5 blockbuster Meta announcements from Cannes

Today’s Social Media advertising rates believe we will win:

↘️ META: $9.05 | ↗️ TIKTOK: $2.47 | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $6.05

In this week’s edition: 

• 🚨 20+ Cannes updates from TikTok, Reddit, Google, and Pinterest 

•  This AI chatbot will help you with Snapchat Ads Manager  👻

• 🦉 Duolingo opens its nest to ads

But first…

♾️ Cannes you dig it? The 5 best things Meta announced this week.

Like everyone else in the advertising universe, Meta is at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this week. They took the opportunity to announce a series of key platform updates. Here’s the 5 most important for agencies and brands:

• Creator Marketplace and Partnership Hub Merger: They are bringing the Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub together into a single surface called ‘Meta Creator Marketing Hub’ launching later this year.

• Creator Marketplace Expansion: Meta is adding Facebook creators to the creator marketplace.

• Creative Approval Flow: They’re testing a creative approval flow to help advertisers get feedback and align on creative revisions in a more streamlined and integrated process.

• Language Translations: They’re adding Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Indonesian to text on media, and adding Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, German, French, Chinese, Italian, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch and Turkish to video voiceover.

• Enhanced Text Generation Tools: They’re expanding text generation in Ads Manager beyond headlines and primary text to include text that appears directly in image creative

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta is charging new location fees to cover Digital Service Taxes (DST) in certain regions. They’ll take effect July 1. For those familiar with how Google handles DSTs, this is similar. If you’re running ads in the following areas, you’ll see these fees added to your ad spend:

• Austria: 5%

• France: 3%

• Italy: 3%

• Spain: 3%

• Türkiye: 5%

• United Kingdom: 2%

👉 Note that Meta won’t cover location fees from your campaign budgets. Instead, location fees are added after your ads are delivered. Location fees apply to all ads regardless of format. They’ll be applied to WhatsApp click-to-message campaigns, as well as marketing messages that are invoiced together with ads, but not to any other WhatsApp paid messaging. All applicable taxes (e.g., Value-Added Tax) will still apply on top of the total amount.

⚒️ For good measure, Meta has announced the following suite of new tools for conversion-focused advertisers: 

• Live Video Ads: They’re bringing Live Video Ads to Instagram and expanding them globally on Facebook, making it easier for businesses to promote their live videos, reach new audiences, and drive commerce across both apps.

• Live Shopping Tools: On Facebook, marketers can use Live Shopping Tools with live video ads to create an in-stream shopping experience. Viewers can browse products, check pricing, and discover items to buy – all without leaving the live video.

• Add Products on Instagram: Creators in 22 countries can now add affiliate links or tag products from a business' catalog directly on Instagram. Businesses can make their catalogs discoverable for creators to search and tag, and creators can add affiliate links that direct people to specific products. When creators feature products in Reels and Feed, people discover and purchase products while browsing, and creators can earn commission through the affiliate links they share.

🎲 Is Zuck betting on prediction markets? The New York Times reports that Meta is building “Arena,” a standalone app that sits outside of Facebook and Instagram. It’s a direct play to steal market share from established players like Polymarket and Kalshi.

🔎 Google announced new product updates for YouTube at Cannes:

• Deeper trend data: New trending insights in the U.S. within Google Ads Insights Finder offer a more granular look at what’s popular on YouTube right now. 

• Integrated brand pulse insights: Select brand pulse report metrics now appear in Insights Finder, giving brands a clearer view of their paid and organic presence on YouTube. The report uses first-of-its-kind AI to evaluate your brand presence across YouTube by detecting brand mentions via visuals (brand logos, product shots) and language (audio, video titles).

• Insights APIs for partners: The new Content & Creator Insights API provides richer information about YouTube creators and audiences to help agencies plan their media more effectively.

• Demand Gen creative campaign tips: Gemini will soon help you optimize Demand Gen campaigns on YouTube with creative insights, like tips about which visuals to use to boost performance.

🧪 Google is testing new labels designed to spotlight ads it deems “most relevant” to your search query. It’s a subtle nudge that could shake up how users engage with paid results and force us all to rethink how we approach relevance in our own campaigns.

⏰ TikTok announced creator updates at Cannes this week focused on AI integration:

• Symphony Agent in Symphony Creative Studio is effectively a co-pilot that helps you write prompts and build high-performing ad creative in minutes.

• Symphony Agent in Content Suite, which makes it much easier to scale existing creator content by searching through thousands of videos for the content that matches your brand goals.

• Symphony Agent in TikTok One helps you generate creator briefs, identify and invite creators at scale, and discover creators who speak specific languages to adapt content across markets.

• Custom Creator Networks are being added to Content Suite, allowing advertisers to build a curated pool of creators, employees, partners, or brand advocates to receive campaign briefs or turn their existing brand-relevant videos into high-performing ads.

📺 TikTok’s multi-video ad unit has entered GA and is available at no minimum.You can add up to 4 videos in a carousel format and link each to a different location. 

💅 Pro Tip: Beware of the Smart+ toggle for TikTok audiences: at the ad set level, it doesn’t always stay enabled when duplicating a campaign, but it does seem to stay enabled when duplicating ad sets.

👻 Snapchat is launching a series of new AI powered tools:

• The first is an AI-powered chatbot in Snapchat Ads Manager that guides advertisers when they’re setting up campaigns, in addition to correcting errors and recommending enhancements.

• Snap also introduced Creator Network, which uses AI to help brands find influencers that fit their goals and audiences they want to target.

• Advertisers will now be able to connect third party AI agents to the platform to help with their Snapchat Ads.

• Snap added new creative tools to enhance existing assets on the platform’s full-screen, vertical format.

💼 LinkedIn is experimenting with collaborative posts. The company is starting to test these posts with a select group of brands and creators, with more updates to come in the following few months.

👽 Reddit introduced new ad formats at Cannes aimed at making ads feel more native to conversations on the platform:

Free-form Ad Generator: This tool pairs information from a brand’s website with related Reddit content to create unique ads designed with Reddit’s best practices in mind. Free-form ads are long-form reddit posts that combine text, images, GIFs, and videos. Now in Beta.

Tailored Creative Assets: AI-driven recommendations for headlines, visuals, and subreddit community targeting within Max campaigns, now in Beta.

Reddit Highlights: Now available for all advertisers: this embeds real Reddit conversations into ad units, helping build credibility.

Shopping Listing Ads: Reddit’s first multi-advertiser ad matches products from participating brands to the context of real conversations, surfacing highly relevant options to high-intent audiences in a carousel and mirroring how redditors already compare, contrast, and validate before they buy. In Alpha tests now.

📌 Pinterest unveiled at Cannes its plan to build AI into advertiser workflows with Business Assistant, an AI collaborator in Ads Manager and mobile, currently in a closed beta in the US.

• Unlike other AI assistants, Pinterest’s AI bot shows breakout trends in graphs and shows top pins to promote. For example, if “clean beauty routine” searches are up 42% one week and an advertiser wants to join in, Business Assistant can represent how user interest grew, alongside real trending Pins to inspire their ads.

🎯 Also introduced at Cannes, Pinterest is launching a new AI model with Performance+ campaigns to deliver the right creative variation at the right moment. 

• Through dynamic creative selection, the model can evaluate a broader set of creatives and identify the variant most likely to perform for each ad impression.

• Similar to Meta, this moves performance optimization from the ad level to the asset level, delivering a more personalized experience for users and better results for advertisers.

💬 Ask Pinterest, the platform’s own AI chatbot, is designed for exploring more conversational, visual-first and agentic shopping experiences. It’s made for more complex, multi-step decisions that don’t fit neatly into a single search, like planning a dinner party on a budget.

💅 Pro Tip: Pinterest added Amazon Storefront linking for creators, allowing creators to connect their Amazon account directly to their Pinterest account. Once connected, their affiliate link is automatically applied whenever they tag an eligible Amazon product

📦 Amazon Ads and Samsung are teaming up to turn Samsung TV Plus into a shopping destination. Viewers can now interact with ads and add items to their cart without leaving their show. Advertisers could also use call-to-actions such as “sign up today” to push engagement beyond just the TV ad.  

🎯 Meanwhile, Amazon DSP and Comscore also announced a new partnership. Proximic by Comscore, the company’s programmatic targeting tool, is making its contextual and ID-free Predictive Audience segments accessible within Amazon DSP across CTV, web, and mobile.

🧠 OpenAI announced a series of updates for self-serve advertisers on ChatGPT:

• Edit campaign budget type: All advertisers can now switch between lifetime and daily budget.

• Clone to convert CPM campaigns to CPC: You can now convert a campaign to CPC bidding.

• Custom CPM max bids: All advertisers can now set a custom max bid. Previously all impression-based campaigns had a fixed max bid.

• Bulk edits in Ads Manager UI: You can now make bulk edits to campaigns, ad groups, and ads directly in the Ads Manager interface or using CSV uploads.

🦉 Duolingo is reportedly opening its nest to advertising opportunities. Ahead of Cannes Lions, the language learning app announced Pre-Lesson Energy Sponsorships, a new 30 second opt-in video ad that rewards free users with 30 minutes of unlimited Energy and uninterrupted learning, a perk previously reserved for subscribers. With the new format, Duolingo hopes to boost engagement among free users while drawing more advertisers to the platform.

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, Mariya Samardzhieva, Sabina Saktaganova, Sims Wilson, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Kayleigh McDonald, Caitlin LaValle, and Carly Carioli.