by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)

Today's News

• GOOGLE ADS • Cookies Will Never Die, Will They?

• PAYMENTS • Stripe’s Big Platform Updates

• THREADS • Now Gets More Daily Users Than X

• REDDIT • New Dynamic Product Ads Available

• AI • How’s Meta’s AI? You Know, Meh. Like the Rest

• VIDEO • Finally, an “Enhance!” Tool That Works?

GOOGLE ADS • Cookies Will Never Die, Will They?

Every other week, our Google ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales walks us through the latest platform changes. Jyll spent six years at Google in a senior ad role, and today runs the Inside Google Ads training program.¹

This week:

• Google has delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies until 2025 due to privacy concerns.

• Third-party cookies are text files that websites use to remember information about users.

• Alternative solutions, such as the Topics API and FLOC, have not been successful in delivering the desired results for advertisers.

• Retail companies and banks are developing their own ad platforms to leverage their first-party data.

Be sure to check out Jyll’s Inside Google Ads training program¹

PAYMENTS • Stripe’s Big Platform Updates

It was a big day for the payments processor Stripe today, announcing it would no longer require its customers to use its payment services in order to access other tools, like fraud detection and invoicing.

Stripe also announced some other things:

• AI tools to try to personalize the payment flow and make more intelligent A/B tests

• They’re doubling the number of payment methods to 100

• A new fraud detection tool that uses natural language commands

• More options for its subscription and billing products

THREADS • Now Gets More Daily Users Than X

Some surprising numbers from Threads — that’s Meta’s attempt to move into the void left by X (formerly Twitter) — numbers that show their plan might be working.

And while you might be tempted to think that’s just an anomaly, or the Taylor Swift effect, it turns out Threads has had more daily actives in the U.S. than X since December, when Threads became Apple's most downloaded app.

Today, Threads is in third place among the free apps. X is in 78th place.

This might be why Meta seems to be accelerating plans to open the app up for ad placements.

Of course, those are daily actives, not monthly actives. In the battle for the less active users:

All that said, we’ll likely have more numbers to chew on soon — Meta reports first Q1 results after the market closes tonight.

REDDIT • New Dynamic Product Ads Available

Reddit has added Dynamic Product Ads to its ads platform.

Here’s how they describe the new format:

Dynamic product ads have been in private testing for a few months; Reddit claims the new format drove 1.9x greater ROAS when compared to old-school conversion campaigns.

They are now available globally in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.

Reddit today also announced some updates to its mobile app, which should let comments load faster among other changes. Reddit’s own mobile app is widely considered to be mediocre at best. The company used to welcome a host of excellent third-party apps, like Apollo, but many of those had to close after Reddit introduced new and eye-wateringly higher API pricing.

AI • How’s Meta’s AI? You Know, Meh. Like the Rest

Meta is the latest entrant in a growing list of companies jamming AI into their apps — whether users want it or not.

If you think I’m exaggerating, go look at the comments under Instagram’s head who was “proud to announce” that they’d replaced Search with an AI prompt field. I scrolled through about 100 replies — not one was positive. Most of them were along the theme of “Nobody is asking for this” and “How do I turn this off?” (Spoiler alert, you can’t.)

It’s been a few days now, and people have put the AI to the test — how is it? Not great.

When the reporter asked Meta’s AI about himself, it reported back that he worked at The Verge, which he never has.

Also, it’s hilariously bad at basic math. Asking it for a four-syllable word will offer a three-syllable word instead. To be fair, Gemini and ChatGPT also struggle with this kind of query.

But it’s not all terrible. Apparently Meta’s AI is good at editing existing text.

It’s also pretty good at image generation, and faster too — though it also has trouble with limbs and fingers and eyes, like the other models.

So, probably put Meta’s AI in the same boat as the others — as U.S. President Ronald Reagan once said: “Trust, but verify.”

VIDEO • Finally, an “Enhance!” Tool That Works?

Among the many tropes of TV crime dramas, perhaps the most well-known — certainly the most mocked — is this: They have a photo of the suspect, he’s wearing glasses, and we can see something in his glasses.

If only there were a way to, I don’t know, press a magical Enhance button!

Turns out, we might not be too far from that future.

Adobe researchers say they’ve developed a new AI model capable of upscaling videos up to eight times their original resolution.

They released it as a research preview about a week ago, and some industry experts say the model can indeed upscale to high-definition videos without the common distortions seen in other methods.

This kind of tech is part of a group called Generative Adversarial Networks and they’re commonly used for enhancing still images. But they often falter with videos, typically causing flickering and other inconsistencies.

Adobe's tech, which it calls VideoGigaGAN, can maintain natural textures and details so fine, you might not realize it had been enhanced. [examples]

In particular, it can add skin textures and fine hairs that remain stable even during motion—creating a lifelike appearance without the artificial "jitters" often associated with other upscaling technologies.

As I said, this is just a research preview for now. Adobe hasn’t commented on any plans for consumer release.

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