Meta’s holiday calendar, unpacked

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are ready for some football:

↗️ META: $12.12 | ↗️ TIKTOK: $2.12 | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $13.43

In this week’s edition: 

• ♾️ Meta’s holiday calendar, unpacked

• Is that a YouTube remote in your pocket? 📺

• 💼  These four LinkedIn alphas are pretty cool

But first…

🔎 Google’s ad business dodges another disaster

A federal judge ruled this week that Google won’t be forced to spin off its network ad business, which sells ads on other publishers' inventory. This comes as a major win for Google, which was found guilty last April of violating U.S. antitrust laws. The judge said Google would have to make changes to its ads business, but did not specify what those behavioral remedies would be. 

⛓️‍💥 Meanwhile, as you may have heard, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 22 states sued Amazon this week, alleging that the platform “inflated prices in its online search advertising auctions” through covert and unfair practices. The suit specifically calls out Sponsored Product, Brand, and Display ad placements in Amazon’s store. The suit claims that Amazon tells advertisers that it uses a “second price” (GSP) auction model, but that 80% of the time, the platform charges the winning bid rather than “one cent more than the next highest bidder.”

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta released its 2026 Holiday Insights Center featuring several Holiday playbooks for creative, AI features, and more. Of special interest to media planners: the latest data on when Meta users plan to start their shopping:

🎨 Gupta Media clients and followers are likely sick of hearing us tell them “creative is the new targeting.” But the implications of Meta’s algorithmic targeting continue to drive performance strategy. As Search Engine Land points out this week, “Creative targeting is quietly fragmenting your Meta audiences.” 

• Key takeaway: “You can ask one question of every ad before it launches: Who is this for that my other ads aren’t already reaching? If there’s no good answer, you don’t have a new ad. You have a new way to pay twice for the same audience.”

📸 Instagram is revising its AI transparency labels for accounts. The update renames its “AI creator” account labels to “AI generated profile” labels, and adds a description noting that the images posted by the account may feature AI-generated characters.

💅 Pro Tip: Meta is testing out a new Automatic Events feature in the Settings tab of Events Manager. Advertisers also get a dashboard to manage their AI automated events.

• As of this week, any new pixel added to your business portfolio will have automatic events turned on by default during setup. By having this setting on, advertisers agree to allow AI to identify and add missing events from your website.

• You can turn this off by going to Events Manager > Data Sources > Select your Pixel > Settings > Toggle off “Track events automatically without code.”

🔎 Google introduced a new round of Demand Gen updates to help advertisers drive higher-quality leads and turn YouTube viewers into customers.

• Direct Messaging: Google is testing ways for viewers to start conversations on messaging apps directly from demand gen ads on YouTube

• Travel Integrations: Demand gen ads will surface local activities, events, real-time offers, and will personalize hotel ads.

• Video Creation Options: Google is making the multimodal video creation in asset studio more widely available, bringing a streamlined video generation.

🤖 Google has added new AI-powered creation tools to its AI Pro subscription package with Pics.

• Pics provides advanced image generation paired with agentic video understanding. For example, it offers language translation options and the capacity to add and edit elements within a generated image.

📺 YouTube announced an update for its Connected TV viewing experience, which will let viewers use their phones to control what they see on their YouTube-connected TV sets. This move will make it much easier to interact with YouTube content without having to use a TV remote or gaming controller.

⏰ TikTok is expanding its “Out of Phone” promotion option, which enables brands to use TikTok content on billboards, in-store displays, cinema promos and more. This was previously available via partnership with Vistar Media and is now available with Alight Media, DooH it, Powerpill, Zoom Media, Next-Gen Mediaand C-Screens.

👻Snapchat announced an expansion of its Unified Attribution approach for app marketers, which will enable more advertisers to combine Snap Ads performance insights with data from their chosen mobile measurement partner (MMP)

💼 LinkedIn is alpha testing In-Stream Ads, which run contextually aligned pre-roll ads across categories of premium publisher and creator content at scale, without requiring direct publisher partnerships or large minimum spend commitments.

🎯 LinkedIn is also planning to test Persona-Based Ads Personalization, which lets advertisers tailor creative messaging to multiple audience personas within a single campaign, supposedly delivering more relevant experiences while simplifying campaign management. 

🏋️ Now in open beta: Advertisers running CTV Ads can now leverage Conversion Lift Testing (CLT) to measure the incremental business impact of CTV campaign exposure beyond traditional attribution models.

🦺 Need more brand safety control on LinkedIn? Inventory Tiers for LinkedIn Feed are also in beta. These offer greater control over where ads appear within the LinkedIn Feed by letting you choose among varying levels of content sensitivity.

• On a related note: Advertisers will now see proactive warnings when restrictive allowlists, blocklists, or suitability controls significantly reduce eligible inventory.

👽 Reddit’s 15-second Engaged Video Views optimization is now available in public beta for all advertisers globally.

📌 Pinterest released their teen wellbeing report detailing that young users are coming to the platform for “doing, not scrolling.” In the wake of Meta’s landmark settlement on teen usage, platforms are at pains to show they’re taking teen safety seriously. 

• According to Pinterest, “At Pinterest, we believe the best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline. As a visual search and discovery platform, people come to find ideas for what they want to do, make and try next…Pinterest is not a social media platform where users get trapped in an endless rabbit hole.”

• They also emphasized the measures they’ve taken to keep teens safe: teen accounts default to private, messaging is limited to mutual followers, and comments are off by default.

🎧 Amazon is now allowing authors to advertise their audiobooks with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads in the U.S. 

• This includes writers or rights holders who use Amazon’s Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX)

• Before this change, authors could only advertise digital and print format book ASINs

🐦 X announced back in August that it was bringing Lead Gen Ads back to the platform. They’re now officially available across all accounts.

🤖 X is offering free API credits to accounts that connect to their new Grok Bot. This AI tool scans X posts, checks your mentions, and whips up industry-specific insights and best practices. All that for the low, low price of giving the AI agent broad access to all your account information!

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, Kayleigh McDonald, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Liana Giacobbe, Mariya Samardzhieva, and Carly Carioli.