German court finds Meta liable for scam ads

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

⚖️ German court finds Meta liable for scam ads

🥤 PepsiCo debuts its first 'House of Brands' campaign

📸 Analysis reveals creator collab posts outperform standard Instagram content

📌 Pinterest is turning visual search into a new ad placement for you

🎯 Sam's Club can now target buyers a year before they buy

Plus: 💡 5 strategies & tactics, 🎁 6 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

⚖️ German court finds Meta liable for scam ads LINK

A court in Frankfurt has ruled that Meta is responsible for fake investment ads posted by others on Facebook and Instagram, ordering the company to take the ads down and pay damages in a decision that can still be appealed.

Finanzfluss, a German personal finance platform, and co-founder Thomas Kehl sued after scammers used the firm's trademarked logo and his photo, reporting nearly 260 similar violations to Meta in August 2024, with some posts staying online for 62 days.

The judges said Meta controls what users see through its algorithms and decides when ads appear, so it loses the hosting protection the EU's Digital Services Act allows, following a June ruling by the EU's top court.

🥤 PepsiCo debuts its first 'House of Brands' campaign LINK

PepsiCo has rolled out its first corporate brand campaign, called 'House of Brands', built to help consumers link its many products, including Cheetos and Gatorade, with the overall PepsiCo company name.

Even though PepsiCo owns more than 500 brands, such as Walkers, Quaker Oats and the newer Poppi, only 18% of consumers connect the company with brands other than Pepsi, according to the company.

The social-first campaign is led by a video showing well-known brands pitching to claim the company name, with fictional names like "CheetosCo" and "QuakerCo", following a recent refresh of PepsiCo's corporate identity.

📸 Analysis reveals creator collab posts outperform standard Instagram content LINK

An analysis from social media management platform Emplifi found that Instagram posts made through the collaboration feature draw stronger organic engagement than a brand's standard posts, with creator-initiated collaborations producing the biggest gains.

The study covered 520,198 posts and accepted collaborations across 3,791 Instagram profiles from January 1 to June 30, 2026, and found accepted collaboration posts from XS brands earned five times more interactions than those brands' standard posts.

Reels saw the largest lift from collaboration among post types, especially creator-initiated ones, while accepted collaborations reached more than five times the shares and reposts of non-collaboration posts in the ecommerce and retail verticals.

📌 Pinterest is turning visual search into a new ad placement for you LINK

Pinterest is rolling out Visual Search Ads, a performance format that lets advertisers bid for prominent spots while users visually search, compare products and get closer to buying, reaching people based on what they look at rather than type.

The ads show up within Pinterest Search Results and Pin closeups, powered by Pinterest Intelligence, the company's AI for reading images, products and intent, and they work with the Pinterest Performance+ suite for lower-funnel objectives.

Pinterest says users run more than 80 billion searches each month, most of them visual and over half carrying commercial intent, and Visual Search Ads enter beta for eligible advertisers across all its ad markets in the coming weeks.

🎯 Sam's Club can now target buyers a year before they buy LINK

Sam's Club Connect started selling targeting products on September 17 that predict what members will buy rather than what they already bought, in some cases reaching households a full year before the purchase happens.

Predictive Precision Targeting builds segments of households with no prior purchase history in a category, and Procter and Gamble tested it with Cascade Platinum pods, reaching 800,000 households at what the company calls 94 per cent accuracy.

Sam's Club says spending on Cascade Platinum Plus rose 71 per cent against typical campaigns, though no media spend, campaign duration, control group design or measurement partner was disclosed for the single pilot.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> Why your highest-converting B2B landing page might be hurting your pipeline: Judge landing pages by how many qualified prospects and deals they produce, not raw conversion rate, since easy-to-convert pages often attract poor-fit leads.

> Cyber5 Prep: Are You Ready for Paid Media’s Biggest Week?: Start preparing Google and Meta ads for Thanksgiving-through-Cyber-Monday now, because testing and budgeting in September avoids the costly mistakes of a November scramble.

> Faster AI can make slow marketing processes worse: Fix broken workflows before adding AI, because faster tools only expose bottlenecks like unclear approvals and unowned analytics rather than removing them.

> IKEA has a team just for reactive posts: IKEA runs a dedicated rapid-response team that posts on cultural moments only when there's a genuinely IKEA-specific angle, avoiding the forced trend-jumping that draws backlash.

> Your marketing automation needs more context: Add checks for a customer's past actions and current stage before automated messages fire, so triggers respond to the relationship rather than treating each signal as a fresh start.

Other news you might like

• Creator content preferred in AI recommendations: Here’s what the numbers sayLINK

• Google Ads’ Smart Bidding update appears to have ended bid suppressionLINK

• Overwolf Ads Launches In-Game Audience MapLINK

• Google Search Drops Free Product Listings From European Economic AreaLINK

• Google Tightens the Leash: How New Ads Controls Are Reshaping What Advertisers Can — and Cannot — DoLINK

• Google Search Bar Results Page Testing AI Mode ButtonLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Coldtea.ai: automates QA and monitoring with AI agents that catch post-deployment bugs, flag issues, and generate actionable fix tasks for your teamLINK

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

Kane CLI: drive real Chrome with plain-English commands to test web apps and extract data, replacing brittle selectors and scripts for developers, QA, and AI agents.LINK

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

Openbase: helps developers pick npm packages by comparing popularity, maintenance activity, and reliability metrics alongside real user reviewsLINK

Harden: a free, local security tool for AI coding agents that vets tool calls before they run, keeping your repo and output on your machine.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!