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The Top Three 🏆

The industry’s most important stories today.

🥇 TIKTOK BAN FUELS META’S GROWTH

Meta’s ad prices are on the rise as TikTok’s U.S. ban near, shifting dollars in a big way. ADWEEK reports as advertisers brace for a U.S. without TikTok., Meta’s rising cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPMs) reflect increased competition. more

• New data shows CPMs for Reels on Facebook and Instagram surged in Q4 2024 compared to the previous year.

• YouTube stayed flat, while TikTok saw declines.

• 🎯 With TikTok’s removal, billions in ad dollars are up for grabs, and rising CPMs on Meta’s Reels already indicate a clear shift in demand.

🥈 SUPREME COURT BACKS TIKTOK BAN

💣️ Boom!: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the law potentially forcing TikTok to sell or face a ban is constitutional, citing national security concerns over its data collection practices and ties to China. more

• The ruling means that TikTok is still on track to be banned in the U.S. on Sunday unless ByteDance sells the company or President Biden extends the deadline.

• The Biden administration now appears set to delay enforcement, leaving the decision to the next administration once Trump is sworn in on Monday

🥉 BUY YOUR WAY OUT OF “COMMUNITY NOTES”

Meta’s Community Notes won’t apply to paid ads. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company reassured advertisers this week that its upcoming feature, which lets users flag false or misleading posts, will only target unpaid content like organic posts and influencer-sponsored posts Meta hasn’t been paid to boost. more

• Unlike X, where notes can target both organic and paid posts, Meta is keeping Community Notes exclusive to organic content—for now.

• Meta has yet to clarify how it will handle unpromoted posts from brands.

• A spokesman for the company said it plans to tweak the program as it rolls out across the U.S. in the coming months.

Today’s Other News ☑︎

Everything else that matters.

TikTok 🎵 

• TikTok’s competitors are vying for its share of ad dollars: more

  • Snapchat is highlighting its audience overlap with TikTok in both daily and monthly users during pitches to marketers.

  • YouTube is sweetening the deal to lure more ad spend, offering incentives like "spend X amount, get X in ad credits."

  • Pinterest is offering a percentage match for advertisers increasing their investment, starting on or before January 22.

  • Meta is also offering a percentage match for incremental spend on Reels ads or additional budgets in January.

• TikTok is prepping advertisers for a potential "pause" in advertising due to a ban set for Sunday, which it says will be "temporary," sources told The Information. Advertisers can still access TikTok’s ad-buying system even if the ban happens, though U.S. targeting will be blocked. more

  • Ads can be purchased for other countries, and past campaign data will remain available.

  • However, if Oracle, TikTok’s cloud service provider, is forced to stop hosting data, media buyers are unsure whether they’ll still be able to use the platform’s ad system.

• Triller, the video app, is making another push to attract TikTok brands and creators. It plans to offer creators full-service teams to move content and has launched a tool for backing up and uploading videos to the app. more

• 😭 This is why we can’t have nice things: After 700M+ new users flocked to RedNote, rumours suggest the app might soon segregate U.S. and foreign users from its Chinese audience to curb outside influence. A post on Reddit suggests an update could move foreign IPs to separate servers, potentially ruining the app for Chinese Americans. No official confirmation yet. more 

Google 🔍️ 

• It’s not your SEO tool, it’s Google: Reports say Google is blocking tools that scrape search results, causing global outages for popular SEO tools like SEMRush. Many SEO services are struggling to access the data they usually gather from Google's search results pages (SERPs). more

• 🚨 Beware: Scammers are hijacking Google Ads accounts from media buyers. When ad execs log into their ad accounts after a Google search, fraudsters serve fake sponsored links, hack the accounts, and use the funds to run more phishing ads and fraudulent campaigns, funneling money back to themselves. Three major account operators reported breaches last month. more

  • Google says it is investigating the issue.

• Performance Max may soon get a cousin: “Search Max” may be coming to Google Ads soon, as a "Search Max" option has started appearing in the match type report for some advertisers. more There’s not much info on Search Max yet, but Google Ads and SEO specialist Adrian Dekker has more details here.

• Google has told the European Union that it won’t add fact checks to Search or YouTube, ahead of the EU's plans to expand disinformation laws. This pushback follows Google's previous voluntary commitments, which are being formalized into law under the Digital Services Act (DSA). more

Social Media 📱

• Instagram is reviving one of its more chaotic features: A new tab in the Reels feed will show videos liked or commented on by a user’s friends. This feature is a nod to the old "activity" feed, which was removed in 2019. more

• LinkedIn’s new campaign takes aim at bad ad targeting with videos showcasing scenarios where products are being marketed to the wrong audience. By showcasing misdirected ads, LinkedIn is pitching its own AI tool, designed to save B2B brands from wasted ad spend. more

Agencies 💼

• AI agents are starting to creep into the ad world with startups like Adaly and Anthrologic pitching tools to automate grunt work. But one ad exec told Marketing Brew the tools aren't a threat to agency jobs—yet. more

Marketing Tool of the Day 🔨

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

We’re sometimes asked how WE stay on top of the news, sort the newsworthy from the random, and make sure we have the latest information.

We’ve been using Inoreader since the podcast and newsletter started more than four years ago. It’s not the cheapest tool out there, but it’s definitely the strongest.

It’s an RSS reader, but also adds newsletters, blogs, podcasts, social channels like Bluesky—all of it comes into a central dashboard for our review. A few things we like about it:

• Customizable feeds: You can set rules to filter out noise and tag important stuff automatically. For instance, we have it looking at every story published by a number of major news sites, but it will only surface stories which contain a mention of a company (e.g.., LinkedIn) or a topic (e.g., SEO) we follow.

• Newsletters: It will give you a unique email address and you use that email address to sign up to newsletters, letting you read them in the dashboard and not clutter up your email.

• Social listening & monitoring: You can follow social feeds and keep tabs on trends or competitors. We follow a number of industry hashtags on Bluesky this way.

As with all tools in this section, we don’t make anything for recommending this, so check out Inoreader. 🙂 

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