Meta to brands: Hey, remember Facebook?

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are singing for their supper:

↘️ META: $9.12 | ↘️ TIKTOK: $2.70 | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $8.01

In this week’s edition: 

• 🛡️ Self-serve ads on Euphoria? Check out NEO.

•  LinkedIn joins the ChatGPT craze 💼

• 🍿 6 takeaways from Neflix’s upfronts

But first…

♾️ Meta’s comeback plan for Facebook is…’Gram-tastic

The company formerly known as Facebook has come a long way—so much that Meta now feels like it needs to re-introduce its IG users to its OG platform. 

To wit: Meta’s latest update is aimed at making it easier for brands to create a new Facebook page . . . from their existing Instagram page, at the click of a button. Here's how it works, according to Meta:

• Eligible businesses will receive a notification on Instagram that their Facebook Page is ready to preview.

• The business name, photo, bio, category, and contact information are already in place.

• Businesses can review, edit, and easily publish their Facebook Page. Once live, businesses can connect their Instagram account to enable cross-posting.

• Businesses can invite their Instagram followers to follow the new Facebook Page

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta’s AI is really good, it turns out, at hacking Meta accounts. Last week, reports emerged that hackers had been able to gain access to Instagram user accounts simply by asking Meta’s AI assistance bot to re-assign the email address for the accounts. Meta initially claimed to have solved the issue, but some users continued to report they were being hacked, leading to speculation that Meta lacks the manpower to deal with the crisis after having laid off thousands of support workers. 

💬 Advantage+ catalog ads will now automatically style promotional text overlays, such as “SALE” or “30% off,” to match AI-generated backgrounds. This automated formatting only triggers when advertisers actively turn on both the “Background Generation” and “Dynamic Overlay” features.

🖼️ We’re old enough to remember when marketers used AI to turn stills into video. Now, Meta is flipping the script: they’re rolling out the ability to generate “high-quality static images” from video creative. The goal, as with all things Meta, is to help advertisers introduce more no-lift creative diversity to their asset mix.

👥 Meta is rolling out Value Rules for Custom Audiences, which allow you to assign relative bid adjustments to your custom audiences, telling Meta's AI which audiences are worth more to you within consolidated campaigns and ad sets. How to do it:

• Add or edit audience labels for custom audiences.

• Set up value rules with audience labels.

• Once your value rule set is created, you can create a campaign using value rules. Rule sets can be applied to individual ad sets.

🎯 For the first time on Meta, you can set a new customer acquisition goal when creating a campaign. By selecting "Acquire new customers," when creating a new Sales campaign, Meta will enhance exclusion coverage and maximize your reach to new customers. How to do it:

• When creating a new Sales campaign, you’ll see a new "Customer lifecycle strategy" card at the ad set level.

• Meta recommends enabling both website custom audience exclusions (based on the purchase event) and customer list custom audience exclusions within the new experience to maximize new customer reach.

• Purchase event custom audiences now support a retention window of up to 730 days (2 years), allowing you to build exclusion audiences that better reflect your definition of an existing customer.

💅 Pro Tip: If you’re anApp advertiser with MMP integrations,Engaged-View Conversions will now count conversions when users watch at least 5 seconds of a skippable video ad. Previously it was 10 seconds.

🔎 Google is showing some advertisers a new “Branded Searches” control inside AI Max campaigns that lets them choose how the campaign handles brand-related queries. It gives them three options:

• Show ads on all relevant searches (default behavior)

• Control branded searches using brand inclusions and exclusions

• Show ads only on unbranded searches

▶️ YouTube has earned the Media Rating Council's (MRC) brand safety accreditation for the sixth consecutive year, but this latest update brings a major milestone for short-form video. The MRC has expanded its certification to include YouTube Shorts, making YouTube the industry's first platform to achieve this rigorous brand safety accreditation for short-form video.

⏰ TikTok has updated us on a slew of new features and products coming soon. With the exception of AGC, these are currently open only to select partners (like us). Let’s jump in. 

🤓 TikTok Smart+ Auto Generated Catalog (AGC): Automatically turn a website into a catalog ready to power a Smart+ campaign. 

• According to the platform, advertisers saw a 7% reduction in CPA when using an auto-generated catalog

• Note: TikTok defaults campaigns to turn on AGC

• Currently available for Web Conversion and Web Traffic objectives

🚿 TikTok Projects: Projects is a new page in Content Suite allowing advertisers to send auto-generated briefs based on an advertiser’s historical data directly to a pool of brand-specific creators.

🖥️ Asset Manager: TikTok’s unified command center designed to bring catalog, creative, and events into one place.

📺 Product Video Linking: Link top-performing organic content (Spark ads) and single videos directly to products.

👻 Snapchat announced Unified Attribution, a new measurement and optimization tool designed for app advertisers. Currently in beta, this solution integrates Snapchat’s native platform metrics with cross-channel data from Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) into a single, unified view.

💼 LinkedIn is beta-testing a new LinkedIn Ads app within ChatGPT that allows advertisers to analyze campaign performance using natural-language prompts. The beta is designed for advertisers to quickly review and compare performance without navigating multiple dashboards, and return to Campaign Manager to take action.

👽 Reddit is alpha-testing 15-second engaged video views. Alpha participants can measure impact through split testing against 6-second views.  

📊 Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) for Awareness, Engaged Video Views, and Traffic is now generally available.

• Reddit’s early results show a 3.5% improvement in CPV6 for Engaged Video Views, 2.6% improvement in CPM for Awareness, and 10% improvement on CPC for Traffic.

🚨 Buyer Beware: Reddit ad groups default to having automated targeting turned on. This can be manually turned off if needed.

🛡️ Warner Brothers Discovery’s self-serve platform NEO is live with new advertising options. Here’s what you need to know:

• Through NEO, you can run on their different owned networks at a more cost-efficient CPM than DSPs and at no minimum cost for standard instream and pause ads.

• NEO also allows you to run on popular shows like The Pitt and Euphoria at no minimum cost.

• Self-serve reporting is robust, with WBD providing you genre, show, and episode level breakdowns for campaigns.

• You can run episode-level moments, subject to minimum buys. This is AI contextual targeting that places our ads next to relevant moments, like Disney Hits Playlist ads next to musical scene moments.

🍿 Netflix announced several exciting updates at their upfronts, including:

• They’re expanding programmatic capabilities to Pause Ads and Live using their Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) technology. Advertisers can buy both via their preferred DSP partner, starting this summer in the US and Canada, and other countries by the end of this year.

• They’re also enabling programmatic audience targeting for all ad-supported countries on Amazon DSP as of this month.

• They’re expanding their optimization tools for advertisers, including the ability to maximize conversions and outcomes.

• Starting in 2027, Netflix’s ads plan will expand to 15 new countries, including Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Indonesia, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and Thailand.

• New ad inventory across podcasts and vertical video will be available globally in 2027.

• They’re testing new personalized ad loads and frequency caps that dynamically adjust the ads our members see, based on their viewing behaviors.

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, Sabina Saktaganova, Sims Wilson, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Kayleigh McDonald, Caitlin LaValle, and Carly Carioli.