Mortgage Solutions Financial is buying ChatGPT ads to educate borrowers before it tries to qualify them. CMO Dawn Dawson’s organic search traffic had begun to slip, and the lead-gen engines she relied on were showing diminishing returns. A mortgage application also forces people to disclose missed payments and credit problems, and many prospects aren’t ready for that while they are still wondering whether they can buy a home at all. That gap between early curiosity and hard qualification, Dawson said, produces unproductive calls, frustrated sales teams and wasted media spend. “We are a very intrusive purchase, so I want people to be able to talk through their situation before they ever have to face a salesperson,” she said.
ChatGPT serves ads to free and lower-tier users as an image, short copy and a call to action placed directly under the answer, targetable by location, first-party audiences or the type of conversation. When someone asks about home loans or a specific program, a Mortgage Solutions Financial ad can appear with content built to explain options rather than rush an application. The lender offers more than 1,100 loan programs, from VA and FHA to USDA and down-payment assistance, and the targeting aims at the language uncertain people use rather than at broad keywords. As users add context to their prompts, the team narrows who sees which offer, and sales inherits conversations further along in intent. At HubSpot’s Unbound conference in September, where Dawson presented her early results, OpenAI’s Lorry Destainville said more than half of ChatGPT’s billion weekly users lean on AI platforms to navigate major decisions, citing internal research across 15 countries.
Dawson is also testing sponsored agents, a format announced at the same conference: brand-built agents inside the platform, trained on company data, that answer category questions and hand outcomes such as a new lead into tools like HubSpot. An ad can lead into one that checks eligibility or books time with a human. Impressions and clicks ramped quickly, but the more important learning has been qualitative. “We are seeing what customers actually need in their own words, and some of it is different than what we expected,” Dawson said. Because the OpenAI integration feeds HubSpot, her team can trace those conversations into leads and opportunities, the reporting she needs when a CFO asks whether AI advertising belongs in the channel mix.
Read more at Chief Marketer.