10 new YouTube tools you can’t live without

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are putting on their game face:

↘️ META: $11.55 | ↘️ TIKTOK: $2.46 | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $12.77

In this week’s edition: 

• 🛒 Amazon wants to sell you the faucet (and find someone to install it)

• LinkedIn thinks your next B2B buy needs an influencer strategy 💼

• 🔎 Your first-party data just got a couple of new columns

But first…

♾️ 10 new YouTube updates you can’t live without

YouTube’s Made on YouTube event just unveiled a massive slate of AI, commerce, and creator tools. Here is what you need to know:

🛍️ For Brands & Commerce:

• Expanded Affiliate Shopping: Creators can tag products across 35 countries, with tags automatically localized for the viewer. 

• Targeted Brand Invites: Brands can now search for specific creators and send direct invitations for sponsored deals.

🛒 For Viewers & Shoppers:

• Custom Feeds: Users can prompt the algorithm to generate and save alternate video feeds. 

• Ask YouTube for Shopping: A new in-stream AI assistant will answer product questions during shopping streams. 

• Real-Time Livestream Dubbing: Coming early 2027, livestreams will feature AI-powered translations.

📲For Creators:

• Conversational AI Editing: Gemini Omni is coming to YouTube Create and Shorts to help creators generate and edit drafts via prompts. 

• Shorts Series: Creators can organize short-form content into episodic seasons to capitalize on the microdrama trend. 

• Multi-Thumbnail Testing: Upload up to three thumbnails per video and let YouTube serve the most relevant one to specific audiences. 

• Creator AI Tools: "Ask Studio" will serve up performance insights, automated comment moderation, and help drafting brand proposals. 

• Live Showdowns: Streamers can battle head-to-head to drive engagement and viewer donations (pictured below).

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

📦 Amazon Ads is bridging the gap between retail purchases and local services. In a new partnership with Yelp, Amazon is introducing Sponsored Services, an ad format designed to capture high-intent shoppers who purchase or search for items needing hands-on support (like a new kitchen faucet or car part). How It Works:

• Ads for local Yelp professionals are triggered dynamically when a user searches for or purchases a product requiring installation or service. 

• Listings appear natively across product detail pages, order confirmation screens, and package tracking pages. 

• Shoppers can click "Call" or "Quote" to contact local pros or request estimates directly within Amazon without needing to visit external apps.

💼 LinkedIn is expanding its B2B creator marketing tools, helping advertisers find relevant creators, build partnerships, and promote creator content to reach decision-makers.

• LinkedIn reports that 82% of B2B marketers believe creator content helps shorten sales cycles, while 63% of B2B buyers rely on creators for research and insights early in their buying process. 

• LinkedIn is testing a new Creator Discovery feature with advanced search filters, including content type, industry, job function, audience demographics, and Top Voices. Wider availability is expected in early 2027.

LinkedIn also highlighted its existing B2B advertising formats and their performance:

• Thought Leader Ads: Allow brands to promote creator posts to targeted audiences, generating what LinkedIn reports is a 252% higher CTR than standard single image ads targeting B2B buyers. 

• BrandLink: Allows advertisers to place pre-roll video ads alongside selected creator and publisher content, generating a 130% higher video completion rate compared to in-feed ads, according to LinkedIn. 

• Top Voices 360°: Connects brands with exclusive LinkedIn creator shows and offers opportunities for branded content, custom pre-roll ads, and creator partnership.

🔎 Google is testing an expanded footprint for Local Services Ads. The new format features larger images and prominent highlight boxes, helping advertisers command more attention, while pushing organic search results even further down the page.

🎯 Google is upgrading Customer Match to help advertisers squeeze more reach out of their first-party data. 

• You can now include IP addresses and interaction timestamps in your audience uploads, expanding the file format to eight columns and paving the way for higher, more accurate match rates. 

• Note that the new identifiers must be uploaded un-hashed.

🧪 Google is testing a redesigned mobile ad sitelink layout that makes individual links darker, clearer and more prominent.

🧠 Google is rolling out AI Mode Monitoring to all users globally, after previously limiting the capability to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Users can tell AI Mode what to watch for, and Google will continuously check changing information across websites, forums, social posts, real-time data sources, and its Shopping Graph, then surface updates when new information appears. Google says use cases include restaurant openings, local events, restocks, and price drops.

▶️ If you're running PMax for e-commerce, Google is almost certainly spending a chunk of your budget on YouTube, whether you have a real strategy for it or not. A new deep-dive from Search Engine Land highlights why treating PMax as a set-it-and-forget-it YouTube engine is a costly mistake.

♾️ Meta offers two distinct ways to measure multiple variables in a brand lift study, each with different capabilities—so be careful which flavor you ask for:

• Multi-cell: Two distinct cells with the same holdout. Cannot see topline market/study results, only the comparison between the two cells against the holdout.

• Parent/child: Allows you to see the breakout in reporting from two different variables along with topline study results, but there can be bleed across the “child” studies. One person could see an ad from both variables.

⏰ TikTok representatives report that sparking posts from a brand handle will not negatively affect other organic performance on that handle: “Each unique asset will have unique performance based on how much it resonates with the TikTok audience,” they tell us. “The performance of a post organically is not a reflection of how it will perform with paid, and vice versa. The delivery systems operate differently across organic and paid as organic posts run under an independent user product logic with no correlation to the ad product.”

• However, there are effects in paid and organic traffic when comments, duet, stitch, download, share, and music clickability functions are set in a different status on the user side and in Ads Manager, respectively. For example, if the Comment Status on an organic post is ON but it's toggled to OFF in Ads Manager, then comments on the organic post will be disabled.

👻Snapchat is actively pitching itself to B2B advertisers, positioning the platform as a way to influence decision-makers even when it isn’t the final conversion channel.

• Snap’s argument is that business audiences aren’t only consuming professional content on traditional work-focused platforms, giving advertisers an opportunity to expand their B2B media strategy beyond typical channels. 

• Recent updates like expanded optimization tools and Dynamic Product Ads give advertisers more ways to connect upper-funnel reach with measurable performance.

💾 Microsoft Advertising has opened Excluded Content Terms to all accounts, filling a critical brand safety gap by targeting individual page titles rather than relying solely on broad site categories or domain blocklists.

• Page-Title Filtering: Block up to 1,000 specific keywords in webpage titles across Search, Shopping, Audience, and Performance Max campaigns. 

• Hierarchy Controls: Exclusions can be set at the campaign or account level—just note that campaign-level additions inherit globally across your entire account.

🧠 OpenAI claims that ChatGPT ads have no effect on ChatGPT results. But some marketers are reporting that “organic” traffic rises when campaigns are on and drops when they pause, sometimes in the same day. One advertiser saw organic ChatGPT traffic jump 5x during a campaign. Another team nearly cut a small test budget before finding its client’s biggest deal of the year in the CRM, sourced “organically” through ChatGPT.

OpenAI denies any tampering. So what’s happening? One explanation could be a tracking problem: ChatGPT ad clicks without UTM tags show up in Google Analytics as regular chatgpt.com referrals, mixed in with free mentions. When the ads stop, the “organic” traffic stops with them.

The reporting also raises an auditability concern: nobody outside OpenAI can confirm what is happening, while answers shift with every question and the ad slot rotates constantly. If marketers conclude that ads help brands get mentioned, ad spend could start to look like the price of visibility—and budgets for earning organic mentions could become harder to defend when the two numbers can’t be separated.

🙃 Everything is advertising: Part 4,395

✈️ Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Well, yes, it is a plane, but now it comes with a media kit! Delta Air Lines has announced plans to launch its own advertising business, following United's 2024 debut of Kinective Media. That venture enabled marketers to target passengers through both in-app and in-flight ads. An official takeoff date for Delta's new business has not yet been announced.

🍔 And Delta’s not flying solo. McDonald's announced plans to launch its own media network, aiming for $1 billion in ad revenue by tapping into its 70 million daily global customers across app ads, ordering kiosks, menu boards, and restaurants.

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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This week’s edition of the Thread was created by Jess Dashner, Anoushka Madan, Kayleigh McDonald, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Liana Giacobbe, Mariya Samardzhieva, and Carly Carioli.