Buyology

The real bottleneck in scaling creators

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:58:46 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔓 The scaling problem hiding in every creator rights negotiation

🛒 ChatGPT shopping is becoming a new battleground for advertisers

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

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🔓 The scaling problem hiding in every creator rights negotiation

Difficulty securing usage rights or content permissions is one of the top barriers to scaling creator content, cited by 54% of paid media managers and marketing executives. That’s a striking number for a problem that sounds purely administrative.

It means the thing actually capping how fast a program can scale, for more than half the teams running one, isn’t creator supply or content quality. It’s the friction of negotiating rights one relationship at a time.

The default structure most programs run makes this worse than it needs to be. Rights get negotiated narrowly at the start of each relationship, whatever’s needed for the immediate campaign, and every time the brand wants to expand usage, a new platform, a longer window, paid placement that wasn’t originally scoped, that’s a fresh negotiation with a creator who now has more leverage.

Default to broader rights upfront instead of narrow rights renegotiated later

A narrow initial grant feels cheaper in the moment and gets expensive the first time content performs well enough to justify wider use, since that’s exactly when a creator has the most leverage to charge more for expanding it.

Build your standard offer around a broader default package, organic and paid, a defined multi-month window, whitelisting included, priced accordingly from the start.

Paying slightly more upfront for room to actually use strong content is usually cheaper than paying a premium to renegotiate mid-campaign once a piece is already proving itself.

Separate your rights template from your one-off exceptions

A rights negotiation that starts from a blank document every time is slower than one that starts from a standard template and only negotiates genuine exceptions.

Build a default rights package that covers the large majority of your program’s actual use cases, and reserve individual negotiation for the real edge cases, exclusive category requests, unusually long windows, rather than treating every creator relationship as a negotiation built from scratch.

This is exactly the kind of program structure Insense supports at the roster scale ecommerce brands past $2M need.

Track rights friction as a scaling metric, not just a legal one

If 54% of teams cite this as a genuine barrier to scaling, it’s worth measuring directly rather than only noticing it anecdotally when a specific deal drags.

Track average time-to-signed-rights-agreement across your roster and watch for it trending upward as the program grows, since that trend is an early signal of a scaling bottleneck before it becomes a visible one.

The bottleneck on scaling creator content usually isn’t finding more creators. It’s how long it takes to agree on what you’re actually allowed to do with what they make. You can book a free strategy call and get $200 towards your first campaign

Together with Omnisend

They Switched Platforms Before BFCM and Made $113K

For ecommerce teams watching software costs climb, switching sounds sensible until migration enters the conversation. Nobody wants the move disrupting revenue.

Ecom2Win faced that decision weeks before BFCM, when nearly one in six brands earns at least 30% of its annual orders. The agency moved its client to Omnisend anyway.

The outcome answered the biggest concerns:

Migration was completed in 24 hours, with every automation rebuilt and checked within four days.
Email generated $113,000 and accounted for 53% of the store’s total revenue during BFCM.
Omnisend plans can cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo, helping brands keep more of the revenue they generate.

More than 150,000 ecommerce brands use Omnisend, with customers generating an average of $79 for every $1 spent. Migration is free and can be completed within five business days.

Jocelyn breaks down how they moved without sacrificing peak-season revenue and why Omnisend was worth choosing before BFCM.

Try Omnisend for free

🛒 ChatGPT shopping is becoming a new battleground for advertisers

Three changes are reshaping how brands appear across AI shopping and search: Amazon DSP ads are entering ChatGPT, product feeds are driving more ChatGPT Shopping recommendations, and Cloudflare is changing how AI bot blocking works from September 15.

The Breakdown:

Product feeds now heavily influence ChatGPT Shopping - Feed-sourced recommendations reportedly jumped from 8.26% to 61.54% after July 10. Among 687 tracked merchants, 450 lost visibility while only 67 gained.

Amazon DSP ads arrive inside ChatGPT - Advertisers can now buy conversational ChatGPT ads through Amazon DSP, combining Amazon’s shopping data with lower DSP fees, although OpenAI’s measurement remains limited.

Cloudflare’s new bot rules could affect search indexing - Starting September 15, bots such as Googlebot, Bingbot, and Applebot will be classified according to their strictest identified use, potentially grouping traditional search crawlers with AI-related activity.

Blocking AI bots could unintentionally block search crawlers - A broad “block AI bots” setting could therefore interfere with indexing. Brands using Cloudflare need to review crawler settings rather than assuming AI blocking only affects model-training bots.

AI visibility is becoming an infrastructure issue as much as a marketing one. Brands now need to think about where they buy ads, whether their product feeds are accessible to AI shopping systems, and whether bot-blocking settings accidentally remove them from search and discovery.

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The cleanest ROI signal you're not using

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:58:45 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🎯 The cleanest ROI signal in influencer marketing is sitting in your best organic post

👻 Snapchat is bringing shopping and real-world plans deeper into chat

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🎯 The cleanest ROI signal in influencer marketing is sitting in your best organic post

Partnership Ads, running a creator’s top-performing organic post as a paid ad through their own handle rather than rebuilding it as brand-account creative, delivers what’s widely regarded as the most direct ROI signal available in influencer marketing today.

The mechanism is simple: take content that’s already proven itself organically, put media spend behind it in the exact form that already worked, and get a clean, direct cost-per-result number back, without a brand-new creative variable entering alongside the spend.

That cleanliness is the whole point. Most influencer ROI measurement gets complicated by too many variables changing at once, new creative, new audience, new timing, all shifting simultaneously, which makes it genuinely hard to isolate what’s actually driving a result.

Partnership Ads strip out most of that noise, since the creative and audience fit are already validated by organic performance. What’s left is close to a pure signal on whether spend behind proven content converts.

Identify your actual top-performing organic content before deciding what to put spend behind

The whole value of this approach depends on starting from content that’s genuinely proven, not just recently posted or personally favored by whoever’s making the call.

Pull your organic creator content from the last quarter and rank it by actual engagement and completion performance, not recency or gut feel.

The handful of posts at the top of that list are the specific candidates worth testing as Partnership Ads, since they already cleared the bar organic performance is meant to set.

Run the comparison against rebuilt brand-account creative directly

The value of running content through the creator’s own handle instead of rebuilding it as brand creative isn’t obvious until it’s tested directly against the alternative most programs default to without thinking about it.

Test the same underlying content both ways, once as a Partnership Ad through the creator’s handle and once rebuilt as standard brand-account creative, and compare cost-per-result. The gap, if there is one, is real evidence for how much the creator’s identity is doing work a brand account can’t replicate.

Build this into your standard measurement toolkit, not a one-off test

A clean ROI signal this direct is worth running repeatedly across a roster, not treating as a single experiment run once and set aside.

The specific frameworks for building this kind of measurement into an ongoing program, with real campaign examples from teams running it at scale, are what Return on Influence Festival ‘26, powered by Modash, covers October 21, with Leah Walker from Adobe and Tyler Vaught from Edelman. You can join free on October 21st, and catch the recordings within 24 hours if you can’t make every session live.

The cleanest ROI answer in this channel isn’t hiding in a complicated new attribution model. It’s sitting in the post that already worked, waiting for someone to put real spend behind it the right way.

Together with Zenty

Your Store Is Quietly Losing Revenue Right Now

Sending paid traffic to product pages with hidden errors makes every campaign work harder than it should.

Zenyt checks your live store continuously, catching errors your team cannot manually find across thousands of SKUs. Every finding includes visual proof and is ranked by revenue impact, helping your team fix the most expensive problems first.

Instead of reviewing pages one by one, your team gets a prioritized list of fixes backed by screenshots.

Setup takes only your store URL. No code or platform migration.

shortyLOVE cut manual store checks by 95% and lifted conversion by 35%.
London Victorian Ring reduced manual store-checking time by 90%.
Brooklinen uncovered more than $250K in annual opportunity through checks after weekly releases.

That means campaigns land on accurate pages and more paid traffic turns into revenue.

Peak-season updates are moving fast. See what is costing your store before shoppers find it.

Get your free store analysis

👻 Snapchat is bringing shopping and real-world plans deeper into chat

Snapchat is expanding what happens inside its most-used surface, adding Dynamic Product Ads to Sponsored Snaps alongside a new Plans feature for organizing real-world events directly from conversations.

The Breakdown:

Shopping ads move directly into Snap DMs - Dynamic Product Ads can now appear as Sponsored Snaps inside Chat, where Snapchat says 85% of users regularly spend time.

Snapchat is optimizing ads around purchases - Value Optimization is entering beta, while third-party web and Omnichannel optimization tests aim to direct shoppers toward whichever web or app destination is most likely to convert.

Users can create events without leaving conversations - Plans lets Snapchatters set a title, date and time, invite up to 200 friends and collect Going, Maybe or Can’t Go responses directly through individual chats.

Snapchat wants to turn online conversations into meet-ups - Events appear under a new My Plans section and trigger reminders one hour before starting. Snapchat says 35% of U.S. users aged 13 to 24 already use Chat to organize plans.

Snapchat is building more utility around conversations instead of pushing everything into a feed. The same Chat surface can now influence purchases and organize real-world events, reinforcing Snap’s strategy of making private interactions more useful for both commerce and social connection.

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Your catalog is now your ad creative

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:58:44 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🛍️ Your product catalog is now your ad creative

📊 Google and Microsoft are taking more control over ad campaigns

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🛍️ Your product catalog is now your ad creative

Shoppable in-feed ads on TikTok pull directly from a brand’s TikTok Shop catalog rather than from a separately built creative asset, letting users complete a purchase without leaving the feed.

That’s a real convenience for the shopper and a structural shift for whoever manages the ad account, because a catalog field that used to only affect the product page now directly determines what an ad shows.

Most teams still treat catalog management and ad creative as two separate jobs handled by two different people on different timelines. A thin product title or a low-resolution image was a product-page problem before.

On a shoppable in-feed format, that same thin title or image is now the ad creative itself, live in the feed, with no separate creative review step catching it before it runs.

Audit your catalog the way you’d audit ad creative, not the way you’d audit a product page

A product page can tolerate an imperfect title because a shopper who’s already clicked through is forgiving of small gaps. An ad competing for a scroll in a crowded feed cannot, since the catalog data has to do the entire job of stopping a thumb that creative used to handle separately.

Pull your highest-volume SKUs and review title, primary image, and price display the way you’d review a creative asset before launch: does it work as a scroll-stopper, not just as an accurate description.

A catalog entry that reads fine on a product page can be a genuinely weak ad once it’s pulled into a shoppable format.

Assign catalog quality to whoever owns creative performance, not just whoever owns product data

If catalog upkeep sits entirely with a merchandising or ops team disconnected from whoever reviews ad performance, the person best positioned to notice a weak-performing shoppable ad has no path to actually fix the catalog entry causing it.

Build a direct line between ad performance review and catalog editing, even if that just means the person running paid media has direct edit access or a fast escalation path, rather than a request queue that treats a creative fix like a routine data update.

Prioritize catalog fixes by ad spend exposure, not by catalog size

A catalog with thousands of SKUs doesn’t need every entry perfected before shoppable ads work well. It needs the SKUs actually running in paid placements to be genuinely ad-ready. You can get started with TikTok for Business to see how shoppable formats pull from your existing catalog once it’s set up.

Cross-reference your shoppable ad spend against catalog completeness for those specific SKUs first, rather than running a catalog-wide cleanup that spends equal effort on products with no paid exposure at all.

The catalog used to be backend infrastructure. On a shoppable feed, it’s the thing actually competing for attention.

Together with Levanta

Your Best Holiday Creators Are Choosing Brands Now

Holiday performance is often decided before the promotion goes live. Creators commit to brands offering attractive economics and strong audience fit, so delayed outreach leaves your team competing for whatever attention remains.

Levanta built The 90-Day Holiday Sprint to turn that shrinking window into measurable momentum. Inside, you’ll learn how to:

Set commissions around customer lifetime value, protecting margin while attracting stronger partners.
Recruit with proven products that give creators better conversion potential.
Use 30, 60, and 90-day checkpoints to identify winning relationships before seasonal budgets rise.

A 90-day runway gives you time to see which creators convert before holiday budgets climb. That evidence makes every commission increase easier to defend.

Don’t wait until November to build the creator program you will wish you already had. Your 90-day countdown starts now.

Download the Free Playbook

📊 Google and Microsoft are taking more control over ad campaigns

Microsoft is removing a key bidding control, while Google is automatically moving eligible Search campaigns into AI Max and bringing Gemini into reporting. At the same time, changing Shopping metrics and Meridian GeoX are making independent measurement more important.

The Breakdown:

Shopping CTR rises while impressions fall - Shopping CTR is up 17% to 20% YoY despite flat clicks and declining impressions, suggesting Google is concentrating ads across fewer, higher-intent queries.

Microsoft removes Max CPC limits - From October 1, new campaigns using Maximize Conversions, Conversion Value, Clicks, tCPA or tROAS cannot set Max CPC. Existing limits remain, but once removed, they cannot be restored.

Google automatically upgrades campaigns to AI Max - Search campaigns using campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets will be upgraded to AI Max unless advertisers switch those features off.

Gemini moves into Google Ads reporting - AI Dashboards can turn text prompts into performance charts and provide live summaries explaining what changed, giving advertisers a faster way to investigate campaign performance.

Platforms are taking more optimization decisions out of advertisers’ hands, making independent measurement increasingly valuable. Google’s free Meridian GeoX library provides one counterweight, allowing marketers to run cross-platform geo experiments, measure incrementality and calibrate marketing mix models.

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The budget line top teams ask for

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:58:37 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📊 The budget line top-quartile teams ask for and nobody else does

📍 Google is connecting ads more closely to local intent

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Zenty

You don’t have a catalog problem. You have a coverage problem.

Right now, somewhere on your store, a photo shows pockets while the description says none.

A midi dress is labeled full length. A price reads one thing on the page and another in the cart. Across thousands of SKUs and variants, no team can browse every page before customers do.

Zenyt’s AI shopper agents review your entire store the way a customer would, checking every title, spec, image, and price against your source of truth, continuously. Then they rank what is costing you the most first.

New York & Company identified 500+ findings before BFCM and uncovered $100K–$300K in potential revenue.
Caudalie generated €700K in incremental revenue within 12 weeks.
LG protected $900K in EBITDA and saved 2,100 working hours.

Your catalog changes every day between now and Black Friday. Get your free store analysis before peak traffic finds the gaps first.

Get your free store analysis

📊 The budget line top-quartile teams ask for and nobody else does

Marketing teams that consistently rank in the top quartile for ROI share a specific habit that rarely shows up in how everyone else builds a budget: they reserve roughly 18% of total spend for mid-year reallocation.

Bottom-quartile teams reserve about 3%. That gap isn’t a rounding difference in planning discipline. It’s the difference between a budget that can respond to what actually happens this year and one that’s locked into assumptions made before the year started.

Most annual budget asks are built as a fixed allocation: this much to paid, this much to content, this much to headcount, approved once and defended for twelve months.

That structure looks disciplined in the planning meeting and becomes a liability the first time a channel underperforms or a new opportunity appears mid-year, because there’s no funded mechanism to move money without reopening the entire approval process.

Build the reserve into the ask itself, not as an afterthought

A budget request that only lists fixed line items gives finance nothing to say yes to except the full fixed number. A request that explicitly carves out a reallocation reserve, framed as a specific, defensible percentage rather than a vague contingency, gives finance a controlled mechanism instead of an open-ended one.

Propose the reserve at somewhere between 10 and 18% of total budget, scaled to how volatile your specific channel mix has been over the last two years.

A team running mostly stable, proven channels needs less flexibility than one still testing new ones. This is exactly the kind of operating discipline Krithika Shankarraman and AirOps CMO Christy Roach unpack on September 17.

Define the reallocation trigger before you need it

A reserve with no rules attached is just an argument waiting to happen the first time someone wants to move it.

Write the trigger conditions in advance: what performance threshold on an existing channel releases reserve funds toward it, and what evidence is required to fund a new opportunity instead.

Having that framework agreed before the year starts turns a mid-year budget conversation from a negotiation into an execution of something already approved.

Report reserve usage as a discipline metric, not a spending line

A reserve that gets treated like slush fund money undermines the case for having one next year. A reserve tracked and reported against its own trigger rules builds the track record that makes the next ask easier.

A fixed budget defended for twelve months isn’t more disciplined than a flexible one. It’s just less honest about how much actually changes in a year. You can reserve your free spot here to hear more from a survey of 300+ marketing leaders navigating this exact tension.

📍 Google is connecting ads more closely to local intent

Google is expanding where local ads can appear, testing more traditional Search campaigns inside AI Mode, and making it easier for physical businesses to connect online advertising with what happens inside stores.

The Breakdown:

Waze Ads expand to 42 countries: Advertisers can now reach drivers across markets including Canada, Australia, the UK, and all 27 EU countries through Performance Max campaigns optimized for store visits, sales, or directions.

Exact and phrase match enter AI Mode: Google is testing regular Search campaigns inside AI Mode, allowing exact and phrase match keywords to trigger text ads when users demonstrate explicit, direct intent.

Google prioritizes nearby customers: A new Local Customer Optimization toggle lets Performance Max shift budget toward in-market consumers nearby, using intent signals across Google Maps, Waze and local Search.

Offline sales become easier to measure: Store Sales in Data Manager will let advertisers connect CRM or Google Sheets data directly, helping Google Ads measure physical purchases and optimize campaigns toward higher-potential walk-in customers.

Google is bringing its ad ecosystem closer to the full customer journey. AI Mode captures high-intent searches, Maps and Waze reach people near physical locations, while easier store-sales reporting helps connect those digital interactions to actual offline revenue.

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Fake content is getting easier to spot

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:58:43 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔏 As AI content gets easier to spot, what’s left becomes worth more

🔎 OpenAI is building more of search for itself

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🔏 As AI content gets easier to spot, what’s left becomes worth more

Watermarking and detection technology for AI-generated content is tightening across the industry, with distribution controls increasingly able to flag synthetic content at the point of publishing rather than relying on a reader to guess.

That’s usually framed as a compliance story, one more thing to disclose, one more label to apply. It’s also a market story: as detection gets more reliable, the content that clearly wasn’t AI-generated becomes a distinguishable, verifiable category of its own for the first time, rather than an assumption nobody could confirm either way.

A market where anyone can plausibly claim their content is authentic is one where the claim is worth very little.

A market where authenticity can actually be verified is one where it becomes a real signal, both to a human reader deciding what to trust and increasingly to the AI systems that weigh source credibility when deciding what to cite.

Audit which of your existing content can actually be verified as human-made

Most teams can’t currently answer, with any confidence, what percentage of their published content involved generative tools somewhere in production, since the line between human-written and AI-assisted has blurred inside normal editing workflows for a while now.

Pull your highest-value published content and trace its actual production path: fully human, human with AI-assisted editing, or generated outright.

This isn’t a compliance exercise. It’s an inventory of which assets could credibly carry a verified-authentic label once the market starts rewarding one.

Build provenance tracking into new content from here forward

Reconstructing production history for content already published is difficult once the people who made it have moved on or forgotten the details. Capturing it going forward costs almost nothing.

Add a single field to your content workflow at creation time: human-authored, AI-assisted, or AI-generated, with enough detail to stand behind the label later.

That record is the raw material for whatever verification standard the market settles on next, and it’s the kind of provenance Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tracks alongside how your brand is cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.

Treat verified authenticity as a citation signal, not just a trust signal

As detection tools make synthetic content easier to flag, AI systems weighing which sources to trust and cite have a new input available that didn’t reliably exist before: whether a source’s content is independently verifiable as human-made.

Authenticity used to be a claim anyone could make. It’s becoming something you can actually prove, and proof is worth more than a claim. You can try it free for 7 days.

Together with AirOps

How Stripe and OpenAI Built Marketing From Scratch

Higher growth targets are landing on teams that already feel stretched. Without sharper priorities and reporting, every new request creates pressure without improving performance.

On September 17 join AirOps CMO Christy Roach and Krithika Shankarraman to show how faster-growing marketing teams operate, using findings from 300+ marketing leaders.

You’ll learn how to:

Prioritize your biggest growth constraints without letting reactive work take over
Report performance clearly and build leadership confidence in channels like AI Search
Align with the wider business so promising marketing investments move faster

Krithika was the first marketing hire at Stripe and OpenAI. Christy’s experience spans AirOps, AssemblyAI, Airtable, Asana, and Gusto.

You’ll walk away with operating principles you can immediately use to tighten priorities and make clearer investment decisions.

Reserve your free spot

🔎 OpenAI is building more of search for itself

OpenAI appears to be reducing its dependence on traditional search engines just as ChatGPT becomes a bigger destination for finding information. The bigger shift is what happens to the websites supplying those answers.

The Breakdown:

OpenAI is testing its own search index: Researchers found an experiment named “prefer-index-over-serp-v3,” suggesting OpenAI is comparing results from its own index against third-party search engine results.

The search infrastructure is getting broader: Separate indexes were identified for news, shopping, PDFs, YouTube, and academic papers, alongside a reported experiment involving crawling as many as one billion webpages.

ChatGPT is becoming a major destination: ChatGPT.com reached 1.09 billion monthly US visits, up 48% year over year and ranking ninth nationally, while Bing traffic fell 50% and DuckDuckGo declined 16%.

AI search means fewer clicks outward: Although 95% of ChatGPT users still use Google, forcing users into AI Mode reduced external click-through by 18.8 percentage points, with even steeper declines for Reddit.

OpenAI building its own index would give it more control over how information is discovered and retrieved. At the same time, AI interfaces are becoming destinations themselves, creating a growing gap between being used as a source and actually receiving the click.

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Your refresh schedule is out of date

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:59:39 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

⏱️ Your refresh schedule was built for a slower quarter

🔎 Product pages are winning more AI citations than Reddit or YouTube

👨‍💻 Quick hits

Together with Insense

Your November Creator Roster Is Already Being Booked

BFCM is an expensive time to discover a creator cannot sell your product. Late briefs and unusable assets leave your team scrambling as ad spend peaks.

Insense gives brands scaling beyond $2M a faster way to pressure-test their creator bench before peak season.

Put products in creators’ hands early, so BFCM briefs come with product knowledge and content you already trust.
Turn a $1,000 budget into up to 20 UGC ads from five creators, creating more hooks to test from every shoot.
Connect Ads Manager to Insense’s performance dashboard to see which Partnership Ads and creators drive results, then rehire the strongest performers.

Insense provides access to 115,000+ creators across 57+ countries and is trusted by over 3500 brands like Il Makiage, Quince, Huda Beauty, and Monster Energy.

Book a free strategy call by September 11 to map creator availability in your niche and receive $200 toward your first campaign.

⏱️ Your refresh schedule was built for a slower quarter

Most teams run creative refresh on something close to a flat cadence year-round: swap in new ads every few weeks, watch performance, repeat. That cadence was tuned for a normal month.

Q4 compresses the same fatigue curve into a fraction of the time, since holiday competition means more advertisers bidding into the same audience, and creative that coasted for three weeks in June burns out in five days during peak week.

The teams still running their June refresh schedule in November aren’t being lazy. They’re applying a correct process to the wrong clock.

Watch hook and hold rate, not CPA, for the early warning

Creative fatigue shows up in hook rate and hold rate five to seven days before it shows up in cost per acquisition, which means a team waiting for CPA to move is always reacting a week late.

Build a standing check on hook rate specifically, since a Meta hook rate under 15% at meaningful impression volume signals structural failure worth killing outright, not iterating on. Catching that shift a week early is the difference between refreshing a creative on your terms and discovering it’s dead after a week of wasted spend.

Set separate refresh windows for top and bottom of funnel

Applying one refresh cadence across the whole funnel treats two different fatigue curves as if they were one.

Top-of-funnel prospecting creative, facing the broadest and most competitive audience, fatigues fastest and needs refreshing roughly every five to seven days during peak Q4 weeks.

Bottom-of-funnel retargeting creative, running against a narrower and less contested audience, can typically hold ten to fourteen days before performance meaningfully degrades. Running both on the same calendar means one is either refreshed too late or replaced before it needed to be.

Build variety into the replacement, not just volume

Five new ads that are the same hook with a different background color fatigue at close to the same rate as running one ad, since the algorithm is still testing the same underlying creative idea against the same audience.

Real variation means different hooks, different formats, and different angles on the same offer, run as three to five live variations per ad set heading into BFCM, weighted toward prospecting where the fatigue curve is steepest.

Knowing where your own numbers actually land against a category-specific benchmark, rather than a flat cross-industry number that doesn’t account for how differently each vertical peaks in Q4, is exactly what Billo built its free calculator to answer, drawn from 80,069 sales-objective Meta video ads across 14 categories from Q4 2025. You can check your Q4 benchmarks and see your category’s peak month, benchmark, and fix in under a minute.

A refresh schedule tuned for June doesn’t survive November. Neither does the budget spent running it that way.

🔎 Product pages are winning more AI citations than Reddit or YouTube

New Ten Speed research analyzed 7,387 citations from 170 B2B evaluation-stage prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, examining what AI cites when buyers compare specific vendors and products.

The Breakdown:

Product pages lead AI citations: Product pages captured 24.1% of citations, followed by articles at 17.4%, while brand-controlled content collectively accounted for 88.3% of evaluation-stage citations.

Comparison content punches above its weight: Comparison prompts represented 20% of the dataset but generated nearly 27% of citations, giving comparison pages and related content a 1.33x citation return.

Reddit and YouTube play a smaller role: Reddit, YouTube, forums and discussion threads combined for just 4.2% of citations, with Reddit contributing most and YouTube accounting for roughly 1%.

The findings have important limitations: Results combine four AI platforms without platform-level breakdowns, cover Ten Speed’s B2B client base only, and the headline 24% versus 4% difference was descriptive rather than statistically tested.

The data suggests owned product and comparison pages may matter more once AI users move from researching a category to evaluating specific vendors. But the study is a directional snapshot, not evidence that Reddit or YouTube matter less across every stage or AI platform.

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Your creator content has a second job

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 11:58:43 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🤖 Your creator content now has a second job

🛍️ YouTube and Reddit are automating more of advertising

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Levanta

Your Affiliate Roster Should Make You More Money

A roster with hundreds of creators looks healthy until you check the sales.

If fewer than 10% have converted in 90 days and no new partners joined last month, the program is quietly losing revenue every week.

Levanta shows you what is stalling growth and which partners can move products, so more budget reaches relationships producing measurable returns.

REVO generated $1M+ in affiliate-driven sales, with 96% coming from new-to-brand customers.
Grace & Stella added $350K+ in affiliate revenue while its Amazon sales rank climbed from #520 to #28.
Acquco grew monthly affiliate sales from $1,500 to $36,000 in four months after adding 130+ creator partnerships.

You get a growing roster and clear visibility into which relationships drive sales. More converting external traffic can also help your products climb Amazon’s rankings.

Levanta’s self-diagnostic reveals which gaps are holding back your program and where your next growth opportunity may be hiding.

Take the Self-Diagnostic

🤖 Your creator content now has a second job

New holiday shopping research found something most teams haven’t priced into creator strategy: shoppers who trust AI recommendations are six times more likely to also trust creators.

Forty-three percent bought something an AI chatbot recommended in the last three months, and that experience made them more receptive to creator content, not less.

That connection has a consequence most creator briefs never account for.

A piece of UGC doing well organically isn’t just performing for humans scrolling past it. It’s also source material a model might pull from when a shopper asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, whether the creator or brand intended that.

Write briefs that hold up as a citable answer, not just a scroll-stopper

A hook built purely for watch time, a cold open with no context, a joke that only lands with sound on, can be genuinely excellent for organic reach and completely useless as anything an AI system could extract.

Add one requirement to your next batch of briefs: somewhere in the first few seconds, the creator states plainly what the product does and who it’s for, in language that makes sense as a standalone sentence pulled out of context.

This costs nothing in production and doesn’t compromise the hook, since it’s a sentence, not a rewrite.

Check whether your winning organic content is showing up outside its original platform

Content that performs well organically sometimes gets referenced in places you never posted it, comment threads, aggregator sites, community forums, the layer AI systems increasingly draw from.

Search your product name alongside the core claim your best-performing content makes. Where it’s echoed somewhere you didn’t post it, that’s a signal the content is doing work beyond its original platform, worth knowing which pieces carry that weight.

Treat your best creator content as evergreen infrastructure, not a single campaign asset

Content built to double as a citable answer keeps earning long after the campaign that funded it ends, since an AI system pulling from it doesn’t care when it was posted, only whether it still answers the question.

Identifying which pieces are quietly doing that double duty is what Insense helps ecommerce brands scaling past $2M track, trusted by Il Makiage, Quince, Huda Beauty, and Monster Energy. You can book a free strategy call to map creator availability in your niche and get $200 toward your first campaign.

A creator used to get paid once for a post. Increasingly, that post keeps working long after the invoice clears.

🛍️ YouTube and Reddit are automating more of advertising

YouTube is improving affiliate shopping and branded-content compliance, while Reddit is opening its AI-powered Max campaigns to every advertiser after reporting stronger conversion performance during testing.

The Breakdown:

Reddit Max opens to everyone - Reddit’s AI-powered campaigns can automate targeting, creative selection, placements, and budgets, while new asset groups let advertisers organize and measure different products or messages separately.

Early Max campaigns delivered stronger results - Reddit says beta advertisers averaged 17% lower CPA and more than 27% additional conversions, with API and Smartly support now expanding campaign management options.

YouTube tests smarter affiliate sourcing - YouTube can show the same creator-tagged product from a different eligible local retailer, testing whether better availability and delivery can increase affiliate sales.

Branded content disclosures get stricter - YouTube is adding clearer labels, age and location restrictions, and automated detection that can apply disclosure labels when creators fail to identify sponsored content.

Both platforms are reducing manual work across commerce and advertising. YouTube is automating product sourcing and compliance, while Reddit is using AI to handle more campaign decisions and make performance advertising easier to manage.

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You're only seeing 12% of the picture

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:58:42 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔍 Tracking one AI engine means missing most of the picture

💰 ChatGPT ads are scaling faster than their performance

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Omnisend

They Switched Before Black Friday and Made $113K

BFCM is the last time anyone wants to risk deliverability or rebuild revenue-driving automations. Yet weeks before Black Friday, Ecom2Win moved a client from Klaviyo to Omnisend.

The migration paid off with $113,000 in attributed email revenue, while email generated 53% of the store’s total revenue during BFCM.

Omnisend made the switch manageable:

Move without migration costs: Omnisend transfers your setup for free within five business days.
Protect peak-season revenue: Ecom2Win had the migration completed in 24 hours and its automations rebuilt and checked within four days.
Reduce ongoing costs: Plans can cost up to 35% less than Klaviyo, while Omnisend customers generate an average of $79 for every $1 spent.

More than 150,000 ecommerce brands now use Omnisend to turn email and SMS into measurable revenue.

With Klaviyo’s SMS pricing increasing, waiting only means paying more while leaving less time to switch safely before peak season.

Try Omnisend for free

🔍 Tracking one AI engine means missing most of the picture

A brand that carefully tracks its ChatGPT citations and treats that data as a reasonable proxy for “AI visibility” overall is measuring a much smaller slice of the landscape than the effort suggests.

Independent research comparing citation sources across AI platforms found only 11 to 12% domain overlap between what ChatGPT cites and what Perplexity cites for comparable queries. The two engines are pulling from almost entirely different sets of sources to answer similar questions.

That’s not a rounding error or a temporary quirk in early-stage AI search. It reflects genuinely different retrieval architectures and source-weighting logic between platforms, which means strong visibility on one engine carries very little predictive value for visibility on another.

A team optimizing against ChatGPT alone is, by this data, blind to roughly 88% of what determines citation on a different major platform serving a meaningful share of AI-driven discovery.

Audit your citation presence across at least three engines before drawing any conclusion

Before deciding your AI visibility strategy is working or failing based on one platform’s data, run the same set of category prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and compare which sources get cited on each.

Expect the overlap to be low. That’s not a sign something is broken. It’s the actual shape of the current landscape, and the real value of the exercise is seeing exactly where the gaps sit rather than assuming performance on one platform generalizes to the rest.

Stop treating “AI visibility” as one number

A single blended score across platforms hides more than it reveals when the underlying source sets barely overlap. Strong ChatGPT citation and weak Perplexity citation isn’t a wash that averages out to “moderate.” It’s two separate problems requiring two different fixes, since the sources each platform trusts aren’t the same sources.

Report citation presence per platform rather than collapsed into one figure, even though the single number is easier to put in a slide. The collapsed version actively hides which platform needs the actual work.

Build a source strategy that accounts for fragmentation, not one that assumes convergence

Getting cited across genuinely different platforms means diversifying the sources that mention your brand, not optimizing one type of content and assuming it travels.

Tracking citation and mention data across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode in one place, so the fragmentation is visible instead of hidden inside a single averaged score, is what Semrush One is built to surface.

Eighty-eight percent of the picture doesn’t show up if you’re only checking one platform’s mirror. You can see how it works here.

💰 ChatGPT ads are scaling faster than their performance

ChatGPT’s ad business is growing rapidly, but early advertiser tests show the platform still has work to do on campaign performance and measurement.

The Breakdown:

Early ChatGPT Ads are underperforming - One agency reported a 0.6% CTR versus its usual 2%, with clicks costing roughly $7 and generating little meaningful activity afterward.

Advertisers are seeing measurement gaps - ChatGPT’s reported clicks are not always matching Google Analytics, making UTMs important while newer targeting and conversion optimization tools continue to mature.

OpenAI Ads hit a $1B run rate - OpenAI reportedly reached a $1B annualized advertising run rate in roughly 200 days, with self-service ads now expanding across more than 40 countries.

EU rules bring more transparency - The EU designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine after reaching roughly 159.1M monthly EU recipients, requiring a public advertising repository within four months.

ChatGPT Ads are scaling quickly, but the ecosystem is still maturing. Better targeting, more reliable measurement, and greater regulatory transparency will determine how valuable the platform ultimately becomes for advertisers.

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The FTC fines you not them

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:58:35 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

⚖️ The FTC doesn’t fine your affiliates. It fines you.

🎥 Google and Reddit are betting more on video

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Insense

The 3-Step Playbook for Winning BFCM Before October

By October, CPMs can already be 20–60% higher. Brands that win BFCM build their creator roster in September, while costs are lower and there’s still time to find proven winners.

Here’s the playbook:

Seed now so creators know the product before November. Seed in Aug-Sep and flag organic winners early, since 81% of BFCM collaborations involve repeat creators.
Source modular UGC with flexible hooks and raw footage. Refresh fatigued ads without funding another shoot.
Run proven creators across organic and paid. Put winning content behind the creator’s handle to carry existing trust into each impression.

Bonus: Connect Ads Manager to Insense’s performance dashboard to identify the creators driving performance, then rehire them before availability tightens.

Insense helps DTC brands scaling beyond $2M build repeat creator rosters and is trusted by Il Makiage, Quince, Huda Beauty, and Monster Energy.

Book a free strategy call by September 11 to map creator availability in your niche and get $200 toward your first campaign.

⚖️ The FTC doesn’t fine your affiliates. It fines you.

Every affiliate program runs on the same unspoken assumption: the person posting the review holds the legal risk, since they’re the one wearing the “material connection” to your product. The FTC doesn’t see it that way.

The agency has sent warning letters straight to brands over an affiliate’s undisclosed post, not just to the creator who wrote it, and the statutory ceiling sits at $51,744 per violation, per day.

That number rewrites what an affiliate program actually is. It was never a channel where you pay for outcomes and stay clear of how they got produced. It’s a channel where the legal exposure sits with you, for content you never wrote and, in most programs, never even saw.

Exhibit A: the format is the risk, not the partner

Compliance failures cluster by format, not by name on the roster. Short-form video and livestreams, where disclosure has to survive an unscripted moment instead of a written post, and email newsletters, which quietly drop the language entirely, are where enforcement guidance points hardest.

Pull a sample from those two formats specifically, not from your highest earners as a stand-in for lowest risk. A top earner running clean and a mid-tier partner posting undisclosed Stories are not the same risk, and revenue share won’t tell you which is which.

Exhibit B: most violations are accidents, not evasions

FTC guidance keeps tracing failures to ignorance, not defiance. A creator raised on casual posting genuinely doesn’t know “affiliate link” has to sit in the first few lines of a caption, above the fold, not buried in a bio link three taps deep.

Build a short, format-specific disclosure guide into the onboarding message every new affiliate gets, and make it required, not a document nobody opens. That costs a fraction of a warning letter, and far less than losing a partner over a dispute neither side saw coming.

Exhibit C: a roster you can’t see is a liability you haven’t priced yet

Hundreds of names with zero visibility into who’s disclosing and who isn’t is not a program you can defend when the letter shows up; it’s exposure sitting quietly on a spreadsheet.

Seeing which partners are actually driving compliance, converting traffic, instead of managing a roster with blind spots baked in, is what Levanta’s platform surfaces. You can take the self-diagnostic here to find out where your program’s actual gaps sit.

A dead partnership costs you revenue. An undisclosed one costs far more, and the FTC sends that bill to you, not your affiliate.

🎥 Google and Reddit are betting more on video

Google is expanding AI tools for creating and understanding visual content, while Reddit is giving advertisers a new way to optimize campaigns around viewers who spend longer watching video ads.

The Breakdown:

Google Pics expands AI image creation: Powered by Nano Banana, Pics adds advanced generation, editing, customization, and language translation tools designed to create and modify visual content from one interface.

Gemini can analyze videos more deeply: Google’s agentic video understanding can inspect clips, identify what happened and who presented it, and extract specific details with improved speed and lower token usage.

AI video understanding is expanding across Google: The technology is coming to Gemini’s Flash and Flash-Lite models and will eventually improve Ask YouTube answers by grounding responses in video visuals.

Reddit targets 15-second viewers: Advertisers can now optimize campaigns for people likely to watch at least 15 seconds, with beta split testing available against Reddit’s existing six-second objective.

Both updates focus on extracting more value from visual content. Google is making images and videos easier to create and understand with AI, while Reddit is helping advertisers optimize video campaigns around deeper viewer attention.

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Those SMS credits are gone

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:58:40 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📱 The SMS credits you paid for and never used are gone

📊 Google and Snapchat give marketers more control

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

📱 The SMS credits you paid for and never used are gone

Klaviyo’s mobile messaging system works on a monthly credit allowance tied to your plan tier, and that balance resets at the end of every billing period with no rollover. Underuse your SMS credits in a slow month and the unused capacity doesn’t carry forward. It’s simply gone, and you paid for it anyway.

Most teams never notice this in a normal month, because SMS volume tracks roughly flat and the allowance mostly gets used. BFCM breaks that pattern completely.

A brand that sends a steady trickle of SMS in October and then triples or quadruples volume in the two weeks around Black Friday either burns through its allotted credits fast and pays overage rates, or it was sized for peak all year and has been quietly overpaying for capacity it never touched the other eleven months.

Calculate your real cost per message, not your plan’s sticker price

Pull your actual SMS sends for a normal month and for last year’s BFCM week separately. Divide your monthly SMS line-item cost by messages actually sent in each period.

The two numbers are rarely close. A plan that looks efficient against average monthly volume can be dramatically more expensive per message in the low months and still fall short in the high ones, since the credit reset punishes both underuse and overage in different directions.

Model your BFCM SMS volume before you’re inside peak week

Estimate your actual send volume for the BFCM stretch specifically, based on last year’s campaign calendar and cart-recovery cadence, not your average month.

Compare that number against what your current tier actually allows before assuming your plan scales cleanly into peak. A gap discovered mid-week during your highest-revenue period costs more than the overage itself, since the alternative is throttling sends at the exact moment they matter most.

Weigh the migration math against the price direction you’re already paying into

Klaviyo has raised SMS pricing this year, which compounds the reset problem rather than offsetting it. One agency ran this calculation on a client’s numbers and migrated to Omnisend just weeks before Black Friday anyway, in under five business days, landing $113K in holiday revenue that matched the year before.

Omnisend plans run up to 35% less than Klaviyo’s, with average returns of $79 for every $1 spent across more than 150,000 ecommerce brands on the platform. Jocelyn A., COO at Ecom2Win, walks through why the timing made sense despite the risk You can read the full story.

A credit system that quietly deletes what you don’t use is a normal-month inconvenience. At BFCM volume, it’s a line item worth pricing out before the season starts, not during it.

Together with AirOps

The Growth Targets Changed. Did Your Plan?

Growth targets are rising faster than the resources behind them, forcing marketing teams to make critical budget decisions without a credible view of how peers are responding.

AirOps surveyed 300+ CMOs and VPs to reveal how leaders are reallocating budgets and closing capability gaps as pressure grows to deliver more pipeline with limited support.

Compare how peers are responding to higher targets, now affecting 75.4% of marketing leaders across the market.
Build a stronger budget case using the reality that only 43.0% received more funding.
See why 86.6% prioritize AI search while just 23% feel confident measuring its impact.

The report lets you compare your growth targets and available resources against responses gathered directly from 300+ marketing leaders.

You’ll immediately see whether your performance gap starts with execution or a plan that was under-resourced from day one.

Get the Marketing Leaders Reality Index.

📊 Google and Snapchat give marketers more control

Snapchat is improving attribution, Google is giving publishers visibility into AI Search, and new YouTube data shows how specific creative choices can materially change advertising performance.

The Breakdown:

Snapchat unifies app attribution - Unified Attribution is now available globally, combining Snap performance with AppsFlyer or Adjust data so advertisers can optimize campaigns against installs, purchases, and other business outcomes.

Google opens up AI Search reporting - Search Console now shows impressions across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other generative features globally, broken down by pages, countries, devices, and dates.

Publishers can opt out of Google AI - A new Search Console control lets websites block content from Google’s generative AI features without affecting rankings in traditional Search, though they lose AI impressions and traffic.

YouTube reveals what improves conversions - Google says human voice correlates with 12% higher conversions, text overlays with 3%, and showing the brand within five seconds with 4% higher conversions.

Creative may be the biggest lever here. Nielsen research cited by Google attributes 49% of campaign ROI to creative, while Ekimetrics found improving YouTube creative can more than double ROI. Google recommends human presence, native-looking imagery, early branding, and avoiding fake buttons or UI elements that could confuse viewers.

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Too Many Integrations Kill Domain

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:58:03 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🔧 The SPF record that’s one tool away from breaking

🔎 Brand discovery is moving beyond brand websites

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Tatari

When Meta hits a ceiling, the smartest brands look beyond it.

Scaling digital used to be straightforward. Now brands hit a Meta Ceiling where reach stalls and CAC skyrockets.

The brands still compounding aren’t fixing it inside Meta. They’re diversifying.

Tatari is a TV buying platform that lets you run across linear TV, streaming, and direct publisher buys, all from one place.

You see exactly where every ad aired, so nothing is hidden, and nothing is wasted. Every dollar ties back to actual site visits, signups, and revenue not impressions that look good and prove nothing.

Aroma360 cut CPA by 80% and doubled ROAS from a $14K linear pilot
Fiverr retargeted Super Bowl viewers on streaming and slashed CAC by 75%
Saatva saw a 40% lift in branded search from their very first Tatari test

Every week you wait is a week someone in your category is pulling customers you could have reached first.

Book a free demo and get a launch-ready TV plan built around your numbers.

P.S. In NYC Oct. 29? Join Tatari at Forward for an afternoon on what’s next in advertising with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and marketers from Liquid IV, MANSCAPED, and more.

🔧 The SPF record that’s one tool away from breaking

Every marketing tool a growing ecommerce team adds, a helpdesk, a CRM, a review platform, a loyalty app, typically wants a line added to the domain’s SPF record so its emails authenticate correctly. Each addition is reasonable alone. The protocol underneath has a hard limit nobody checks until it’s already crossed.

SPF authentication allows a maximum of ten DNS lookups. Past that ceiling, the record doesn’t degrade gracefully.

It returns a permanent error, and mail sent under that domain gets treated as unauthenticated, regardless of whether DKIM and DMARC are otherwise correct. A brand that added its eleventh tool integration this year may already be over the line with no alert telling them so.

Count your actual lookups, not your tool count

The number of tools isn’t the number that matters. Each SPF include can itself reference other domains that add further lookups, so a record with five visible includes can resolve to nine or eleven actual queries once nested references are counted.

Run your domain through an SPF lookup checker rather than counting integrations from memory, since a switch that migrates fast is only half the fix if authentication breaks the week after, and it’s one reason one agency moved a client’s entire program to Omnisend weeks before Black Friday and still landed $113K in holiday revenue. You can read the full story.

This check takes minutes and is the only reliable way to know whether you’re over the limit or one integration away.

Flatten before you add anything new

Once near the limit, the fix isn’t removing tools you’re using. It’s SPF flattening, resolving nested includes into static IP ranges so the record authenticates without counting against the lookup ceiling.

Flattening needs to happen before your next tool goes live, not after a BFCM send starts failing authentication silently. A record passing today can fail the moment a vendor changes infrastructure behind an include you reference, so this is a recurring check, not a one-time fix, and worth running before peak locks in whatever configuration you’re on.

Build sending infrastructure that isn’t held together by manual DNS management

A growing tool stack changes constantly, and manually tracking SPF lookup counts against every new integration is maintenance that gets skipped the week priorities lie elsewhere.

Consolidating email and SMS sending onto infrastructure that manages authentication as part of the platform, rather than as a DNS record a team babysits through every vendor addition, removes a failure category before it happens.

A broken SPF record doesn’t send a warning. It just quietly starts routing your highest-stakes campaign into folders nobody checks.

🔎 Brand discovery is moving beyond brand websites

Two new datasets show how search and AI discovery increasingly depend on what other people say about a brand. AI shopping tools overwhelmingly cite third-party sources, while public Facebook Groups are becoming a major source inside Google Search.

The Breakdown:

AI recommends brands but sends citations elsewhere - Shero analyzed 1,851 citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode and found just 2.8% pointed to brand-owned pages. Third-party sources accounted for 59%.

Even recommended brands don’t always get the link - Across 159 brand recommendations, the brand’s own website was cited only 31% of the time. The research shows the gap exists, but doesn’t establish why AI systems choose those sources.

Facebook Groups are becoming serious Google real estate - Ahrefs found public Facebook Groups appearing in 38.3% of Google results containing the Discussions and forums module, overtaking Quora and ranking behind only Reddit.

Reddit still dominates, but Facebook is rising fast - Reddit appears in 87.8% of U.S. results containing the module. Facebook went from virtually zero presence in late 2024 to Google’s second-most common forum source, with visibility spread across many public Groups.

Owning a strong website is no longer enough to control how a brand appears in discovery. AI assistants may recommend the brand while citing publishers, and Google can surface conversations happening inside public communities. That makes credible third-party coverage and customer discussions increasingly important parts of search visibility.

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Google recropped your creator

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:58:07 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

✂️ Google will now recrop your creator content without asking

🛒 Social platforms are making ads more shoppable

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

✂️ Google will now recrop your creator content without asking

Google began automatically resizing video assets in Performance Max this month, generating extra aspect ratios from what you upload. The goal is placement coverage without manual production work, and for stock footage it is useful.

For creator content, it introduces a problem your usage agreements almost certainly do not address. A creator licensed you a vertical video. The platform now generates horizontal and square derivatives from it. Nobody asked the creator, and depending on how your agreement is worded, nobody had the right to.

Reconcile your usage grants against derivative works

Pull your five most recent creator agreements and search for the word “modify” or “derivative.”

Standard whitelisting language grants a right to use and distribute an asset. It frequently says nothing about altered versions.

An automated recrop is a modification, and one that pushes a creator’s face outside frame or crops out a disclosure overlay carries consequences beyond contract technicalities.

Where the grant is silent, amend it. The clause is one sentence: permission extends to platform-generated format variations of the licensed asset.

Set the crop before the algorithm does

Auto-generated crops optimize for filling a frame, not for keeping the important thing inside it.

Build creator briefs with a defined safe zone from the start. Specify that the speaker’s face, the product, and any required disclosure text sit within the central square of a vertical frame. Shoot to that spec and the asset survives every derivative the platform produces.

Fill the full vertical frame, and it breaks the moment it is cropped, and you will not see the broken version in your own reporting.

If your program leans on whitelisted creator video for holiday paid spend, this spec needs to reach creators before they shoot, not after.

Getting a brief revision through a roster takes weeks, which is one more thing that argues for building the program across the ninety-day runway Levanta’s 90-Day Holiday Sprint is designed around rather than assembling it in November. You can download the free playbook here.

Audit the derivatives you are actually serving

You cannot fix what you have not looked at.

Pull the asset report for any campaign running creator video and view the generated variations directly rather than trusting the thumbnail.

Check three things on each: whether the face is intact, whether the product is visible, and whether any text overlay is readable at the new dimensions. Where a derivative fails, disable the format for that asset rather than the campaign.

The efficiency argument for automated formats is real. It also assumes the source asset belonged to you outright, which for creator content is rarely the whole story.

Together with Insense

Meta Just Broke Your Look-Alike Ads. Here’s the Fix.

Meta’s new Andromeda update is silently killing look-alike ads before they even enter the auction. If your creatives share too many visual cues, your ads collapse overnight.

With Insense, each collab gives you a full bank of raw footage you can mix, match, and turn into multiple scroll-stopping ads. One creator can fuel an entire round of testing without draining your team’s bandwidth.

20+ raw assets per creator you can spin into countless variations.
Fast 14-day turnaround so you stay ahead
Lifetime usage rights, so every winning asset keeps paying off.

Over 3500+ brands and agencies are already scaling 3× faster with 40% lower fatigue rates using Insense’s modular system.

Cost-effective UGC with lifetime usage rights? Yes please!!

Book a free strategy call by August 28 and get $200 for your first campaign.

🛒 Social platforms are making ads more shoppable

YouTube and X are expanding their direct-response tools, giving creators a tighter connection to Amazon purchases while bringing native lead capture back to X.

The Breakdown:

YouTube adds Amazon product tags - Eligible U.S. creators can now tag Amazon products directly inside videos, Shorts, and livestreams, earning commissions when viewers purchase through those tags.

Product tags are beating description links - YouTube says a July 2026 experiment found videos using Shopping product tags generated over 110% more product clicks than description links alone. Creators can also enable automatic tagging for eligible Amazon products.

X brings Lead Gen Ads back - X has revived a format Twitter retired a decade ago, adding prominent CTA buttons that open native lead forms without requiring users to leave the platform.

X wants fewer steps between ads and leads - After a user completes their first form, future forms can be pre-populated to reduce drop-off. Advertisers can use them for demos, appointments, email signups, waitlists, and quote requests.

Both updates remove steps between attention and action. YouTube is shortening the path from watching a creator to buying a product, while X is cutting out landing pages for lead capture. For advertisers, more of the conversion journey is moving directly inside the platforms.

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The metric agents actually weight

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:58:32 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🎯 The metric AI agents actually weight, and nobody’s buying media against it

📺 The fight for the TV screen is expanding

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🎯 The metric AI agents actually weight, and nobody’s buying media against it

Shopping research found that when someone asks an AI assistant a comparison question, close to nine times out of ten it triggers a shopping response with product cards and retailer links.

What decides which products make that card isn’t just price or availability. Brand recognition and trust are factors the models weight directly, the same way a human shortlisting options leans on what they’ve already heard of.

That is not a new idea in marketing. It is an old idea showing up inside a system nobody is currently measuring it against.

Search and social spend gets judged constantly against last-click and assisted-conversion data. The channels that build the kind of broad recognition an AI agent seems to draw on when it forms a shortlist rarely get judged against that outcome at all, because nobody built a way to test it.

Run a recognition audit before you defend the budget

Pull ten comparison queries your category actually gets asked, the kind a shopper would type into an assistant rather than a search bar. Run them and record which brands appear on the shortlist and in what order.

Cross-reference that list against your unaided awareness data, if you have it, or against a quick panel survey if you don’t.

Brands with high unaided recognition tend to cluster near the top of these shortlists more consistently than brands relying purely on paid placement to appear in the same category. That correlation is not proof of causation, but it is the first real test connecting a channel to an outcome that used to be unmeasurable.

Treat linear and CTV reach as a shortlist input, not just a reach number

If recognition feeds the shortlist, then the channels built specifically to produce broad recognition deserve a line in that argument, measured by outcome rather than exposure.

That is the case for pairing reach data with something closer to attribution, which is where a platform built to connect TV and streaming exposure to downstream conversion outcomes, rather than reporting reach alone, does work a media plan built on GRPs can’t.

Tatari runs that measurement for 300+ brands buying linear and streaming together, and you can schedule a demo to see how the connection gets made.

Watch the gap, not just the position

Track the shortlist audit monthly rather than once. What matters is whether your position moves as your reach investment moves, or stays flat regardless.

A flat line despite rising spend is diagnostic information a channel review usually never surfaces, and it is worth more than another quarter of defending the budget on reach alone.

Together with Levanta

Your Best Holiday Creators Are Choosing Brands Now

Levanta built The 90-Day Holiday Sprint to turn that shrinking window into measurable momentum. Inside, you’ll learn how to:

Set commissions around customer lifetime value, protecting margin while attracting stronger partners.
Recruit with proven products that give creators better conversion potential.
Use 30, 60, and 90-day checkpoints to identify winning relationships before seasonal budgets rise.

A 90-day runway gives you time to see which creators convert before holiday budgets climb. That evidence makes every commission increase easier to defend.

Don’t wait until November to build the creator program you will wish you already had. Your 90-day countdown starts now.

Download the Free Playbook

📺 The fight for the TV screen is expanding

TV viewing is shifting fast. Ad-supported streaming is taking more viewing share, while Instagram and YouTube are building new ways to move creator content from phones onto the biggest screen in the house.

The Breakdown:

Ad-supported streaming hit 48.2% of viewing - Nielsen’s Q2 2026 Gauge shows ad-supported streaming gained 1.6%, continuing to take a larger share of total TV viewing.

Broadcast slipped despite major live sports - Broadcast fell from 28.2% to 26.6% even with the NBA Finals and opening World Cup stages, both of which were also available through streaming.

Instagram is bringing creator content to TVs - Instagram enlisted four creators to showcase its TV app, testing how creator-led content translates from personal phone screens to shared big-screen viewing.

YouTube is turning creators into 24/7 channels - YouTube expanded its Stations experiment, letting selected creators, podcasters, and musicians run continuous programming with live chat attached.

The living-room screen is becoming another battleground for digital platforms. For marketers, that could mean rethinking creative built exclusively for vertical feeds as social content increasingly reaches shared, horizontal screens.

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Skimmable isn't extractable

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:58:36 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find;

📖 Skimmable and extractable are not the same skill

📣 Meta, TikTok, and ChatGPT roll out new ad tools

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Insense

1 UGC creator = 20+ ad variations to scale your Q4 creatives

Insense makes UGC ads insanely cost-effective - and Andromeda-approved!

Meta’s Andromeda update now rewards creative diversity (+22% ROAS), so the more distinct hooks and angles you test, the better you rank.

From one brief, get numerous raw footage clips to mix, match, and turn into multiple scroll-stopping creatives for your paid social ads.

Source 20+ pieces of raw content (per creator) with lifetime usage rights, all delivered in 14 days or less.

Here’s the Q4 math: one winning ad takes 10–13 tested creatives, so 20+ variations per creator means more shots at a winner, and instant hook-swaps when an ad fatigues during BFCM week. Many versions from one shoot, not 50 shoots.

That’s how over 3,500 brands like Beauty Pie, Il Makiage, Revolut, and Monster Energy scale UGC without killing team bandwidth.

Cost-effective UGC with lifetime usage rights? Yes please!!

Book a free strategy call by August 28 and get $200 for your first campaign.

Book Your Free Strategy Call

📖 Skimmable and extractable are not the same skill

Ecommerce teams optimizing product pages for AI agents converged on a specific finding this year: agents evaluate pages programmatically, checking attribute completeness and whether claims contradict spec data, and a page failing either check gets skipped rather than penalized.

That standard has quietly become the model for a much bigger category of content than product pages.

Most content teams write for skimming: short paragraphs and bolded phrases that let a human’s eye land on what matters.

That skill produces content a human reads quickly. It does not reliably produce content a model can extract cleanly, because skimmable and extractable optimize for different things.

Test extraction against your own best-performing page

Take your highest-traffic article or guide and ask a model to answer three specific questions using only that page as source material, not the topic in general.

Where the model has to infer, combine two separate sentences, or guess at a qualifier the page never states outright, that’s a section a human skims past successfully, but an extraction pass fails on.

Skimmability and extractability diverge exactly there, and it’s usually invisible until you run the test.

Write the fact, then the frame, in that order

Human-oriented writing often leads with the frame, a story or analogy, arriving at the specific fact after the setup earns it.

That structure reads well. It also buries the extractable fact inside narrative context a model has to parse through first.

Flip the order for any sentence carrying a number, a specific claim, or a named comparison. State the fact plainly first, then add the framing or narrative color after it, in the same paragraph if the piece’s voice depends on it.

The fact survives extraction either way once it isn’t the thing doing the work of holding the reader’s interest.

Separate the two audiences instead of compromising between them

Trying to write one sentence that’s both a compelling human hook and a clean extractable fact usually produces a sentence that’s mediocre at both jobs.

Structure pieces with the narrative hook doing the human-engagement work up top, and a distinct fact-and-source section, plainly stated, carrying the extractable content.

Readers get the version built for them, agents get the version built for them, and building both at scale without slowing a content calendar is the production problem AirOps solves for teams running this at volume, the kind of capability gap its Marketing Leaders Reality Index found only 43.0% of teams got funding to close.

Neither audience is optional anymore. Writing for only one of them is a choice, just not one most teams are making on purpose.

📣 Meta, TikTok and ChatGPT roll out new ad tools

Three major platforms are expanding their ad products in very different directions. Meta is turning Instagram comments into DM leads, TikTok is taking creator content onto physical screens, and ChatGPT Ads is adding more of the controls advertisers expect from mature ad platforms.

The Breakdown:

Meta can turn comments into DMs - A new Instagram ads test lets advertisers choose up to five keywords and automatically send a private message when someone comments with one, making “comment X for more” campaigns much easier to run.

TikTok ads are moving beyond TikTok - Its Out of Phone program is expanding across Europe, letting brands place TikTok and creator content on screens in malls, supermarkets, universities, bars and other physical locations.

ChatGPT Ads gets automated bidding - The new Maximize results strategy automatically adjusts bids toward an advertiser’s chosen campaign goal, bringing more algorithmic optimization into the platform.

ChatGPT adds better targeting and attribution - Advertisers can separately target iOS, Android, and web, while new one-day view-through reporting measures conversions that happen after an ad impression without a qualifying click.

These updates show three different ways ad platforms are trying to capture more of the customer journey. Meta wants to own the conversation, TikTok wants its content to travel beyond the app, and ChatGPT is quickly building the optimization and measurement infrastructure advertisers already rely on elsewhere.

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ChatGPT just became a media buy

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:59:00 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📢 ChatGPT just became a media buy, and nobody’s briefed it yet

📊 Google makes testing and tracking easier

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Omnisend

They migrated a client weeks before Black Friday. It made $113K.

Weeks before Black Friday, one deliverability issue or broken automation can put months of revenue planning at risk. Ecom2Win still chose that moment to move a client to Omnisend.

The migration was completed before BFCM, and the client generated $113K during the holiday period, matching the previous year’s revenue.

Omnisend gave the team a faster and more affordable path forward:

Migrate for free in up to five business days.
Cut platform costs by up to 35% compared with Klaviyo.
Generate more from email and SMS, with brands averaging $79 for every $1 spent.

More than 150,000 ecommerce brands already use Omnisend, giving teams proven infrastructure for their highest-pressure sales periods.

Nearly one in six ecommerce brands earns at least 30% of its annual orders during this period. If your current platform is slowing execution or draining budget, carrying it into another peak season could be the bigger risk.

Read the full story.

📢 ChatGPT just became a media buy, and nobody’s briefed it yet

OpenAI opens ChatGPT ads to 31 European markets today, extending a business that launched in the US six months ago. European advertisers buy initially through major agency groups, with self-serve access coming later.

OpenAI has shifted most of that spend to cost-per-click buying, and says roughly 20% of ChatGPT queries carry direct commercial intent, with more queries signaling upper-funnel purchase interest without stating it outright.

That’s not a small ad platform quietly finding its footing. It’s a conversational surface with hundreds of millions of weekly users turning into a paid channel with real buying intent, and most growth teams have no brief written for it because there was nothing to brief until now.

Treat conversational intent as its own creative problem, not a search headline shrunk to fit

A Google search query and a ChatGPT prompt asking the same underlying question look nothing alike. “Best running shoes for flat feet” is a search query.

“I have flat feet training for a half marathon, what should I look for in a shoe” is a ChatGPT prompt, and it already contains the qualifiers, the use case, and half the objection-handling a search ad normally earns through extensions.

Pull your last month of ChatGPT-shaped queries from your own customer service or on-site search data, if you have anything approximating them.

Write ad copy answering the qualifiers already embedded in the question, rather than repurposing a headline built to compress intent that’s already spelled out.

Separate the 20% from the 80% before spending against either

Direct commercial intent and upper-funnel signal are different audiences with different economics, and OpenAI’s own numbers show the second group is the larger one.

If self-serve is still limited or agency-only in your market, use the runway to build two creative tracks now: one for buying-intent, priced like a conversion channel, one for upper-funnel, measured on assisted outcomes. Teams waiting for self-serve build both under launch pressure instead of ahead of it.

Watch where the CPC pricing shift leads next

A channel that moved most of its spend to cost-per-click is behaving like a platform feeling out its auction dynamics in public, the same trajectory paid search and social both followed early on.

Track CPC trends here the way you’d track a new platform’s early CPMs: expect volatility, expect compression as more advertisers enter, and expect whatever format wins early to get copied fast. Being in the auction during the volatile early period is worth more than the spend itself.

The 20% commercial-intent number is the headline. The 80% still deciding is where the actual opportunity sits, mostly because nobody’s built for it yet.

📊 Google makes testing and tracking easier

Google is tightening up both sides of campaign optimization: advertisers are getting better ways to test major Search changes, while conversion tracking is becoming much easier to set up and manage.

The Breakdown:

Google tag and Tag Manager are merging - Existing Google tags will become fully capable Tag Manager containers, bringing tagging, debugging, version control, and destination management into a more unified setup.

Conversions without code - New visual tagging lets advertisers navigate their website and select actions they want to track. Google handles the selectors and triggers behind the scenes, reducing the need for developer work.

Test changes across campaigns - Starting in September, advertisers can A/B test different budgets and ROI targets across multiple Search campaigns at once, making it easier to measure the wider impact before scaling changes.

AI Max keeps its guardrails - Experiments can now run with brand and location controls enabled, so advertisers can test AI Max under the same restrictions they would actually use in live campaigns.

Google wants more advertisers using automation, but it’s also removing two reasons to hesitate. You can test AI-driven changes without dropping important controls, and you can build the measurement needed to judge those changes without wrestling with code.

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Paying commissions on returns

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:58:46 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

💸 The Q4 margin leak hiding in your payout calendar

🤖 Microsoft and X push AI deeper into ad management

👨‍💻 Quick hits

Together with Tatari

The brands winning BFCM start optimizing early.

Tatari surveyed TV advertisers about their 2026 holiday plans, and brands are moving early.

Nearly 6 in 10 are increasing their BFCM TV budgets, and 54% plan to launch holiday messaging before mid-November

Launching earlier gives brands time to find what converts before TV inventory gets more competitive and expensive.

That’s how Knix approached TV. After testing ahead of peak season, one spot drove 9,000 site visits within five minutes at a 70% lower CPA. Creative testing also doubled response rates and cut CPV by 45%.

The extra runway helped Knix identify what deserved more budget before purchase intent peaked.

By Black Friday, you don’t want to still be testing. You want to be scaling.

See how Tatari can help you scale TV for BFCM.

P.S. In NYC Oct. 29? Join Tatari at Forward for an afternoon on what’s next in advertising with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and marketers from Liquid IV, MANSCAPED, and more.

💸 The Q4 margin leak hiding in your payout calendar

Return fraud tactics got fresh attention this month, and the coverage focuses on the consumer side. The version that quietly costs you more is procedural, living in the gap between two calendars you probably set independently.

Affiliate and creator commissions typically pay out on a 30-day cycle. Holiday returns land at 45 to 60 days, sometimes later, because a November gift purchase does not get opened until late December and does not get returned until January. Every commission paid on an order that later reverses is margin you have already spent, on revenue that no longer exists.

Measure your actual days-to-return before you set the cycle

Do not use your published return window. Use the observed distribution.

Pull last year’s Q4 orders and plot days from purchase to return initiation. Segment gifting-heavy SKUs separately, since they skew right by weeks. Find the day by which 85% of returns have occurred. If it sits past your commission payout date, and for holiday cohorts it usually does, you are paying on unsettled revenue by design.

Replace the clawback with a holdback

Clawing money back from a creator after it has landed is the fastest way to lose a partner you spent three months recruiting.

Structure it forward instead. Pay 80% on the standard cycle and release the remaining 20% after the return window closes, with the reserve percentage set to your observed Q4 return rate rather than your annual average. Creators accept this readily when the reserve is explained as a settlement mechanic, and the release date is specific and honored.

If your return distribution stretches well past your payout cycle, the fix is not a payment rule bolted on in November. It is a recruiting calendar that gives you time to negotiate terms while creators still have room to talk, which is the logic behind Levanta’s 90-Day Holiday Sprint and its 30, 60 and 90-day checkpoints. You can download the free playbook here.

Write the fraud carve-out before peak

Standard affiliate agreements rarely distinguish an ordinary return from a coordinated one. Add three clauses before your Q4 terms lock:

A defined threshold at which a partner’s return rate triggers review rather than automatic reversal
Explicit language that reserves are released on a stated date regardless of dispute status elsewhere
A named owner on your side responsible for the release, so it does not slip into January

Terms are easy to agree when nobody knows whose commission is affected. They become a negotiation the moment the numbers are visible, which is the argument for settling them now rather than in week three of December.

🤖 Microsoft and X push AI deeper into ad management

Microsoft and X are both changing how advertisers manage campaigns with AI. Microsoft is expanding its own Search automation globally, while X is letting advertisers bring their preferred AI assistant directly into campaign workflows.

The Breakdown:

Microsoft takes AI Max global - AI Max is rolling out globally with search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion, extending Search campaigns beyond traditional keyword targeting.

Advertisers keep more control - Microsoft includes brand inclusions and exclusions, URL rules, text-generation exclusions, and ad group-level settings, while letting advertisers test individual AI Max features through experiments.

Google imports carry AI settings - Supported AI Max settings enabled in imported Google Search campaigns will automatically carry into Microsoft Advertising, although campaigns originally upgraded from Dynamic Search Ads are handled differently.

X opens ads to outside AI - X’s new Ads MCP lets advertisers connect campaign data and analytics to MCP-compatible tools like Grok, Claude Code, or custom agents and manage them through natural-language queries.

Ad platforms are splitting into two AI strategies: build the intelligence directly into campaign management or let advertisers bring their own AI agent. Either way, manually digging through dashboards is becoming less central to the job.

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Google may replace your search pitch

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:58:40 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🧐Google is testing AI summaries inside the snippet itself. Your meta description might already be obsolete.

📊 Meta and Google push AI deeper into ad management

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

Together with Omnisend

Your AI Is Missing Your Best Marketing Data

Your email platform holds the data behind better campaign decisions. By the time you’ve translated the numbers for your team, the next campaign is already underway.

Omnisend’s guide shows 10 ways to connect ChatGPT and Claude to your account data and reach decisions faster.

Compare this week’s performance with last week’s and get changes explained in plain English.
Analyze six months of subject lines to uncover the wording patterns your audience consistently opens.
Generate a monthly executive summary with priorities, without losing another afternoon to reporting.

The guide comes from a platform used by 150,000+ ecommerce brands, whose customers average $79 in revenue for every $1 spent across Omnisend channels.

Users can get a free migration completed in five business days, with pricing up to 35% lower than Klaviyo at comparable tiers.

See what becomes possible when AI can work with your real email data, then decide whether your current platform is keeping up.

Read the guide

🧐Google is testing AI summaries inside the snippet itself. your meta description might already be obsolete.

Search Engine Roundtable reported Google testing AI-generated summaries directly inside individual search snippets, rather than limiting generated answers to the separate AI Overview. If that expands, a carefully written meta description may no longer be the copy a searcher sees before deciding whether to click. Google could increasingly build that pitch from the page itself.

Find where you’ve already lost control

Start with the ten pages responsible for the most organic traffic. Search their primary terms and put the live Google snippet beside the meta description currently on file.

You’re looking for one thing: divergence.

For every mismatch, record what Google used instead. Did it pull the opening paragraph? A sentence beneath a subheading? Pricing copy? A product detail buried further down?

Don’t immediately rewrite anything. Ten pages are enough to reveal whether Google is already consistently preferring a certain type of passage over the descriptions your team wrote specifically for search. That pattern tells you what part of the page may increasingly function as the real meta description.

Write the opening so it can survive being stolen

Take the worst divergence from the audit and rebuild its opening using a simple constraint:

If Google could extract only one sentence from this page, would sentence one make a good search pitch?

A SaaS pricing page shouldn’t spend its opening explaining the company’s mission and reveal the price three paragraphs later. If the useful answer is “$49 per month for five users, including X and Y,” put that information where it can stand alone.

Then add context underneath it.

This isn’t about stuffing keywords into the introduction. It’s about making the page’s most important information understandable without requiring the sentences around it, because generated summaries need passages that can survive extraction.

Don’t trust the rewrite until the snippet changes

Keep the existing meta description untouched on a test group of pages. Rewrite only their openings, record the date, then monitor what appears for the same queries.

Now there are three outcomes worth separating.

If the generated snippet changes and CTR improves, the new opening likely gave Google stronger material. If the snippet changes but CTR falls, you’ve gained more control over what gets extracted but written a worse pitch. If the opening changes and the snippet doesn’t, body copy probably wasn’t the lever for that query in the first place.

That makes the experiment considerably more useful than simply comparing CTR before and after a rewrite.

Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit helps monitor how a brand and its pages appear across Google’s AI surfaces alongside other AI platforms, making shifts in search visibility easier to catch as generated experiences evolve. You can try free for 7 days.

The meta description may be losing its monopoly over the search pitch. The response isn’t abandoning it. It’s making sure the page itself can make the sale when Google decides to write the preview instead.

📊 Meta and Google push AI deeper into ad management

Meta and Google are moving AI beyond ad creation and into the decisions marketers make after campaigns launch. New tools can analyze performance, recommend changes, test strategies, and automate reporting.

The Breakdown:

1. Meta AI Becomes an Ads Analyst - Advertisers can connect Meta Ads directly to Meta AI and ask about performance. It can identify strong audiences, creative patterns, fatigued ads, and opportunities to improve budget allocation.

2. Reporting Gets Automated - Meta AI can combine campaign data with Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, then generate reports, presentations, and spreadsheets. Recurring tasks can also automate regular performance reviews.

3. AI Max Gets Better Testing - Starting in September, Google will let advertisers A/B test budgets and ROI targets across multiple Search campaigns. Tests can retain brand and location controls instead of removing those guardrails.

4. Google Lets You Forecast Changes - Performance Planner can model how budget or bidding changes could affect existing campaigns before they’re made. Advertisers can then apply Google’s suggested changes directly with one click.

Meta and Google are turning their AI systems into campaign-management layers, moving from generating ads toward analyzing performance, testing decisions, forecasting outcomes, and recommending what marketers should change next.

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Your creative has a fingerprint

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:58:37 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🧐 Your creative has a fingerprint

📊 Google and Microsoft reshape ads

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🧐 Your creative has a fingerprint

A winning ad fatigues, and the standard fix is a new format in-house, a different visual style, a different pacing, produced by the same team that made everything else in the account. Sometimes that resets performance.

Sometimes it doesn’t, and the reason it doesn’t isn’t that the new format was weak. It’s that the audience wasn’t reacting to the old ad specifically. It was reacting to a pattern trained across the account’s entire creative history, and one new format doesn’t erase a signature built from dozens of ads before it.

Diagnose which kind of fatigue is actually happening before building a new format. When a fresh, genuinely new-to-the-account format underperforms, split the result by audience type before concluding the format failed.

If it performs fine among cold prospecting traffic but still underperforms specifically among warm retargeting audiences, that’s not format fatigue on the new ad.

It’s evidence the warm segment has pattern-matched the account’s broader creative style, camera angle habits, pacing, editing choices, regardless of what the format nominally changed, and no further in-house iteration is likely to break that specific signal.

Source the reset from outside the account’s own creative history once that’s confirmed. A warm audience trained on an account’s creative handwriting hasn’t been trained on a competitor’s or an adjacent niche’s, which is why structure pulled from outside the account resets recognition more reliably than another internal attempt, even a genuinely different one.

The value isn’t novelty for its own sake. It’s that the specific audience segment showing fatigue has no prior exposure to that particular structural pattern, unlike every in-house format, which shares some DNA with everything else the team has produced.

Strip the account’s own stylistic tells when adapting a swiped structure, or the reset doesn’t actually happen. Pulling a competitor’s or adjacent niche’s format and rebuilding it in the account’s usual editing style, familiar pacing, familiar framing conventions, familiar voiceover cadence, can still get pattern-matched by a warm audience that’s learned to recognize those specific execution habits, even inside a nominally new structure.

Rebuilding the swiped structure with genuinely different execution choices, not just a different underlying idea, is what actually resets recognition rather than producing a new format that still reads as unmistakably the same account.

The audience isn’t tired of one ad. It’s learned to recognize a signature across many, and the fix for that lives outside the account’s own back catalog, not inside another round of the same team trying again.

Together with AirOps

Your AI Visibility Can Disappear Before Tomorrow

Your brand can appear in an AI answer this morning and disappear by afternoon. That volatility quietly redirects high-intent buyers toward competitors while your SEO reports show nothing unusual.

AirOps built The GEO Strategy Playbook to map the system behind brands that stay visible across repeated AI searches.

You’ll learn how to:

Find the purchase-intent prompts where competitors are replacing you before those losses reach the pipeline.
Identify the external pages shaping AI recommendations, so you know exactly where stronger brand coverage can influence the shortlist.
Turn proprietary data and expert insight into quotable proof that models can confidently use.

Only one in five brands remained visible across five identical AI searches. If you are checking quarterly, you may be measuring visibility your brand has already lost.

You’ll walk away knowing what drives AI citations and how to track where your brand gains or loses visibility each week.

Get the GEO Playbook

📊 Google and Microsoft Reshape Ads

Google and Microsoft are adjusting everything from measurement to creative automation and mobile ad formats. For advertisers, these changes affect how campaigns are measured, built, and ultimately displayed.

The Breakdown:

1. Mobile Ads Get Bigger - Microsoft is testing full-block images in mobile Bing ads, while Google experiments with larger review stars in sponsored results. Both give visual assets and ratings significantly more screen real estate.

2. PMax Videos Get AI - Google will use generative AI to fill missing video aspect ratios, opening existing PMax creative to more inventory. Advertisers wanting manual control must opt out by September 4.

3. Microsoft Goes Server-Side - Microsoft’s beta Conversions API sends conversion data directly from advertiser systems. It works alongside UET rather than replacing it, expanding measurement across offline and cross-channel customer activity.

4. Brand Measurement Changes - Google’s Branded Searches now supports YouTube and Demand Gen, but no longer lists PMax. Its default conversion window is seven days, and the metric cannot be used for bidding.

Google and Microsoft are steadily giving automation more influence over creative and measurement while making ads more visually prominent. Advertisers gain reach, but keeping control of tracking, assets, and feeds becomes increasingly important.

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Your spam rate can pass and still fail

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:58:11 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🫣Your spam rate can pass and still fail

📊 Google and ChatGPT are feeding each other

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🫣Your spam rate can pass and still fail

Google and Yahoo’s mandatory spam complaint threshold is 0.3%. But current deliverability engagements point to a much tighter working standard in 2026: stable senders are increasingly expected to stay below 0.10%.

That creates an uncomfortable middle ground. A sender sitting at 0.20% or 0.25% can technically pass the rule while still operating well outside the range associated with reliable inbox placement.

Compliance and healthy deliverability are no longer the same benchmark.

Start by moving the internal red line

Pull the last three months of complaint data and judge it against 0.10%, not 0.3%.

Don’t treat everything below Google’s mandatory threshold as healthy. Flag every week or month above 0.10%, then look at what was being sent during those periods.

That one change can expose deliverability pressure that a compliance-focused dashboard would continue showing as perfectly acceptable.

Then break one number into three

A blended complaint rate can hide the source of the problem. Instead, separate at least:

Welcome flows → Promotional campaigns → Win-back sends

An apparel brand, for example, could appear relatively healthy with a 0.18% blended complaint rate while promotional sends alone are generating 0.31%. Looking only at the account-wide number would hide a campaign category that’s already above the mandatory threshold entirely.

The useful question therefore isn’t simply, “What’s our spam rate?”

It’s “Which type of email is creating it?”

The number doesn’t even need to cross 0.10% to become dangerous

Direction matters before the threshold does. Consider a complaint rate moving like this:

Week 1: 0.04% → Week 2: 0.06% → Week 3: 0.08%

Every week is technically healthy against the tighter benchmark. But the trajectory is telling you something the latest number alone doesn’t: complaints have doubled in three weeks.

That’s the moment to investigate send frequency, campaign type, targeting and recent list changes, rather than waiting for the fourth or fifth week to confirm what the direction was already showing.

The better monitoring system therefore has three layers: 0.10% as the working ceiling, campaign-level segmentation to locate the source, and week-over-week movement as the early-warning system.

Doing all three manually means repeatedly pulling different cuts of the same deliverability data.

This kind of monitoring is exactly where connecting campaign data to the AI tools already in your workflow becomes useful.

Omnisend connects directly with ChatGPT and Claude, letting you interrogate campaign, automation and subscriber data without opening another dashboard, including checks designed to catch deliverability problems such as rising bounce rates before they start costing opens.

Its new guide breaks down 10 practical ways to run these checks and other email diagnostics with AI. Read the guide.

The number that gets a sender in trouble and the number associated with healthy placement are no longer necessarily the same.

Waiting for the first one means potentially discovering the problem long after the second one started warning you.

Together with Levanta

The biggest holiday mistake brands make? Trying to build a creator program in November.

The strongest holiday programs are built over the 90 days leading up to peak shopping season. That is when brands recruit the right partners, test incentives, and build enough momentum to scale when demand arrives.

Trusted by 3,000+ eCommerce brands, Levanta created The 90-Day Holiday Sprint, a free step-by-step playbook to:

Recruit and activate creators before their holiday calendars fill
Build competitive commission structures without sacrificing margin
Use Day 30, 60, and 90 checkpoints to create a program ready to scale for BFCM

Don’t wait until November to build the creator program you will wish you already had. Your 90-day countdown starts now.

Download the Free Playbook

🔄 Google and ChatGPT are feeding each other

ChatGPT is becoming a bigger source of B2B traffic, but Google remains an important gateway into ChatGPT itself. The emerging discovery journey looks less like AI replacing search and more like users moving between both.

The Breakdown:

1. ChatGPT Referrals Surge - Demandbase says monthly ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites jumped 303%, from 645K to 2.6M. Perplexity declined, while Gemini and Claude stayed flat.

2. Robots.txt Gets Murky - OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply to ChatGPT-User when a person requests a page. TollBit found it reached disallowed pages on more sites than comparable bots.

3. Google Feeds ChatGPT - Across 13.1B search events, ChatGPT ranked as Google’s sixth-most-clicked destination. Zero-click searches rose 2.6 points while organic clicks fell 2.8, but paid clicks remained stable.

4. Watermarks Become Optional - Google is adding a toggle to remove visible watermarks from Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria outputs. SynthID and C2PA remain, while EU users still receive mandatory labels.

AI discovery isn’t creating a clean break from traditional search. ChatGPT increasingly sends traffic outward while simultaneously depending on Google for users, creating a more interconnected discovery ecosystem.

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New SEO is getting people talking

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:59:19 GMT

Howdy Readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🗣️New SEO is getting people talking

📢 Google Ads is giving automation more control

👨‍💻 Tweet of the day

🗣️New SEO is getting people talking

For years, SEO has rewarded authority built through backlinks. Earn enough high-quality links and search engines gain confidence that your content deserves to rank. AI search is evaluating a different kind of evidence. Instead of asking who links to you, it increasingly asks where else your brand keeps appearing independently.

Those aren’t the same signal.

A site can have exceptional backlink authority and still have very little of the broader reputation AI systems look for when deciding which brands to mention.

Start by measuring presence, not links

Instead of reviewing backlink reports, map how visible your brand is across the places AI systems regularly pull information from.

A simple scorecard works well.

The exercise often explains why a brand ranks well traditionally but rarely appears in AI-generated answers.

Fix the biggest credibility gap first

Not every category carries the same weight.

If your brand is largely absent from review platforms or community discussions, those gaps are usually worth addressing before chasing another backlink campaign.

A brand that earns genuine reviews, participates in relevant communities and builds credible third-party discussion is creating the kind of distributed trust AI systems increasingly recognise. Strengthening those signals often has a greater impact on AI visibility than adding another authoritative backlink to an already strong profile.

Track the mix, not just the outcome

Revisit the scorecard every quarter.

The goal isn’t simply increasing AI mentions. It’s understanding which parts of your external presence are improving and which ones are standing still.

One category moving while another declines requires a very different plan than steady improvement across all five. Measuring category-level progress turns AI visibility from a vague objective into a set of specific priorities.

That’s exactly the comparison Semrush One helps simplify by bringing traditional search performance and AI visibility into the same workflow, making it much easier to spot where strong rankings are masking weak external authority. You can try Semrush One free for 7 days.

A strong backlink profile tells search engines your website is authoritative.

Being discussed consistently across trusted sources tells AI systems your brand is.

Together with Insense

You don’t have a creator problem. You have a workflow problem.

A creator disappears. A shipment stalls. Your paid team waits another week for content while someone tracks contracts and payments across separate tools.

Insense replaces that workflow with one self-serve platform.

One place to receive creator matches from 100,000+ vetted profiles, run briefs, ship product, automate contracts and payments, and own full lifetime content rights.

The results speak for themselves:

Nurture Life cut turnaround time from 2 months to 2 weeks using just one marketer and Insense
Solawave received 180+ ad-ready assets in a single month by simply shipping products
Matys Health achieved 12× reach through Spark Ads on TikTok

More than 3,500 brands use Insense, with first creator applications arriving within 48 hours and teams saving 40+ hours monthly.

Book a free strategy call by August 28 and get $200 platform credits towards your first campaign!

📢 Google ads is giving automation more control

Google is making several changes across Search, Performance Max, and Shopping. The common thread is clear: more decisions are moving from advertiser-controlled settings toward Google’s automated systems.

The Breakdown:

1. Language Control Goes - Campaign-level language targeting disappears from Search in late September. Google will instead use creative language, landing pages, and its own understanding of what languages each user knows.

2. Local Intent Expands - Performance Max can now prioritize people actively looking for nearby businesses across Maps, Waze, and Search. The catch is that Merchant Center feeds and online conversion goals are incompatible with the feature.

3. Policies Get Clearer - Google has rewritten its YouTube and Discover Feed ad requirements for readability. There are no new rules or enforcement changes, so advertisers do not need to modify campaigns.

4. “Sponsored” Gets Softer - Google is testing “Featured Store” as a replacement for “Sponsored” on a Shopping ad unit, alongside “Shop these top products.” The placement remains advertising, but the presentation feels more like a recommendation.

Google Ads is gradually reducing explicit advertiser controls while letting automation decide more about eligibility and delivery. For marketers, creative, landing pages, campaign architecture, and Google’s interpretation of intent are becoming increasingly important.

🗝️ Tweet of the Day

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