LinkedIn ads are pricey. But are they expensive?

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are in a food coma:

↗️ META: $8.71 | ↗️ TIKTOK: $3.31 CPM | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $14.16 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 📦 Amazon’s AI agents will be here next month

• Twitter co-founder brings Vine back from the dead 🌿

• 💼 LinkedIn ads are pricey. But are they expensive?

But first…

🧠 This new standard could let AI take the wheel in media buying

A handful of ad-tech companies (including PubMatic and Scope3) have teamed up to build the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) — basically a shared framework so AI agents can manage more of the media buying workflow without triggering a real-time auction on every impression.

Instead of today’s programmatic pipes — where everything is bid on in milliseconds — AdCP creates a layer where buy-side and sell-side AI agents can negotiate budgets, build creative, and activate data signals ahead of the auction. Think of it like pre-agreed deal terms that let AI move faster and handle more tasks automatically.

AdCP has three main components:

• Media Buy Protocol: AI adjusts budgets, pacing, publisher approvals

• Creative Protocol: AI formats creative, generates previews, ensures specs are right

• Signals Activation Protocol (coming in 2026): AI discovers and applies data signals using natural language

👉 It’s still very early and nowhere near universally adopted, and critics worry: will it truly stay independent, help real publishers monetize, and avoid just automating “garbage in, garbage out”?

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta gave us more detail about a new “creative enhancement” we told you about earlier this month that transforms static carousel ads into auto-scroll videos: 

• There are no format transformations for organic carousel posts, only for the Advantage+ creative enhancement (“Adapt multi-image format”) which will transform it to a video.

• If there is a mix of videos and images in the carousel, it will not be transformed into an auto-scroll.

• Looking for a way to preview what the new auto-scroll carousel ads will look like? When in any Facebook-placed ad group, enable the “Show cards as single media check box,” and a preview will appear under “Advanced Preview.” (Note: this hack only works on Facebook feed placements for now, even though carousels can also get automated on Instagram.)

⚖️ Big win for Meta in a closely-watched antitrust case: Meta prevailed in a major suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A U.S. judge found that Meta did not illegally stifle competition by buying Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. This ruling means Meta won’t have to spin off those apps, and it’s seen as a significant victory for Meta as the company seeks to expand its dominance in the AI era—especially since rival Google lost two antitrust cases this year.

📦 Amazon Ads just unveiled its next big platform move, as well as its opening salvo to challenge Google and Meta on automation. At UnBoxed 2024, Amazon announced it is consolidating its self-service console and Amazon DSP into Campaign Manager, which essentially offers a single user interface for all Amazon Ads customers. This should make life easier for advertisers who previously needed separate log-ins and consoles to run Sponsored Ads and use DSP. Campaign manager is now in beta, but Amazon is teasing a larger rollout next month. 

Within Campaign Manager, Amazon also announced two new AI-driven features:

• Ads Agent, an AI-powered assistant that handles campaign drafting, bid optimization, cross-channel targeting, and media buying through a conversational chat interface. 

• Creative Agent, which generates both video and static creative assets.

👉 Our take: The automation looks interesting, but the real test will be whether Amazon's "advertiser control" claims hold up. We’ll also be watching how budget allocation plays out across owned vs. third-party inventory.

🔎 Google is dramatically lowering the barrier for incrementality testing—cutting the minimum budget from around $100,000 to just $5,000, so even smaller advertisers can measure the causal impact of their ads. They’re also using improved statistical models that make results up to 50% more conclusive, plus faster reporting with customizable test sizes and confidence levels.

🧠 Google’s Demand Gen campaigns just got a facelift with AI. Now, Google can automatically generate animated images, dynamically reformat and shorten your videos (Google chooses key moments to turn into Shorts), add branded-style text overlays to your images (called Adaptive Layouts, see screenshot below), and more:

🧪 Now testing: 

• Google is testing Journey Aware Bidding—which uses signals from the full customer journey, not just the final conversion. You can feed in secondary conversion events (like lead form submissions) to help the system better predict and reach the people most likely to take the action you ultimately care about. To see results, you need to map and label the entire journey correctly and track consistently. A closed pilot is due to launch this year for a small group of advertisers, with broader availability expected afterward.

• YouTube is testing a beta feature that retroactively lowers costs on Demand Gen tCPA campaigns if early performance underdelivers, helping advertisers stay closer to their target CPA. It monitors campaigns during their learning phase (starting as early as five days in, up to three weeks) and then quietly recalibrates the final reported cost without showing separate credits. This approach lets Google share some of the risk when conversion volume is still volatile, though only certain campaigns and accounts are eligible.

💅 Pro Tip: Google has rolled out a new conversion metric called "Original Conversion Value” to see the true, unadjusted value of the conversions their campaigns have driven.

💸 LinkedIn is leaning hard into the justification that its higher‑cost ads are worth the CPM because of pipeline quality: its audience comes with real professional intent, job titles, and buying power. 

It’s no secret that LinkedIn’s CPM rates are higher than other platforms—it’s a platform that advertisers often turn to when they’re seeking high-value leads, so most marketers are also looking at other metrics that measure some version of ROI. 

Digiday’s Krystal Scanlon digs into that phenomenon this week in a look at the “case for pricey ad prices”—using Gupta Media’s benchmarking data to show the difference in pricing between LinkedIn and platforms like Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. According to LinkedIn’s head of ads measurement, when measuring cost per qualified lead (or “pipeline driven” metrics), their expensive CPMs actually become “phenomenally cheaper.” 

📊 Go for the intro to lead-gen metrics; stay for the shout out to everyone’s favorite CPM benchmarking tracker.

⏰ TikTok is rolling out a new slider in its “Manage Topics” tool that will let users indicate that they want less AI slop in their feed. However, TikTokers will still see some generative AI clips, because TikTok’s detection system can’t pick out every gen AI clip.

👻 Snapchat is changing up Partial Dynamic Collection Ads. In the previous state, these had a hero video/image that was overlaid with product tiles. The new version of Partial Dynamic Collection Ads start with a hero video/image and then shift to instead show four large tappable product tiles. Tapping on a tile will reveal a tool-tip that must be tapped to proceed to the bottom attachment (Website or App).

🌿 Vine is coming back…sort of? As of this week, the new Jack Dorsey-funded app “diVine" is live on the app store. Programmers have taken hundreds of thousands of archived Vine videos from your favorite creators and made them viewable again. This platform isn’t meant to be just nostalgic, though: the platform offers users the ability to post new six-second loops as well.

⚰️ RIP GDPR? European Union officials are preparing to unveil new legislation that could roll back key privacy protections by scaling back parts of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

The so-called “digital omnibus” bill is designed to simplify regulations, especially around AI. Supporters of the new rules say Europe risks falling behind the U.S. and China in the AI race — but privacy advocates warn it could weaken long-standing protections around personal and sensitive information. 

Why it matters: The legislation would face an uphill battle in the EU, but after years of blocking and slowing AI launches from Meta, Google, and OpenAI, this signals a major battle coming over how Europe balances innovation and privacy.

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

In the meantime, stay up to date with the latest performance marketing intelligence by following us on Linkedin, Instagram, and X.

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