paid-ads

Federal Trade Commission seal stamping a shattered smartphone with location pins blocked by a red consent required barrier in pop art halftone style

Kochava's FTC Settlement Closes the Causation Defense Every Data Broker Used

The FTC filed a settlement on May 4, 2026 barring Kochava and its subsidiary Collective Data Solutions from selling sensitive location data tied to hundreds of millions of mobile devices unless they get affirmative express consent first. The court rejected Kochava's third-party causation defense, ending the three-year case

Pop-art halftone illustration of TikTok, Google, Bing, Meta, LinkedIn and X logos with click fraud percentages floating around them in red and yellow comic style

Lunio Audited 2.7B Clicks. TikTok Was 24% Fake, Google Was 7.57%.

Lunio's 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report analyzed 2.7 billion paid ad clicks across six major networks and reported TikTok at 24.20% invalid traffic, LinkedIn at 19.88%, X at 12.79%, Bing at 10.32%, Meta at 8.20%, and Google at 7.57%. The 17-point

Pop-art Chrome extension icon leaking dollar signs through a magnifying glass over a privacy policy scroll, user silhouettes flowing into a data broker pipe.

82 Chrome Extensions Sell 6.5M Users' Browsing Data and It's Perfectly Legal

Security firm LayerX audited 6,666 Chrome Web Store privacy policies in April 2026 and found 82 extensions, including Stands AdBlocker (3M users) and Poper Blocker (2M users), explicitly reserving the right to resell user browsing data to third parties. Combined reach: more than 6.5 million users. Every one

Pop-art illustration of stacked Meta ad creative tiles in three aspect ratios with halftone dots and a bar chart showing per-asset performance reporting

Meta's New Creative Workflow Reports Per Asset. Flexible Format Never Did.

Meta started removing Flexible Format from new ad setups in March 2026 and rolled out a replacement creative workflow that lets advertisers upload up to 10 images and videos per ad, with three aspect ratios per creative and per-asset performance reporting. Existing Flexible ads keep running, but new and duplicated

Pop-art smartphone showing a Google search ad tagged with a rounded AI pill label and a sponsored product grid mixing organic and ad tiles below.

Google's Undefined 'AI' Label Just Made Your AI Max Creative a CTR Variable

Google began testing an "AI" label on mobile search ads in late April 2026, with two design variants (a rounded pill background and an information icon) and neither of which surfaces a tooltip or explanation when tapped. The label is undefined to users, which means Google can ship

Pop art illustration of a Google Ads dashboard with a glowing AI Brief preview pane, plain English instruction notes, and the Gemini sparkle icon

Google's AI Brief Lets You Preview AI Max Output Before It Ships

Google announced AI Brief on April 30, 2026: a Gemini-powered control inside AI Max for Search that takes natural-language instructions across messaging, matching, and audience guidelines. The shift that matters is the preview pane, which surfaces sample assets and search matches before any spend leaves the account. Until AI Brief,

Pop-art illustration of Meta and Google logos shaking hands with crossed fingers behind their backs in front of an IAB Tech Lab ECAPI 1.0 specification document and server racks

Meta and Google Helped Write ECAPI 1.0 Without Promising to Honor It

The IAB Tech Lab finalized ECAPI 1.0 on May 3, 2026, a server-to-server specification that defines 42 standard marketing events advertisers can send to any participating platform using one shared payload. Meta, Google, TikTok USA, Walmart, and Roku helped author it, but none have publicly committed to a date