South Africa, Oct. 30 -- ChatGPT ads went live for South African users this week. TDMC (The Digital Media Collective) media director Caleb Shepard looks at what this means for local brands and warns that most will waste their first rand on them. He shares three key insights for local e-commerce businesses as the shopfront moves inside the chatbot.

Since 21 October this year, South African businesses have been able to buy ads inside ChatGPT through OpenAI's self-serve Ads Manager, and South Africans on the free and Go plans have started seeing them. According to OpenAI, its platform now reaches more than 1.2 billion people a week across 89 countries, with over 100,000 advertisers having run campaigns. And in August, Open AI said ChatGPT h...