Paid Ads

Google Ads, Meta, TikTok and programmatic breakdowns for practitioners. What is breaking, what is working, what CMOs are spending on now.

Pop art illustration of shopping price tags with bold red strikethrough lines and crossed-out prices

Amazon's April 23 Deadline Will Strip Thousands of Sellers' Strikethrough Prices Overnight

Amazon just told every third-party seller that their List Price needs to be provable, not just plausible. Starting April 23, the company will require sellers to substantiate submitted List Prices through one of two methods: either the product was offered at that price at another retailer recently, or customers actually

Pop art illustration of search results with fading sponsored labels and magnifying glass revealing hidden advertisements

Bing's Vanishing Ad Labels Are a Regulatory Time Bomb Disguised as a UX Test

Microsoft calls it a "user-experience optimization." That's a very polished way to describe making your ad labels nearly invisible. Bing is currently testing Sponsored labels so faint they're barely distinguishable from the white background behind them. The text is there, technically. A user squinting

Pop art illustration of PMax campaign dashboard with seasonal creative themes overlaying Google Ads interface elements

Google Spent Three Years Saying Trust PMax. Now They Are Handing the Controls Back.

Google spent the last three years telling PMax advertisers to trust the algorithm. Hand over your assets, set a budget, let the machine figure out where to show what. Now they're quietly adding features that do the exact opposite: giving advertisers more granular creative control inside the campaigns

Pop art illustration of a grocery cart with digital price tags and a broken analytics dashboard displaying ChatGPT ad data errors

Albertsons Can't See Its Own ChatGPT Ad Data. They're Still Spending.

Albertsons is spending at least $200,000 on a platform where they cannot see their own campaign data. That fact, by itself, probably would not be worth writing about. Brands blow experimental budgets all the time. But Albertsons is not some startup throwing money at the latest shiny object. This

Pop art illustration of Meta Ads Manager with a glowing natural language text input replacing traditional dropdown targeting menus

Meta Wants You to Describe Your Audience in Plain English. That Is Not a Convenience Feature.

Meta rolled out a text box. That's the most reductive way to describe what happened. Inside Advantage+ targeting, there's now a tab called "Describe Your Audience" where you type a plain-English description of who you want to reach. Up to 2,000 characters. Meta&

Pop art illustration of CTV screens showing static and warning signals with bold colors and Ben-Day dots

CTV Ad Fraud in 2026: A Media Buyer's Audit Guide

Connected TV advertising is forecast to hit roughly $38 billion in US spend this year. That makes it the fastest-growing video channel by a comfortable margin. It also makes it the most attractive target for fraud operators since early programmatic display. Here's what I find genuinely unsettling: depending

Pop art illustration of a B2B sales funnel with confused algorithm gears reacting to a vacation calendar

Your B2B Ad Algorithm Thinks Sales Team Vacations Are Targeting Problems

If you run B2B paid media with sales cycles longer than 30 days, there is a good chance your ad algorithm is solving the wrong problem. Not because the platform is broken. Because you are feeding it data that makes it confused about what "good" looks like. A