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Here comes the Boomer influencer invasion

Here comes the Boomer influencer invasion

Plus: How often is AI wrong?

Gupta Media
March 14, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are 🥧 in the sky:

↗️ META: $7.88 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $4.45 CPM | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $6.53 CPM

In this week’s edition:

☠️ TikTok DeathWatch: Sovereign wealth fund edition
New study: AI is wrong 60% of the time 🤖
🚫 Google goes hog-wild with the negative-keyword settings

But first…

🕶️ Here comes the Boomer influencer invasion

As the influencer marketing space and creator economy continues to grow, so-called silver influencers, or creators from Gen X (45-60 years old) and boomer generations (ages 61-79) are increasingly catching the attention of brands like Progresso Soup, Walmart, Alaska Airlines, and Mountain Dew. Check out a few of these influencers yourself:

♾️ Meta is encouraging advertisers to integrate Google Analytics with its ad platform, offering early access to ad-system updates to those with established connections. According to internal Meta data, advertisers with a high-quality integration saw an additional 5% increase in conversions. They also claim setting up the connection takes just 5-10 minutes. (🧐)

🔎 This week in Google:

📡 Good news for tracking: Google is updating GTM to ensure a Google tag loads before sending events, improving tracking accuracy and data collection for advertisers. This change is scheduled for April 10.

🛠 Google is testing channel reporting for PMax campaigns with a very limited group of advertisers. In the meantime, here are other reports you can look at to get more insight into overall results:

Asset Group Reporting: This provides insights into the performance of different asset groups within your PMax campaigns.
Audience Insights: Analyze audience signals to understand which segments are driving conversions.
Search Terms Report: While PMax automates many aspects, you can still gain insight into the search terms triggering your ads.

🚫 Speaking of PMax, Google is significantly increasing the negative keyword limit for PMax campaigns, raising the cap from 100 to 10,000 per campaign, aligning with Search campaigns. This is expected to roll out within the next few weeks.

❗The latest version of Google Ads Editor has 8 new features, including the ability to create and manage YouTube Masthead ads directly within Ads Editor.

⏰ TikTok’s Ads Only Mode (the function formerly known as Dark Post) has been renamed—again—to "Don't Show on TikTok Profile."

This will make Spark Ads invisible on the Account Profile Page and Search Results, but visible in the For You Feed during the ad campaign.
On the TikTok App: Go to the designated post, click on the three dots, click 'Ad Setting' and toggle on "Don't show on TikTok Profile." (You can toggle on/off at any time.)
In TikTok Ads Manager: After “add creatives,” advertisers can turn on "Don't show on TikTok profile"

📊 Some advertisers (including us) can now view reporting with detailed conversion data at the product/SKU level for Smart+ Catalog Ads campaigns.

Go to Analytics > Custom > Reports > Create > From Template. Under Custom Reports in TikTok Ads Manager Analytics, allowlisted advertisers will be able to see a new report option called “Catalog Product Performance.”

🤖 Consider this your weekly warning to proceed with caution when it comes to AI search results: A new study from Columbia Journalism Review found that AI search engines give wrong answers 60% of the time and often cite fabricated or broken URLs. Some of their findings include:

Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts. (Ouch.)
Their observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that they tested.

☠️ TikTok DeathWatch ☠️

For those of you still keeping track: there’s less than a month to go before TikTok’s 75-day negotiation window closes—although, to be clear, there was no legal justification for the 75-day delay in the first place, which means there’s no additional legal threat when that period ends. (Anyone now hosting TikTok’s US app, including Apple, Google, and Oracle, are legally subject to billions of dollars in fines. Those companies reportedly received a written promise from the Justice Department—which isn’t necessarily legally binding—promising not to enforce the law.)

As Axios reports, there still haven't been negotiations between TikTok’s Chinese owner and prospective buyers. However, on Sunday, President Donald Trump said that his administration has been in touch with four different groups about the sale. And apparently the president hasn’t dropped the idea of creating a U.S. sovereign wealth fund to acquire part or all of TikTok, although such an acquisition would not satisfy the law passed by Congress, signed by former President Biden, and upheld by the Supreme Court.

🐘The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!

🌹 What’s better than a silver influencer? Golden, of course.

Who would've made the best influencer?

📊 Last edition’s poll results: What's the best DQ Blizzard flavor?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Reese’s Pieces Cookie Dough

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Salted Caramel Truffle

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Mint Oreo

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Turtle Pecan Cluster

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Butterfinger

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Royal New York Cheesecake

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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