☕️ ChatGPT ads reach customers Google never could

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🛒 ChatGPT ads reach customers Google never could

🇪🇺 Retailers want AI ads exempt from disclosure rules

🎙️ YouTube is now where podcast fans find shows

📸 Instagram carousels just became richer storytelling tools

💡 + 1 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 6 other news & articles you might like

FROM OUR PARTNER

• ChatGPT ads are reaching shoppers that Google could not, as Similarweb found 83% of the queries triggering ads inside OpenAI's ChatGPT would never have activated a Google Shopping ad.
• The difference lies in how each system reads intent, since Google Shopping matches ads to declared product queries while ChatGPT surfaces ads during problem-solving conversations and research sessions where commercial intent builds gradually.
• Similarweb found that 41% of ad moments inside ChatGPT are purely research-oriented, and 46% of users who start a session with no commercial intent develop buying signals before the conversation ends.

• Europe's retailers have asked the EU to exclude AI-generated advertising from new transparency rules that will force companies to label commercial content made by artificial intelligence once the rules take effect in August.
• The rules sit in Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which makes deployers disclose artificially generated images, audio, or video, and obliges providers to embed machine-readable markers, with no minimum spend threshold and no blanket exemption for ads.
• The transparency obligations apply from 2 August 2026, with existing generative systems given until 2 December to meet the marking requirement, and non-compliance can draw fines up to €15m or 3% of global annual turnover.

• YouTube has become the main place where U.S. podcast fans find their favorite shows, accounting for 40% of discovery, roughly double the share of any other platform, according to the "Podcast Discovery Playbook 2026" from Sounds Profitable.
• Facebook ranked second at 17%, ahead of TikTok at 15%, Instagram at 14%, and internet search at 12%, while 40% of weighted U.S. listeners named YouTube as their most-used podcast app, beating Spotify at 18%.
• Among YouTube podcast users, 78% find shows through intentional search, either by title at 62% or by host or celebrity name at 30%, while trailers on YouTube drove 30% of discovery within that group.

• Instagram now lets people add a separate caption to each slide in a carousel, replacing the old setup where every slide in a post shared one single caption.
• The option appears as a toggle in the caption area, where users can choose to write multiple captions, and the rollout may take about a week to reach everyone.
• The change follows an earlier update that raised the photo limit in a carousel from 10 to 20, so users can now pair up to 20 photos with 20 individual captions.