Facebook ad costs just dropped for your campaigns

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

📊 Facebook ad costs just dropped for your campaigns

🎬 TikTok now funds creator series for your brand

🤖 Microsoft Advertising will now make you disclose AI in your ads

💩 DoubleVerify warns your ads bankroll AI slop

📈 How marketers are using AI search fears to win bigger budgets

Plus: 💡 6 strategies & tactics, 🎁 6 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

📊 Facebook ad costs just dropped for your campaigns LINK

Facebook advertisers paid less for clicks in 2026 while engagement rose and lead costs stayed roughly flat, according to new WordStream by LocaliQ benchmark data drawn from nearly 1,800 campaigns across many industries.

Traffic campaigns showed the biggest gains, with average cost per click dropping 14.29% year over year to $0.60 and click-through rate climbing 12.87% to 1.93%, though Shopping, Collectibles and Gifts saw CPC rise 73.53%.

Lead campaigns kept average cost per lead nearly unchanged at $27.39, with the lowest in Career and Employment at $12.30 and the highest in Dentists and Dental Services at $61.56.

🎬 TikTok now funds creator series for your brand LINK

TikTok and creator agency Amplify have started "The Next Episode," a program that pays for brands to back creator-led episodic series on the platform instead of one-off short-form posts.

The program links brands with Amplify's creator network to build social-first series in formats such as micro-dramas, interviews, game shows, docuseries and reality shows, with production support available through TikTok on top of media spend.

Brands can back a Creator Content Series, joining a creator's episodic world, or commission a Brand Content Series built around their own IP, formalizing past team-ups like "The TikTok Road Trip" with Kia and "Gatorade Games."

🤖 Microsoft Advertising will now make you disclose AI in your ads LINK

Microsoft Advertising has released new guidance requiring advertisers to disclose to consumers when AI has created or materially changed their ads, while still complying with all applicable laws on transparency, consent and deceptive content.

The rules say advertisers must preserve watermarks, metadata and provenance information showing how AI content was made, and place any required disclosure clearly and close to the content, or embed it into image and video assets.

Ads can be rejected, restricted or removed if they contain prohibited deepfakes, impersonate people or organizations, use someone's likeness or voice without authorization, omit required disclosures, or interfere with machine-readable provenance information.

💩 DoubleVerify warns your ads bankroll AI slop LINK

DoubleVerify says advertisers are funding low-quality AI-generated content, or "AI slop," with the firm detecting more than half a billion impressions of it across the internet during the first half of 2026.

In EMEA, travel was the top content category for AI slop, followed by others such as sports and technology and computing, and DoubleVerify's tools either blocked ads from serving or measured them after they appeared.

Nearly half of UK consumers, 48%, say seeing a brand advertised next to AI slop would hurt their view of it, and DV found a network of over 200 AI slop domains with the AI prompts left in the code.

📈 How marketers are using AI search fears to win bigger budgets LINK

Marketers are pointing to worries about AI search tools shifting how people shop as a reason to push for larger media budgets and more upper-funnel brand work, rather than relying on GEO tactics alone.

A Dept survey of 2,600 shoppers found 61% of U.S. consumers used an AI assistant for shopping research in the past three months, and the IAB raised its 2026 U.S. ad spend growth estimate from 9.5% to 12.3%.

State Farm, Mercedes-Benz and Hoka are each running sports-themed brand campaigns, while agency Mediaplus now tracks AI search metrics like share of model and sentiment analysis alongside traditional upper-funnel measures to justify spending.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> 3 ways to make AI safer in a live ad account by Optmyzr: Protect a live ad account from AI mistakes by feeding agents complete data, enforcing account-level limits, and requiring human approval before any change goes live.

> How to Create A Landing Page That Actually Converts: Design each landing page around one specific action, removing distractions and testing every element, because unfocused pages confuse visitors and drop conversions below the 6.6 percent median.

> Enterprise email marketing shortfalls and the upmarket features to avoid them: Fix email programs at scale by tightening sender rules, cleaning contact data, and linking email engagement to revenue, not just opens.

> How Manychat Runs a Performance Creative System Around Retention, Creators, and Weekly Testing: Optimize ads for whether viewers keep watching past three seconds, not just whether they stop, since retention reveals what actually converts.

> What I Built With Muse, Meta’s New AI Agent: Meta's new Muse agent builds working tools like calculators from your own content without coding, letting marketers automate research and repetitive tasks.

> How To Track AI Traffic To Your Website: Combine Google Analytics reports, Search Console's AI report, and server logs, because each undercounts AI-driven traffic and citations differently on its own.

Other news you might like

• Google Search Ranking Volatility Heats Up This Morning - September 15thLINK

• Study: Three in Four US TV Viewers Use Smartphones While Watching TVLINK

• Your Doctor’s Office Is An Ad Channel NowLINK

• Electronic Arts is bundling its games to make a bigger pitch to advertisersLINK

• Ad Tech Briefing: AI is reinforcing Big Tech’s grip on advertising growthLINK

• Gen Z on LinkedIn: What New Research RevealsLINK

🧰 Trending tools

ZooData: converts webpages into structured JSON to cut LLM token usage by 75%, with pre-analyzed Amazon and TikTok data for AI agents.LINK

CartAI: automates checkout across merchant sites through one API, handling payments, shipping, and order tracking without building per-site integrations.LINK

Soloop: an agentic system that plays AI CEO, CTO, and CMO, helping solo founders plan, build, and sell without hiring a teamLINK

Clara AI SDR: engages and qualifies website visitors in real time, handles objections, books meetings, and syncs with your CRM around the clock.LINK

Tines 3B: builds and runs your team's automations, apps, and AI agents in one secure platform, keeping everything unified and manageableLINK

Cekura: automates QA testing for voice and chat AI agents by simulating conversations, evaluating responses, and monitoring production calls with CI/CD integrationLINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!