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The Top Three

🏆 THE INDUSTRY’S MOST IMPORTANT STORIES TODAY

🥇 META’S AD SALES EASE TARIFF FEARS

Meta $META ( ▲ 1.62% ) posted strong Q1 results, with ad revenue up 16% year-over-year to $42.3 billion, beating expectations. Advertisers continued to spend, despite Meta’s pullback on fact-checking and shifting U.S. trade policy. Online commerce was the main growth driver, though spend from Asia-based e-commerce firms softened, possibly due to tariff-related impacts. Looking ahead, Meta projects Q2 revenue between $42.5B and $45.5B, but flagged legal headwinds in the U.S. and EU as potential growth risks. more

• Ad impressions for its family of apps increased 5% YoY.

• Price-per-ad jumped 10% YoY.

• Daily active people hit 3.4 billion, up 6% for March 2025.

🥈 TIKTOK SENDS LEADS TO THE COMPETITION

TikTok’s new ad goal: exit the chat. 🏃 TikTok has added a new Promote ad goal that lets brands invite customers to chat on third-party messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, instead of TikTok's inbox. The feature, similar to Meta’s “Boost,” only targets users who already have these messaging apps installed. more

• The option is available for lead-generation campaigns via Promote.

• It currently only supports links to LINE, Zalo, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

🥉 CHATGPT: THE AFFILIATE KILLER

OpenAI introduced product recommendations into ChatGPT this week, creating a potential opportunity for advertising, but a great piece up on eMarketer today looks at how this move could spell doom for affiliate marketers. OpenAI doesn’t run ads yet, but product recommendations move it closer to that model. The problem is that much of ChatGPT’s product data likely comes from affiliate publishers like the New York Times' Wirecutter, which it can scrape, personalize, and regurgitate.

• While OpenAI has licensing deals with some publishers, it may need to introduce revenue-sharing or adjust fees to avoid unfair use claims.

• Affiliate sites, already under pressure, may see this as a threat... or a chance to forge new data-sharing agreements with OpenAI.

• 🚨 For brands, it’s both a warning and an opportunity: make sure your products are showing up in ChatGPT’s results, and prepare for affiliate partnerships beyond traditional media sites.

Today’s Other News

📰 EVERYTHING ELSE THAT MATTERS

Advertising 📣

• Microsoft Bing $MSFT ( ▲ 0.01% ) ad revenue is up 21% (again). In its Q3 2025 earnings report, the company posted a 21% YoY increase in search and advertising revenue, the same growth rate as the previous quarter. Overall revenue hit $70.1 billion, up 13%. more

• Google is testing AdSense ads within AI Chatbots, including AI search apps iAsk and Liner, with plans to expand to other chatbot providers. This is a big expansion for the ad format, which has traditionally displayed ads in search results and websites. more

• Amazon Ads $AMZN ( ▲ 2.0% ) has introduced a new feature for Sponsored Products campaigns, letting advertisers target business customers. Under the "Sites" option in ad groups, you can now choose from two options:

  1. Amazon and beyond – Ads will appear across Amazon retail, Amazon Business, and off-Amazon placements.

  2. Amazon Business – Ads will be shown exclusively on Amazon Business, directly targeting B2B shoppers.

• Nielsen $NLSN ( ▲ 0.07% ) launched The Ad Supported Gauge today, a new quarterly report expanding on its Gauge TV and streaming measurement chart, offering a broader view of how TV delivers ads across broadcast, cable, and streaming. more

  • In Q1 of this year, 72.5% of TV viewing was on ad-supported platforms compared with 27.5% for ad-free platforms.

  • Cable and broadcast each accounted for around 29% of total viewing, combining to make up 58% of all ad-supported TV.

• Comcast-owned $CMCSA ( ▼ 0.29% )  FreeWheel has launched new tools for brands and publishers on streaming platforms via its FreeWheel Streaming Hub, including advanced customizations, improved data signals, and optimized bidding. Another feature for advertisers is dynamic floor pricing, while FreeWheel is also standardizing signals across content sources. more

Social Media 📱

• Threads now has more than 350 million monthly active users, still trailing behind X's reported 600M, but slowly closing the gap. Threads also saw a 35% increase in time spent on the app. more

• Microsoft is once again reporting “record engagement” on LinkedIn, with sessions up 9%. The company has made the same claim in nearly every quarterly update since 2018 (except one), with session growth being the only metric we have to go off of. That growth, however, is slowing, down from 11% in the same period last year. more

  • Revenue increased 7% YoY.

  • Time spent watching video posts is up 36%.

  • Comments have increased 32%.

• Pinterest $PINS ( ▲ 1.3% ) is (finally) cracking down on the AI slop overrunning its platform. The company will start labelling AI-generated images and plans to roll out a “see fewer” option for AI-generated Pins in cluttered categories like beauty and art. No word yet on when the feature will launch, just that it’s coming “soon.” more

AI 🤖 

• AI is changing how B2B buyers discover brands, but marketers aren’t keeping up. eMarketer reports that while GenAI tools now surface structured, context-rich content, many brands are still relying on old-school SEO tactics. Despite rising expectations, SEO ranks low on the investment list, with only 11% of B2B marketers prioritizing it for 2024, leaving a gap for forward-thinking brands to gain a visibility advantage.

LOL 🤣

• 👀 “You Wouldn’t Steal a Font”: One of the internet’s most iconic anti-piracy ads turns out to be a little pirated itself. The “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” campaign from the early 2000s, part of the “Piracy. It’s a Crime” series, used a pirated font to spell out its slogan. While it was believed to feature the FF Confidential font, it actually used a clone called Xband Rough. The font creator confirmed the knockoff was an illegal ripoff of his work, adding, “The irony is extremely funny indeed.” more

The Ticker

📈 HOW DIGITAL MARKETING STOCKS ARE DOING

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