbiliTec, which resolves scattered offline records into a single link, and the LiveRamp Identity Graph, which maps devices to people. According to LiveRamp's documentation, incoming personal data is decrypted briefly in memory inside a segregated "translation zone", replaced with a 16-character AbiliTec link, then salted and hashed twice.

The output comes in more than one form. Maintained RampIDs, prefixed XY, run to 49 characters and are returned when a persistent record exists in the graph. Derived RampIDs, prefixed Xi, run to 70 characters and are generated algorithmically when no maintained record exists. Each value also carries a four-digit partner encoding that makes it unique to the company receiving it, so two platforms holding the same person hold different strings. Translating between those encodings requires LiveRamp's own Translation API.

This is the mechanism LiveRamp's business has been built on, and it is a form of identity resolution rather than anonymisation. The Federal Trade Commission said in July 2024 that hashing does not make data anonymous, and the treatment of RampID in particular has been contested: a February 2024 Cracked Labs report commissioned by the Open Rights Group led to complaints to UK and French regulators, and a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California in January 2025 survived most of LiveRamp's motion to dismiss in July 2025. LiveRamp disputes those characterisations and points to contractual and technical safeguards. Hashing and salting, in other words, are pseudonymisation. European data protection authorities treat pseudonymised data as personal data, although the Court of Justice of the European Union narrowed that view in September 2025 for recipients with no reasonable means of re-identifying anyone.

The key that crosses between them

Here the public record runs out. OpenAI's documented identifier list covers email addresses, phone numbers and, since late August, Google Advertising ID. RampID is not on it. LiveRamp's post does not say whether OpenAI now ingests a RampID carrying an OpenAI-specific partner encoding, or whether LiveRamp resolves its identifiers back into one of the keys OpenAI already accepts before an audience arrives in Ads Manager.

The answer determines the match rate, and the match rate determines whether a list is usable at all. At a 40% match, a 50,000-person customer file yields 20,000 addressable people. Under OpenAI's current rules that audience could be used to exclude but not to target, since it falls 5,000 short of the inclusion floor. How many ChatGPT accounts LiveRamp can recognise, in which of its 11 markets, is the number that would decide how many advertisers clear that bar. Neither company has published it.

Eleven markets out of 63

The scale gap is easier to measure. When OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Ads in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan on September 23, its Ads Manager availability page listed 63 countries, including 15 Middle Eastern, North African and Turkish markets with no published activation dates. LiveRamp's 11 amount to roughly 17% of that list.

The figure does not match any running total OpenAI has disclosed. The pilot began in the United States on February 9, 2026. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were named as the first international markets in late March, the United Kingdom on June 6, and Japan and South Korea on June 22. Brazil and Mexico took the count to nine on August 17. Thirty-one European markets followed on August 24 and India on August 29, taking the public total to 41. At no point did the running count stand at 11, so the composition of LiveRamp's list cannot be read from OpenAI's timeline.

Europe is the most obvious unknown. When OpenAI told European users on August 15 that ads were coming to the Free and Go plans, it said ads would not be personalised at the start, with selection limited to the current conversation topic, general location and device type, and personalisation deferred behind an opt-in prompt. PPC Land's reporting on the European rollout found that creative and context hints carry the whole targeting burden there, a narrower signal set than the custom audiences available to US advertisers. LiveRamp's post does not say whether any country in the European Economic Area is among its 11. Is a first-party audience integration meaningful in markets where the platform has not yet switched on personalised delivery? The announcement does not engage with the question.

A billion users, counted by the month

The post opens with a scale claim: according to LiveRamp, "1 billion people every month use ChatGPT." OpenAI counts differently. It disclosed 900 million weekly active users on February 27, 2026, and David Dugan, who leads OpenAI's global ad solutions, has since cited more than 1 billion weekly users. LiveRamp's own June announcement described a user base of almost one billion people.

A monthly figure of the same size as a weekly one is not a like-for-like number, and it understates what OpenAI itself reports. More importantly for buyers, neither measure describes the audience that can see an ad. ChatGPT advertising runs only on the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscribers are excluded. OpenAI said in January that ads would also be kept away from accounts belonging to users under 18 and from conversations near sensitive or regulated topics such as health, mental health and politics. The addressable pool behind any Custom Audience is therefore a fraction of the headline, and the fraction has not been published.

One nonprofit and no numbers

The only named user is an agency. Allegiance Group & Pursuant (AGP) is implementing the integration on behalf of an unnamed nonprofit client, according to LiveRamp.

Megan Morris, director of integrated media solutions at AGP, framed the case around donors. "We're continually optimizing the channels we use to reach our customers, and with ChatGPT Ads becoming an increasingly popular engagement surface for donors, it's important for us to view the omnichannel impact of our ads across all of our investments," Morris said, according to the post. She added that working with LiveRamp and ChatGPT allowed the agency "to easily reach ChatGPT's considerable user base."

The statement contains no data on donor response, spend, match rates or results. LiveRamp says it expects "to share results from our work with other innovative marketers, soon." Until those figures appear, the integration's value rests on the vendor's description and a single client's endorsement. Whether cause-related campaigns sit comfortably alongside OpenAI's exclusion of conversations near politics is not addressed by either company.

The second LiveRamp connection in four months

This is not LiveRamp's first route into ChatGPT. On June 10, 2026 the company connected its Conversions API Hub to ChatGPT ads, giving advertisers a server-to-server path for sending conversion events from their own systems to OpenAI, with RampID handling the pseudonymisation in transit. At the time, ChatGPT advertising was live in five countries.

Today's addition runs in the opposite direction. The June connection moved outcomes out of campaigns and back to the platform; the new one moves audiences into campaigns before they run. LiveRamp's argument is that the same identifier at both ends allows marketers to "measure the impact of their investments across their portfolio, and make timely adjustments," according to the post.

The partner roster around OpenAI has lengthened quickly. Criteo, Kargo, Adobe, Pacvue and StackAdapt were named technology partners by early May. AppsFlyer and Adjust added app attribution in seven markets in July. Triple Whale and Hightouch appeared in an August advertiser email as conversion and measurement integrations. On September 10, Amazon Ads opened a US-only pilot extending Amazon DSP campaigns into ChatGPT, and HubSpot and Shopify integrations followed on September 16.

The legal groundwork was laid earlier. OpenAI's US privacy policy, updated on April 30, 2026, disclosed for the first time that the company receives purchase data from advertisers and shares user information with marketing partners for third-party targeting. An audience integration from an identity vendor would appear to sit within that disclosure.

An identity layer changing hands

The timing adds a complication that the post does not mention. LiveRamp is being sold. Publicis Groupe agreed on May 17, 2026 to acquire the company for $38.50 per share in cash, an equity value of $2.5 billion and an enterprise value of $2.167 billion. LiveRamp shareholders approved the deal on August 17 by 51.6 million shares to 60,073, while rejecting executives' merger-related pay by 44.3 million votes to 7.3 million. Regulatory clearance is the remaining condition, with closing expected before the end of 2026.

That matters because of who else sells ChatGPT inventory. OpenAI's September 23 newsroom post named five agency groups as partners: dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP. Once the transaction closes, the identity layer through which any of them might push client audiences into ChatGPT will belong to one of the five. Publicis has committed in writing that LiveRamp will remain neutral and interoperable, that no customer will be refused access and that pricing will not change outside the normal course of business. LiveRamp's SEC filing states that RampID and Epsilon's CoreID will continue to operate separately.

Not every rival has waited to test those commitments. Omnicom had planned to leave LiveRamp when its contract expired in the first quarter of 2028 and brought that exit forward after the Publicis deal, with chief executive John Wren pointing to Acxiom's in-house Real ID as the substitute.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Targeting uploaded files of known people is among the oldest tools in platform advertising. Meta introduced Custom Audiences in 2012; Google followed with Customer Match on September 28, 2015, eleven years to the day before LiveRamp's post. ChatGPT reached the same capability in May 2026 through manual file uploads, and it now has an onboarding vendor. For agencies that already run RampID through demand-side platforms, Amazon Marketing Cloud and programmatic audio, ChatGPT becomes one more destination keyed to the same identifier. That consistency is the practical gain: suppression lists, CRM segments and conversion signals can be managed through the same pipes that feed other channels rather than exported and hashed separately for OpenAI.

Against that sit the limits described above: an unnamed market list, a 25,000-user inclusion floor, contextual-only delivery in Europe and no published match rates. The commercial scale behind the channel is real enough: ChatGPT advertising passed a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days, according to reporting at the end of August. But no independent measure of what first-party audiences do inside a conversational ad unit exists yet, and the first results LiveRamp has promised will come from the vendor itself.

When the pilot opened in February, ChatGPT had no conversion measurement and no audience targeting. It now has both, plus an identity partner whose ownership is expected to change before the year is out. The open question for buyers is less whether the plumbing works than who will own it by the time the other 52 countries are connected.

Timeline

Summary

Who: LiveRamp, the San Francisco data collaboration company whose pending acquisition by Publicis Groupe awaits regulatory clearance, and OpenAI, operator of ChatGPT Ads. Allegiance Group & Pursuant (AGP) is implementing the integration for an unnamed nonprofit client, with Megan Morris, AGP's director of integrated media solutions, quoted in LiveRamp's post by Travis Clinger.

What: LiveRamp became a technology partner of ChatGPT Ads, allowing marketers to activate first-party CRM, loyalty, behavioural, web and app data matched through RampID as Custom Audiences for targeting, suppression and measurement. The post does not state which identifier crosses into OpenAI's systems, which markets are covered, or any match rates or results.

When: Today, three and a half months after LiveRamp connected its Conversions API Hub to ChatGPT ads on June 10.

Where: 11 markets that LiveRamp has not named, out of 63 countries on OpenAI's Ads Manager availability list, with expansion promised to every market where ChatGPT Ads operate. European delivery has so far been limited to non-personalised, contextual selection.

Why: OpenAI has assembled audience uploads, conversion measurement and a growing partner roster in seven months, and identity vendors are competing to become the pipe through which advertisers move customer data into it. For LiveRamp, the integration extends RampID to one more destination ahead of its change of ownership; for buyers, it offers a single identifier across ChatGPT and other channels, subject to OpenAI's 25,000-user inclusion floor and to match rates neither company has disclosed.