AGL-Hakuhodo (AdGlobal360), the Gurugram-based growth-engineering company and member of Hakuhodo International, is taking an early position in conversational advertising. The agency has integrated ChatGPT Ads into its paid media strategy and will run pilot campaigns across five sectors: automotive, education, real estate, CPG and BFSI.
The move is framed as an expansion of Generative Engine Marketing, or GEM, a discipline built for discovery that happens inside AI chat interfaces rather than a traditional search box.
From keyword matching to conversational intent
AGL-Hakuhodo plans to use OpenAI’s Ads Manager to structure campaigns around user context and prompts, not just keyword match. A car buyer asking ChatGPT to compare options could encounter a brand while they are still narrowing choices, rather than after they have typed a dealer query into a search engine.
The agency will start with a portion of experimental media budgets and says it will scale spending only as inventory availability and conversion benchmarks justify it. Paid placements remain separate from ChatGPT’s organic answers, and the agency noted that advertisers do not get access to individual conversations or personal data.
Measurement beyond the click
The more ambitious part is attribution. AGL-Hakuhodo plans to connect OpenAI’s Pixel and Conversions API to clients’ first-party systems, including GA4 and marketing mix modelling. The goal is a full-funnel view: incrementality, blended ROAS and an honest read on whether ChatGPT Ads adds value or just moves credit.
“We see conversational advertising as a discipline to build from the ground up,” said Rakesh Yadav, Founder & CEO at AGL-Hakuhodo. He added that the agency aims to “set the benchmark for Generative Engine Marketing in India.”
The agency frames the move within Hakuhodo’s Sei-Katsu-Sha philosophy of treating consumers as whole individuals, a useful contrast to keyword-era targeting.
What marketers can take from this early test
AGL-Hakuhodo says it will build proprietary Intent Frameworks and prompt-mapping methodologies to connect conversational intent with relevant landing experiences. In practice, that suggests a few starting points for any team testing ChatGPT Ads:
- Run a controlled pilot with a fixed experimental budget before shifting committed search spend.
- Map real customer prompts to intent themes, then build landing experiences that answer those questions directly.
- Connect ad signals to first-party data early, so incrementality is visible from day one.
- Keep paid placements clearly separate from organic AI responses in reporting and client communication.
For Indian marketers, the announcement is a useful signal of where agency thinking is heading: answer engines are becoming advertising surfaces, and the first movers are building measurement around them rather than waiting for the platforms to standardise.
Source: MediaNews4U
