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The Top Three 🏆

The industry’s most important stories today.

🥇 META CUTS AD CROPPING

✂️ Meta's done playing Edward Scissorhands with your ads: The company is updating how 'Flexible media' works. This ad format auto-optimizes your creative to target what Meta thinks will get the best response, tailored for placement and audience. But that sometimes means your ads get auto-cropped… unfavourably.

Now, Meta is cutting back on cropping for image ads — It won’t apply flexible media if it risks chopping off objects or text. more

• When you enable ‘Flexible Media,’ Meta may crop your media to meet placement size needs — but only when it thinks it’ll perform better.

• For video ads, cropping could still happen, but you can turn it off in the 'Ad creative' section at the ad level.

🥈 INSTAGRAM STORIES RANKING

Is your brand getting ‘friend zoned’: Instagram's chief Adam Mosseri recently broke down how the platform ranks Stories. According to Mosseri, Stories are designed to connect with your followers, not for discovery. If you’re looking to reach a wider audience, the Feed is still your best shot. more

So, how do you win at Stories in 2025? Instagram's ranking system focuses on three things:

1. Will users tap on your story?

2. Will they like it?

3. Will they reply with a message?

🥉 LINKEDIN SHUTS DOWN AI PROFILES

🤖 Not Ella coming for our jobs: LinkedIn has shut down accounts created for AI "co-workers" on the hunt for jobs, including a profile for an AI called Ella, that claimed, "I don’t need coffee breaks, I don’t miss deadlines, and I’ll outperform any social media team you’ve ever worked with—Guaranteed." more

• Ella's profile also flaunted impressive stats, boasting 500% follower growth and 150% engagement increases in just six months.

• The AI profiles were created by Marketeam, an Israeli company offering AI agents for marketing strategies.

• But LinkedIn wasn’t having it, stating that fake accounts violate their terms of service.

Today’s Other News ☑︎

Everything else that matters.

Google Updates 🆕 

• 🍪 Google’s cookieless measurement tool is here: Meridian, the open-source marketing mix model, is now available to marketers worldwide. The platform offers customizable options through code and model parameters, analyzing key metrics like conversions, profit, sales, and website visits, with the option to include non-media variables. more

• Reporting changes coming soon: Google is making several major changes to its ad platforms, with multiple features being deprecated or modified in early 2025. more

  • Reach report confidence will default to "All" in Display & Video 360 (DV360) and Campaign Manager 360 (CM360) by February 4, 2025.

  • Lifetime frequency caps in DV360 will be limited to 30 days by February 28, 2025.

  • Ads Creative Studio will shut down on March 25, 2025.

• 🆘 When help docs are wrong: The tech giant has reversed its stance on PMax campaign controls, clarifying that placement exclusions work via both API and UI, contradicting prior documentation and support guidance, per research from Optmyzr. more

  • Previously, Google said exclusions only worked through its user interface, not via API.

• Looker Studio announced updates, including a preview of Modern charts with new colour themes, rounded edges, line gradients, and customization options. Pivot tables now support sorting by any metric, and the 'Is Any' filter fixes blank parameter issues. more

Advertising 📣

• Meta is removing the "Audience Types" option for Advantage+ catalog ads with the sales objective as part of its push for automated ad targeting. However, advertisers can still retarget customers or find new prospects using catalog custom audiences, which target people who have interacted with specific products in the catalog. more

• 💸 ROI? We’re cooked: New data suggests brands are paying more for online customers but seeing fewer conversions. The report shows digital ad spend grew 13% last year, but online visit costs jumped 10% this year, while conversion rates dropped 6% year-over-year. The problem? Declining organic traffic, a reliance on paid channels, and higher customer expectations. more

• Meta’s new "Connect with leads in Messenger" feature lets you start conversations with leads after they submit an opt-in to receive messages. When you turn the feature on, leads will see a checkbox to agree to receive updates from your business and start a conversation on Messenger that includes their contact information. more

Social Media 📱

• Threads launched profile tagging for photos today, letting users tag relevant profiles in images, which could boost influencer collabs, brand mentions, and affiliate promotions on the app. more

Business Culture 💼

• Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s return-to-office order for federal employees this week, Digiday reports resistance to RTO mandates is growing as remote work keeps thriving in many sectors. more

  • 6 in 10 U.S. workers say they are more productive at home.

  • 73% of consumers would be less likely to buy from companies enforcing office-only policies.

  • 6 in 10 also support remote work for environmental benefits.

Marketing Tool of the Day 🔨

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

Crafting visuals to complement our marketing content can be such a time sink. We often end up juggling multiple tools to create diagrams, infographics, and other visuals to make our strategies pop.

Last night, I was watching one of those “here’s 8 web tools you probably don’t know about” videos and mentioned in it was Napkin AI.

This one’s actually great. It’s a document editor that will turn your text into infographics, charts, and infographics.

For instance, I pasted our lead story about Meta cropping into it, and it generated a bunch of options, including this one:

You can adjust the look of it, colours, fonts, and export as PNG, PDF, or SVG files, ready to be used across presentations, blogs, or social media.

Best part is it’s free and the “pro plan” also appears to be free while it’s in beta.

Today’s Trivia Question 🧠

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