Here comes the Innernet

Programming note: The Thread is on vacation next week for our annual #AllGuptaWeek. Follow along on Linkedin and Instagram—we’ll hit your inbox again on June 20.

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are in line for a Switch 2:

↘️ META: $8.35 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $6.04 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $9.91 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• ⏸️ Pause ads are going programmatic—on this streamer

• 6 big reveals from TikTok World ⏰

• 🤝 Nielsen just got smarter—thanks to Vizio’s 20M TVs

But first…

💡 Here comes the Innernet

Social media isn’t dead—it’s just getting more private. We’re seeing it across the board: TikTok’s algorithm rewards content, not clout, letting creators go viral without years of audience-building. Meta—the keeper of the eternal social graph—is doubling down on messaging. And what we used to think of as “social media” (public posts, growing follower counts, open communities) is quietly being replaced by smaller groups and more tightly defined interests.

The next era of social isn’t about going wide. It’s about going deep.

So who’s winning in this world? According to AdWeek, two platforms that don’t traditionally read as “social”: 

• Discord, where most servers are “micro-groups” of fewer than 20 people

• Substack, which has evolved from a 1:1 newsletter product into a white-labeled social platform, where creators can host everything from posts to podcasts to group chats

Why it matters: These platforms attract users who are largely resistant to traditional advertising. To reach them, brands will need to get creative—through native content, creator partnerships, and community-first thinking. In the Innernet, you show up differently. And you earn your way in.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

⏰ What’s new in TikTok World? A lot—and nearly all of it points to one big theme: more control, more data, and more full-funnel sophistication. Here are the highlights from TikTok’s annual business-solutions summit: 

📊 TikTok Market Scope, a "first of its kind" analytics platform that "helps advertisers to identify, understand, and activate audiences at every stage of the funnel.”

• The new dashboard segments audiences into "Awareness," "Consideration," and “Conversion” categories.

• How? “Using a rigorous, data-backed methodology, TikTok Market Scope tracks 12+ signals to identify your Consideration audience who are 14-16x more likely to convert than those in the awareness stage.” 

• Also launching: Brand Conversion Ads as a mid-funnel ad objective in select markets.

• Make sure you check out: Market Scope’s “Merchandise Module,” which displays product and category insights

• For more, TikTok’s one-pager on Market Scope is here. 

📈 The platform also announced updates to TikTok One: 

• TikTok One Insight Spotlight: “a window into what content viewers will really watch.” Real time trends, audience behavior, and brand perception—which trends, behaviors, and interests are popular with which audiences

• TikTok One Content Suite: a new dashboard that “centralizes all of the organic content that mentions your brand—from influencer marketing to TikTok Shop affiliate and earned media—into a single location, enabling you to seamlessly amplify genuine user-generated (UGC) content as Spark Ads.” The dashboard also provides a way to view all organic TikTok brand mentions, search and filtering, predicted ads performance, and “one-click authorization” to request permission to promote a video. 

👀 And keep an eye peeled for these new features:

• AI Search Center, "a new AI powered platform within TTAM that makes buying search ads on TikTok simple and easy with new keyword suggestion tools, measuring capabilities, and creative tools.” 

• Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is coming to TikTok—they’ve partnered with 15 partners including Nielsen, PMG, Tunuiti, and Ovative who are authorized to provide MMM services. Also: TikTok API integration for MMM is now in open beta.

• TikTok’s Smart+ (its AI-powered ad automation tool) is getting an upgrade: TikTok Symphony—the platform’s AI-powered creative studio—has been added to Smart+. TikTok is also touting better control over Smart+ targeting, “both over who advertisers can reach…and where their ads will appear.” And Advertisers can now add catalog ads to Smart+. 

🤳 Meanwhile, on the user side, TiKTok is rolling out “Manage Topics” to all users, providing a measure of control over the types of content they’ll see in the “For You” feed.

📈 Google Ads is—finally!—adding channel performance data within Performance Max (PMax). It’s rolling out in accounts now; here’s a glimpse of what it looks like:

📺 Fubo announced a new twist on Pause Ads: the ads that show up when CTV streaming video viewers hit the pause button. Everyone’s got ‘em. But Fubo is now making Pause ads available in a programmatic biddable environment — which appears to be a CTV industry first. According to Fubo, the ads are supported in “both programmatic guaranteed (PG) and biddable private marketplace (PMP) pause ad executions.” 

🎯 Nielsen just locked in a big boost to its CTV measurement arsenal. The ratings giant signed a multi-year deal with Vizio to license viewing data from 20 million Smart TVs via Inscape, Vizio’s automatic content recognition (ACR) engine, which tracks what’s actually playing on-screen, regardless of the source.

The new agreement deepens Nielsen’s access to real-time, device-level viewership data and gives it first-window exclusivity on local station coverage from 400 U.S. markets. Translation for media buyers: sharper local targeting and a clearer view of fragmented audiences.

🎧 Audio Ads: Audio content commands 25% percent of consumer attention, but just 8% of ad investment, according to a recent study. Why is audio—read: streaming, podcasting, terrestrial radio, and satellite—underperforming? 

• Measurement. When it comes to programmatic innovation, podcasting and audio are still awaiting their CTV moment—but inventory and attribution tech has dramatically improved over the past 18 months, which means that moment could be coming soon.  

• Creative. The barrier to entry for audio ads was once fairly high, but it’s quickly shrinking thanks to advances in AI, and cheaper tools that make editing audio as simple as editing text documents. 

• Brand Safety. The same challenges that make audio tough to measure and target—brands were traditionally at the mercy of metadata—have made it hard to guarantee the right fit between broadcasters and advertisers. But AI is beginning to fill the gaps there, too.

🐦 Is X About to Unleash Payments? After signing a deal with Visa earlier this year to create a Venmo-like currency exchange, all signs point to yes. The platform still faces regulatory hurdles in a handful of states, but one sign suggests they’re getting closer. Some observers speculate that X’s push to roll out end-to-end encrypted messaging—which is making its way out of beta—is also a soft rollout for a mechanism that would allow users to send each other cash. 

🫏 The Ds Pick A DSP: In a move that's turning heads in both political and ad tech circles, the Association of State Democratic Committees last week unanimously endorsed TargetSmart as the official "Democratic Party Media Buying Platform." This decision encourages all state campaigns to utilize TargetSmart's demand-side platform (DSP) for digital ad buys, aiming to streamline operations and reduce costs. What’s so special about TargetSmart? It’s a DSP built on top of a proprietary data set — specifically, Democratic Party voter data. Among those who aren’t thrilled with the decision: ad-tech companies like Basis, which called the move “questionable.”  

🚨 Brand Safety Alert: Google has taken heat over the past several years on brand safety concerns, with researchers finding that some automated ad distribution can land ads on questionable sites. But those concerns aren’t limited to Google. This week, AdWeek investigated XShorts— a viral Android app featuring sexually explicit content—which briefly rocketed past AppleTV to the top of the Google Play download charts. AdWeek observed ads by brands including Popeye’s, Walgreen’s, Microsoft, Verizon, and other major brands on the app, which appeared to be delivered through popular ad servers including Epsilon, Facebook Audience Network, InMobi, and Moloco. 

Google blocked ads to the app when AdWeek started asking questions, and Meta removed XShorts from its audience network. But the episode highlights the dangers of automated distribution: since the XShorts app managed to obtain a “teen” categorization in the Apple and Google app stores, it snuck past the guardrails that are supposed to limit ads’ exposure to inappropriate content.

🔎 Google presented its closing arguments last week in the penalty phase of its first antitrust trial. Last year, a federal court ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in the search market. The question now is what to do about it. The Justice Department wants Google to sell off Chrome, cease paying companies like Apple to make Google their default search engine, and begin licensing pieces of its search technology—or even give away some search data to competitors like OpenAI. Google argues that selling off Chrome would essentially kill it, and that giving away search data would create a massive risk to consumer privacy. The final decision is expected in August. 

There’s another reason that this decision—set against the backdrop of a rapidly-changing search market that’s quickly transitioning to AI overviews and LLM chatbots—could have wide impacts across the industry. Justice Department lawyers have also asked the court to consider remedies that will prevent Google from extending its search monopoly into AI in the future. As Digiday notes, Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and AI Model demonstrates the edge the company has against its AI rivals. “[B]y integrating AI Mode directly into Search—a product used by billions daily—Google can quietly onboard users into its AI experience at scale, giving it a massive built-in advantage over standalone platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity.”

🐘 The Elephant In The Room: Our weekly poll!

This week in robots: This company is touting “lab-grown marketing,” a B2B market-research group with panels populated entirely by imaginary AI people. Salesforce and GE are already paying for it. Which begs the question:

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

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