Amazon gets Twitch-y for holiday shopping

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are giving last-minute DIY costume chaos:

↗️ META: $6.87 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $4.29 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $11.08 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 👻 Spooky Szn? Threads launches “Ghost Posts”

• Reddit claims its ads are good for AI optimization  🧠

• 😴 The 4 keys to beating ad fatigue

But first…

🎮  Amazon tees up Twitch for holiday shopping

Twitch might not be the first place you think of for Black Friday shopping deals — but for brands selling on Amazon, Amazon Ads’ new BF/CM offering could be a smart way to meet shoppers where they’re already hanging out.

The campaign enlists 10 creators to feature your product during 3-hour streams, complete with native branding, follower promos, and Twitch’s new shoppable ad unit (currently in alpha). Viewers can purchase instantly during the stream or be retargeted later across Amazon’s platforms.

• 👉 Available in the US & Canada only

• 📦 Must link to Amazon product pages; multi-ASIN support included.

• 🎯 Advertisers can rank creators from a pre-vetted pool, or Twitch can optimize invitations based on creator reach

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta just gave advertisers more ways to show up on Threads — part of its push to make the platform a bigger piece of the paid social mix. New features include:

• 4:5 image + video support (up from 1:1), for a more vertical, feed-native look

• Video ads now fully supported — all aspect ratios deliver, cropped only if taller than 4:5.

• Static carousel ads for multi-frame storytelling.

• Placement Asset Customization (PAC) lets you tailor creative specifically for Threads placements—note this does not support carousel yet

👉 Why it matters: Threads is growing fast (400M+ monthly users) — and Meta’s making it easier to extend your existing Instagram campaigns seamlessly into that feed.

🧵 Threads has also officially launched its new “Ghost Posts”—updates that disappear after 24 hours. Meta is hoping that this will take some of the pressure off of social sharing, since fewer people are posting personal updates than they used to. 

🖊️ Ahead of the holiday shopping season, Meta is pushing Email Sign-Up Offers, which require users to submit their email in order to unlock a promotion. When someone clicks your ad and shares their email, the promo code is automatically applied in the in-app browser. According to Meta, advertisers using email sign-up offers saw a 10% increase in purchases after ad clicks.

💅 Pro Tip: Using Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) to measure cross-channel performance? Meta has released updated guidance. Their key takeaways include:

• The most basic approach to take when calibrating MMM is to compare the results from MMMs and incrementality experiments to see if they generally agree.

• The most thorough approach—called comprehensive parameter calibration—uses lift experiments to adjust not just the main impact of advertising, but also other details like how long ads keep working after they run (ad stock) and how returns decrease as you spend more (media saturation). This ensures the model captures both immediate and carryover effects, giving a more complete picture of how advertising works.

⏰ TikTok’s fate remains in limbo after a dramatic US-China trade summit where the two countries were supposed to seal the deal on a sale of the platform’s American operations. According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were expected to consummate a TikTok deal when they met in South Korea this week—but now both countries are kicking the can, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying a deal could still be months away.  

⚠️ How long does it take before your creative goes stale? SearchEngineLand runs down how to spot and stop creative fatigue, including this table of rule-of-thumb refresh guidelines by platform:

Here’s what you should be thinking about: 

• Watch for falling engagement metrics: Declines in click-through rate (CTR), rising cost-per-click (CPC), or shrinking reach often signal creative fatigue—track these over time to spot when your ad's impact is fading.​

• Monitor ad frequency and performance curve: If user engagement drops rapidly week-over-week, or if audience frequency rises while reach plateaus, your ad may be nearing or exceeding its natural creative lifecycle.​

• Check for audience saturation: A stagnating reach alongside increased frequency shows your ad is repeatedly hitting the same people, making it less effective and more costly.​

• Pay attention to platform underdelivery: Sudden drops in impressions or spend despite stable budgets may mean the platform's algorithm is demoting your creative—something that can look like regular fatigue but requires prompt action to refresh the ad.​

🧠 Last week, we told you about the launch of OpenAI’s new browser, ChatGPT Atlas. It took exactly one week for the alarm bells to start ringing. To wit: There are already concerns that the browser can interact with websites in a way that looks indistinguishable from real human users, including clicking on paid advertisements, SearchEngineLand reports. Not only may this lead to wasted ad spend, it could also cause website analytics data to become unreliable.

👽 Should brands run paid Reddit ads to influence AI-powered search results? According to Reddit, the answer is: you betcha. AdWeek reports that Reddit has been encouraging brands to “lean into ad products that scale organic conversations,” based on a pitch deck they obtained called “How to Drive LLM Visibility.” Paid campaigns, the deck states, can accelerate community engagement, amplify brand mentions, and deliver compounding benefits across channels—including visibility in AI search results.

🚫 We’re less than 50 days away from Australia’s ban on social media for kids under 16. Ahead of the December 10 rollout, the Aussie government has launched a $9 million awareness campaign urging parents to “start having conversations” about what the change means for their families.

Framed as “for the good of our kids,” the effort positions the ban as a protective measure — and marks one of the first nationwide attempts to legislate kids off social entirely.

👉 Expect other countries to be watching this closely.

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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