WPP and Omnicom are OpenAI's first agency partners for the India launch, running campaigns for large advertisers alongside the self-serve Ads Manager that opens to businesses of any size on September 4. For most mid-size Indian B2B companies, the practical question isn't whether agency management is theoretically better — it usually is, on a mature channel — but whether it's the right choice for a channel this new, where even the large agencies are still learning the platform themselves.
Access to whatever early platform insight WPP and Omnicom accumulate as launch partners, existing creative and media-buying infrastructure that can be pointed at a new channel quickly, and the ability to run this as one line item within a broader integrated campaign rather than a standalone experiment. For large B2B enterprises already running significant budgets through one of these agencies, adding ChatGPT Ads to an existing scope of work is often the path of least friction.
Direct, fast access starting September 4 without waiting on an agency's own onboarding timeline to the new platform, full control over a genuinely low-budget test (the ₹725 daily floor is well below most agency minimum retainers), and direct, unfiltered access to your own campaign data during a period when everyone — agencies included — is still building a real understanding of what works. For a mid-size or smaller B2B company, self-serve is very likely the more sensible starting point specifically because the channel is this new.
Whoever manages your first campaigns will define your baseline understanding of the channel — what a good cost per lead looks like for your category, which ad formats and copy patterns work, and how the channel compares to your existing mix. Getting genuine, hands-on visibility into that baseline, whether through self-serve testing or close agency collaboration, matters more in these first months than it will once the channel matures and playbooks become widely available.
A middle path many Indian B2B teams are likely to land on: run the first month self-serve to build first-hand intuition and clean baseline data, then decide whether to keep managing it in-house or hand it to an agency partner once you know what a good result actually looks like for your specific product and buyer.