Meta's AI now builds your ad campaigns

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🤖 Meta's new AI tools can build your ad campaigns

💸 Research reveals brands outspend ads twofold on promotions

📝 X Lift turns your business URL into an ad campaign

🛒 Google is rolling out its new commerce hub to US retailers first

📊 Google now emails you your Preferred Source follower count

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

🤖 Meta's new AI tools can build your ad campaigns LINK

• Meta has announced new AI tools at Advertising Week New York that help advertisers and agencies plan, build and run campaigns, including updates to Ads Creative Studio, its AI business assistant, audience discovery and video tools.
• The AI business assistant in Ads Manager is being tested with agentic features that create campaigns, generate imagery and text, change targeting and budgets through chat prompts, with previews and approvals required before any action takes effect.
• Meta said advertisers following the assistant's recommendations typically see 5% more conversions at the same cost per conversion than those who don't, while the plain-language audience discovery in Detailed Targeting is expected by the end of the year.

💸 Research reveals brands outspend ads twofold on promotions LINK

• New research from Les Binet and Dom Boyd finds that brands now pour about twice as much money into price promotions as into paid media advertising, making promotions the single biggest part of marketing spend.
• The study, run by Censuswide with 250 marketing and insight leaders at UK consumer goods firms, found that most cannot estimate how many of their promotions turn a profit, and 80% think promotional buyers would have purchased anyway.
• The authors warn that heavy promotion raises long-term price sensitivity and damages brands, since 81% of marketers judge promotions over periods shorter than 13 weeks; they offer a six-step plan to cut loss-making promotions and reinvest in brand advertising.

📝 X Lift turns your business URL into an ad campaign LINK

• X has launched X Lift, an AI-powered tool that takes a business website address and turns it into ready-made ad campaign options, unveiled at Advertising Week New York.
• An advertiser pastes a URL, and X Lift generates possible images and copy, then builds out a wider campaign with targeting, leaving the advertiser to set only the budget while X handles the rest of the setup.
• X aims the feature at new advertisers and says self-serve advertisers grew 50% year over year in the third quarter of 2026, though the trade-off is that advertisers accept the platform's interpretation of their business, audience and message.

🛒 Google is rolling out its new commerce hub to US retailers first LINK

• Google is slowly rolling out its Merchant Center Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) integration hub to U.S. retailers, giving them new ways to link shopping and checkout experiences with Google in one place.
• Eligible merchants can pick which UCP options they want through Merchant Center, enabling cart transfer to their own website, native checkout on Google, and identity linking, instead of being tied to a single checkout experience.
• The hub is reaching the United States first, with Australia and Canada now expected to follow next year, and Google says connecting early may position merchants for commerce where AI agents help shoppers research products, build carts, and complete purchases.

📊 Google now emails you your Preferred Source follower count LINK

• Google Search Console began sending emails to some site owners yesterday showing how many people have marked their domain as a "preferred source" in Google Search, a count never shared per site before.
• Each message carries one figure labelled "Preferred source selections", dated the day before it arrived, and links to a seven-question survey asking whether this reporting should move into the Search Console dashboard.
• The number lets publishers set per-site selections beside their existing click-through data, which could test Google's claim that readers click twice as often on sources they have chosen, though the count stays only in the email for now.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> Want an AI-Built MMM You Can Trust? Start With a Thesis: Validate an AI-built marketing mix model by running it against real-world incrementality tests, since expert judgment decides which of many models to trust.

> How to track your AI citations and sources with Semrush: Use Semrush's Sources report to find the web pages AI tools cite when your brand is missing, then target those pages with content updates or outreach.

> What Digital PR Really Does for AI Search with Ross Hudgens (Siege Media): Chase media mentions on topic-relevant pages rather than raw citations, since only brands with real search demand and reusable sales-worthy data get surfaced in AI answers.

> How product thinking can make you a better SEO: Scope SEO requests around the problem and desired outcome, not a prescribed fix, so developers can build simpler, more flexible solutions that solve it.

> Multi-location SEO: How to build a scalable strategy: Build one master record per location that feeds every page and listing, keeping shared details consistent while researching local keywords market by market.

> ChatGPT Prompts for Content Creation and Social Media Analytics: Write specific ChatGPT prompts loaded with your brand, audience, and real analytics so drafts come back usable instead of generic and needing hours of editing.

Other news you might like

• Google Ads can now calculate Target ROAS from profit marginsLINK

• LTK Brings Apple Intelligence Into Creator Workflow With Auto-Draft Posting ToolLINK

• Walmart DSP gains Spotify ads with outcome tracking across 4,600+ storesLINK

• From influencers to AI, here’s what Gen Alpha thinks about your brandLINK

• Google Search Console performance report filter allows selection of multiple countriesLINK

• Amazon Ads expands Prime Video advertising with Interactive Video and Pause AdsLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Ami AI: analyzes your website, selects high-converting buyers, and plans outreach backwards from your lead goals, then runs and self-corrects campaigns automatically.LINK

CREEM 2.0: handles payments, taxes, payouts, affiliates and usage billing for software sellers, so developers can charge customers without stitching together separate tools.LINK

Clara AI SDR: engages and qualifies website visitors in real time, handles objections, books meetings, and syncs continuously with your CRMLINK

Floot MCP: connects Floot to Claude and ChatGPT so you can build full-stack apps from chat, managing databases, logins, hosting, emails, and publishing.LINK

seo-monster: a local MCP server for SEO workflows that connects Google Search Console, GA4, PageSpeed Insights, and Cloudflare using your own credentials.LINK

Easel: an open-source AI agent that discovers trends, creates content, publishes to platforms like Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Zhihu, and Bilibili, and analyzes performance.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!