Perplexity Is Pitching Companies on Advertising Opportunities ⇥ digiday.com

Cristina Criddle, Financial Times:

At present, Perplexity’s AI chatbot gives a comprehensive response to user questions based on information from the internet, citing sources and including links to web pages. Below this, Perplexity offers suggested follow-up queries.

Under its new advertising model, brands will be able to bid for a “sponsored” question, which features an AI-generated answer approved by the advertiser.

Perplexity has held talks with a small number of top companies, including Nike and Marriott, according to correspondence seen by the Financial Times. The company said it hoped to roll out the ads system by the end of the year and was targeting “premium” brands. Nike and Marriott declined to comment.

I will try to withhold judgement about this, but I am confused by the premise of a “‘sponsored’ question”. In a sense, the current search engine advertising model creates sponsored answers to queries. My assumption is that this is like if you ask Perplexity about — to pick an example off its homepage — the “top cookbooks in 2024”, and then its “Related” questions include an ad purchased by, say, Masterclass. Or a website owner could buy an ad which runs below their articles scraped without permission — that kind of thing.

Perhaps I will find more clues in this month-old Digiday article written by Marty Swant, who obtained Perplexity’s pitch to advertisers:

One example in the pitch deck shows a Nike ad sponsoring a related question when a user asked about basketball shoes or options for sponsored videos alongside a desktop version. Another shows a sponsored Marriott Bonvoy video ad next to someone asking about “best European travel destinations for families.” Another option is to have “branded explanatory text” that appears above sponsored and organic related questions.

That is a funny coincidence; those are the two companies in Criddle’s report. Swant’s story has a lot more details. Unfortunately, it lacks on-the-record comments from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, which Criddle’s does, almost as though the Times article is part of a campaign or something, one could reasonably speculate.

What is notable is the lack of any credit whatsoever in Criddle’s story to Swant for accurately describing Perplexity’s advertising strategy. Shameful.