The Top Three

🏆 THE INDUSTRY’S MOST IMPORTANT STORIES TODAY

🥇 META’S NEW AD PLACEMENT YOU’RE GONNA HATE

🔔 Ding dong! It’s an ad: Meta $META ( ▲ 1.67% ) is putting ads in Facebook notifications. These ads will only appear to people who’ve engaged with an ad or shown interest in a brand’s content. But still... this could be a tough sell for users who didn’t ask for it.

Other updates include:

• Expanding Advantage+ Catalog ads to partnership promotions.

• A Google-style AI model display for clothing, showing how items look on various models.

• A new check-out process for Advantage+ Shop Ads, which will let advertisers gather customer details.

• Tests for location-based ad extensions, showcasing nearby stores with available products.

🥈 THREADS DELIVERS FOR PUBLISHERS… SORT OF

🧵 Thread lightly?: Traffic referrals from Threads have seen a dramatic surge for some publishers, with Newsweek seeing its highest social referral traffic to its site on a single day in five years. According to the company, social traffic has increased nearly 10 times compared to last March, with referral traffic from Threads growing 20 times since January.

Digiday reports the boost follows Meta’s January announcement of more publisher support, particularly for political news.

• Politico reported its highest-ever referrals from Threads in February, with March referrals up nearly 50%.

• Forbes saw a 711% year-to-date increase in traffic from Threads, with its posting frequency more than doubling since December.

• Despite this growth, referral traffic from Threads still represents a small portion of overall traffic, leaving questions about its long-term value for publishers’ audience and revenue strategies.

🥉 AI ADOPTION LAGGING AMONG MARKETERS

🤖 AI? Still MIA: Most marketers are talking AI, but not walking it. A new study shows 70% of agencies, brands, and publishers have yet to fully integrate AI into their campaigns, despite acknowledging its potential. more

• Only 30% of media companies have fully integrated AI into their media strategies.

• Agencies (40%) and publishers (35%) lead in AI adoption, while brands lag behind at 20%.

• While 85% use general AI tools, fewer are using custom solutions (45%) or proprietary tools (24%).

• Half of the companies not yet using AI plan to adopt it by 2026.

Today’s Other News

📰 EVERYTHING ELSE THAT MATTERS

Advertising 📣

• Google Ads $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.57% ) now includes Performance Max (PMax) terms in the search terms report, along with new support for negative keyword terms in PMax campaigns. more

• 📰 No news? No worries: Google recently shared the results of its experiment removing some EU news publishers from search results and found no significant impact on ad revenue. The company reported only a 0.8% drop in usage, mainly from low-revenue queries, while overall ad revenue across Google properties remained flat. more

  • AKA: "We don't need news publishers, but they need us."

• Meta has a new Advantage+ creative enhancement for Catalog Ads, called Dynamic Partnership Ads, which automatically pulls top-performing Partnership Ads from other campaigns and displays them alongside items from the product catalogue in the current ad. Partnership Ads involve collaboration between an advertiser and a partner, like creators, brands, or other businesses. more

  • ⚠️ However, caution is advised when enabling this feature. Since it automatically pulls ads from other campaigns, it could result in incompatible ads being shown together.

Ad Tech & Strategy 🧑‍💻 

• TikTok is enhancing its Media Mix Modeling (MMM) capabilities with two new updates:

  1. API in Open Beta: This new API automates access to TikTok data, eliminating manual pulls and making it easier to integrate data into MMM systems.

  2. Earned Data Availability: Advertisers can now integrate earned data from Branded Mission and Branded Effect packages alongside traditional paid metrics like ad spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions.

• Amazon DSP $AMZN ( ▲ 1.0% ) has integrated Google Privacy Sandbox into its measurement tools, improving its ability to track conversions on brand websites, particularly for Chrome users who have opted out of third-party cookies. This integration also supports Amazon's Ad Relevance AI tool, enhancing ad targeting without relying on ad ID. more

• Pinterest $PINS ( 0.0% ) has poached Meta veteran Kate Hamill as its new VP of enterprise sales for North America, where she will oversee enterprise sales teams and revenue across the U.S. and Canada. Hamill spent the last 13 years at Meta, where she was managing director of industry for retail and e-commerce, and played a role in launching ad solutions such as mobile app ads and the Advantage+ suite. more

Privacy & Data Security 🔓️ 

• A technical issue caused Google to delete some users’ Timeline data in Maps... potentially ✨forever✨. The feature logs users' location history, but over the weekend, some noticed their records disappeared. Google confirmed the problem, and while those with encrypted backups may be able to recover their data manually, users without backups have lost it permanently. more

Search 🔍

• 👀 Buckle up, SEOs: Google's March 2025 Core Update, which started rolling out on March 13th, is causing significant fluctuations in search results. Tracking tools show the highest SERP volatility in more than a year the week of March 10th, with movement beginning March 16th in both the UK and U.S. markets. more

  • Google has provided little detail about the changes, and the full effects of the update may not be clear until the rollout is complete later this week.

• Google hasn't provided a specific date for when independent sites will start ranking higher in search results. While Google said it would make improvements by March 2025, not all sites impacted by previous updates will recover. Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said that the process will be gradual, and while some sites may see improvements, others may not recover due to ongoing algorithm changes. more

• Is ChatGPT's search engine a threat to Google? Or is it just another overhyped tool? Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky analyzed traffic data and found ChatGPT's traffic is a tiny fraction of Google's, with Google driving more than 1 million visits compared to ChatGPT's 1,000 — less than 0.1% of Google's traffic. Even Yahoo pulls in 36 times more.

  • The big question is whether consumers will switch, but Hawkins notes that the quality of results matters. In a search for “Best board game stores in Vaughan,” Google highlighted a top store with strong reviews, while ChatGPT provided outdated and inaccurate information. Looking at search quality, Google still leads.

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