Follow TiDM: Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, others 
Follow Tod: Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, and others

The Top Three 🏆

The industry’s most important stories today.

🥇 TIKTOK’S AD CHIEF DUCKS OUT

TikTok’s head of ad sales in North America, is leaving the company, according to an internal memo. Sameer Singh’s exit comes just as TikTok faces a looming U.S. ban set to hit in just 12 days on January 19, 2025. more

• Singh joined ByteDance in 2019 and played a pivotal role in driving TikTok's North American ad business.

• He will remain with the company until the end of February.

• TikTok plans to “immediately begin the search” for a new leader to oversee its NA ad operations.

🥈 VULNERABILITY EXPOSES 100K+ WORDPRESS SITES

A high-severity WordPress vulnerability has been discovered, which lets attackers inject arbitrary shortcodes into sites using the Popular Posts plugin, without needing a user account. WordPress Popular Posts is installed on more than 100,000 websites, and lets sites display the most popular posts within any given time period. more

• All versions up to and including version 7.1.0 are vulnerable.

• The issue is due to the software letting users execute an action that does not properly validate a value before running do_shortcode. This lets attackers, without a user account, run any shortcode they want.

• Wordfence recommends updating to version 7.2.0 to fix the issue.

🥉 AD MARKET SLOWS TO A CRAWL

This dip might be just the beginning: After a strong third quarter, driven by Olympics-related ad spend, the U.S. ad market saw a significant slowdown, with only a 0.8% increase in November, down from 1.4% in October 2024. more 

• It's unclear whether this trend marks the start of a prolonged downturn or just a brief dip following a solid 2024.

• 📉 If this slowdown persists, we might be in for a rough 2025.

Today’s Other News ☑︎

Everything else that matters.

Advertising 📣

• Comcast wants a piece of your ad budget: Comcast is targeting small and medium businesses with Universal Ads, a new platform that will launch in Q1. Partnering with major players like NBCUniversal, Roku, and Fox, it aims to bring more ad dollars to streaming services amid social media’s continued dominance. more

• Have we hit peak ad network? New networks flooded the market in 2024—financial, travel, even real estate. Experts told Digiday they predict even more ad network launches in 2025, along with consolidation. more

• Amazon will hold its second annual upfront presentation on May 12. Expect announcements about developments across Amazon Ads, Prime Video, Twitch, and more. more

Search 🔍

• Has Google dropped a January 2025 local ranking update? There are reports of major ranking changes with Google Maps and Local Search results. Many noticed drastic shifts over the weekend. It’s not yet clear if this is an algorithm update or a bug. more

• If you’ve ever seen a blank screenshot in the Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool, don’t panic. Gary Illyes of Google says that as long as the desired content is in the HTML tab, you’re good. Rendering can fail sometimes, but if it happens consistently, that could be a problem. more

• AI search engine startup Perplexity is challenging Google’s traditional auction-based ad system with a new CPM model. Marketers sponsor questions, not just keywords, with AI-driven answers. more

Social Media 📱

• Elon Musk is pushing for more positivity on X, with a coming algorithm update focusing on “informational/entertaining” content. more

AI 🤖 

• What impact will AI profiles have on user activity? A think-piece on Social Media Today looks at how AI characters are already driving big engagement in social apps. Evidence shows most users can’t tell the difference between human and AI bots. Meta knows this, and is doubling down on AI-driven engagement—even if it’s unconvincing to the more digitally savvy. more

LOL 🤣

• Microsoft is using Bing to trick users into thinking they’re on Google. If you search "Google" on Bing without signing into a Microsoft account, you’ll get a page that looks suspiciously like Google, complete with a search bar, Google-like Doodle, and familiar text. more

  • 🫠 If you can't beat them, just copy them?

Marketing Tool of the Day 🔨

Cool stuff we found on the web (not a paid placement)

Honestly, this is just such a cool idea. MenuBarGrid is a little app that turns any Google Sheet into a Mac menu bar app. A great way to easily check in on any dashboards or mission-critical numbers.

• You can change the font, size, and more

• A variety of layouts like Grid, List, Card, Flip Card, Chart, Table, Form, Kanban, Gauge, Photo, and QR Code.

• Filter items based on column values and conditions, including date-based filters like today, this week, or next week.

• Add tabs to organize different views, incorporate search bars to filter records, and use checkboxes for data modifications.

If you’ve got any data in a Google Sheet that you check several times a day (and have a Mac), this is a great little app that feels like a hack in the best possible way. 🙂 

Today’s Trivia Question 🧠

Tap your guess and you could win!

Spotted on Social 🔍

The social web’s best posts in the last 24 hours.

In partnership with