If your Sales, Leads, Engagement or App promotion ad sets still lean on hand-picked placements, that control is going away. Meta has published a Business Help Center page, “What’s new in placement settings in Meta Ads Manager,” confirming that for those four objectives advertisers no longer choose placements manually at the ad set level. Awareness…
Google Ads is testing a new way to start a campaign. Instead of choosing a campaign type first, some advertisers now see a screen that asks “What’s your goal for this campaign?” Google AI then suggests goals and assets based on what you type. For agencies, this changes where the real work happens: the quality…
Clients are asking a new question: “Do we show up in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, and is it getting better?” A growing number of tools promise to answer it, but they measure in different ways and can give different answers for the same brand. In August 2026, IAB published a framework to bring some order…
On October 8, 2026, Meta started blocking ads from ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, on its platforms in the US and several other countries. The ban doesn’t only affect TikTok’s own marketing. It also covers third-party ads that link to TikTok. For agencies running creator, app or cross-platform campaigns, that last part is the one to…
From October 12, 2026, Google Ads began reading some advertisers’ websites, extracting discount offers and attaching them to ads automatically. The feature is on by default. In the same week, Google updated its Google Maps and Business Profile content policy to spell out what merchants can and cannot post. If you manage local businesses, these…
At Advertising Week New York on October 5, 2026, TikTok announced a group of AI products under a new banner it calls Agentic Commerce. Two are aimed at shoppers (Buy Direct and Shopping Assistant), one is aimed at lead generation (Agentic Leads, delivered through Lead Agent), and there are updates to its automated ad products,…
Media targeting has been heavily automated. Creative is still where most of the judgement calls happen, and where opinions often outweigh data. A study published on September 30, 2026 by Kroger, Vidmob and MMA Global tests whether that can change: can a model trained on a brand’s own creative data predict which ads will convert…
Most performance teams already use AI to make ad creative. The slow part has been everything around it: publishing variants to each platform, pulling the results back, working out which hooks won, and briefing the next round. On September 30, 2026, AI video company Runway launched a product aimed squarely at that loop. Here is…
At unBoxed 2026, Amazon renamed and reorganised its advertising platform around AI. The unified platform is now called Amazon Ads Agent. Two products sit at the centre of the announcement: Full-Funnel Campaigns, which put sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV into one campaign, and DVA+, a simpler way to buy display, video and audio…
Vertical video has been bought in silos for years: YouTube Shorts in one place, TikTok and Reels in another, and open-web or streaming-app portrait inventory somewhere else again. Each silo has its own frequency cap, its own reporting rules and its own idea of what counts as a view. On September 28, 2026 Google announced…