TikTok’s holiday blitz for big budgets

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are chippy:

↘️ META: $5.84 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $4.23 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $11.04 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 🧠 AI now tracks your brand across all of YouTube

• This plot twist made Google search ads cheaper 💰

• 🎁 TikTok’s holiday blitz for big budgets

But first…

🤑 Meta launches ad-free subscription in UK

In the coming weeks, Meta will launch ads-free versions of Facebook and Instagram in the United Kingdom, with a price point of £2.99 per month online or £3.99 per month on iOS and Android.  

And in case you’re wondering, no — the subscriptions are not likely to come to the U.S. anytime soon. The new move will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following the regulatory trends in Europe for the past several years. International courts have repeatedly pushed Meta to be more transparent and pro-active in asking users for consent to use their data; Meta believes that offering a paid, ad-free alternative will satisfy those concerns. Whether the courts will agree is still an open question. 

That said, if you advertise in the UK, this move could begin to limit your reach there — if the subscriptions prove to be popular. Which, of course, remains to be seen. 

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta has been teasing that it will give Instagram users more say in what fills their Reels feed. Now that’s starting to roll out: algorithm control lets you highlight the topics it thinks you’re interested in—and easily add or remove categories to fine-tune what you see. It’s a smart move toward transparency and personalization, but the big question remains: will anyone actually use it?

🎞️ We’re also getting more details about Reels Trending Ads — essentially, TikTok Pulse for Reels. Here’s what we’ve learned:

• Flight: Must run for a minimum duration of 7 days

• Reach: Minimum requirement of reaching at least 200K people

• Objectives: Available only for Awareness 

• Frequency Cap: Meta’s default is “3 times every 7 days,” but it’s adjustable

• Creative: Meta recommends including at least 4 video assets aligned with Reels Creative Essentials

• Targeting: Content categories available now include Animals & Pets, Beauty & Fashion, Cars & Transportation, Food & Drink, and Sports. Available demographics include gender, age, and state-level geography

• Platform: Meta has started testing with Instagram Reels only, with plans to expand to Facebook Reels.

🚨 Beware: Meta has already started opting Sales Objective campaigns into an auto-enhancement that can spend up to 5% of budget on each placement you’ve excluded from an ad set. This is now rolling out to Leads Objective campaigns as well. Advertisers can manually turn off the excluded placements checkbox, but it will be on by default.

💅 Pro Tip: We began seeing this in a limited release last month, but now it’s rolling out to all ad accounts: Meta is showing the number of Instagram Followers gained through your campaign. Find it in Customize Columns >> Instagram Follows.

🔎 Tinuiti just released its Q3 Digital Ads Benchmark Report, which analyzed some dramatic shifts in Google’s digital ad ecosystem.Key advertisers — including Amazon, Temu, and Shein — pulled back their search-auction spending this year. Did it have an effect? Surprisingly, it seems to have been win-win for both Google and advertisers: Tinuiti found search delivered higher click volumes to other advertisers at lower prices, and ad spend rose 10% year over year.

📺 Tubi is teaming up with IRIS.TV (acquired by Viant last November) to tag its on-demand shows and movies with emotional or thematic labels like “joyful” or “travel.” The move will give advertisers the ability to target more precisely based on whether content will fit their brand vibe or not.

🔎 Google’s Text and Shopping ads will now appear under a unified “Sponsored results” header across desktop and mobile. Google is also adding a new “Hide sponsored results” control that allows users to collapse text ads with a single click to focus only on organic results. These updates are currently rolling out globally on desktop and mobile.

▶️ YouTube has introduced a new brand pulse report that gives a unified view of your brand’s presence across all of YouTube — including paid and organic. Using AI, it detects brand mentions via visuals (brand logos, product shots) and language (audio, video titles). It includes metrics that demonstrate how your paid ads can lead to more views on organic videos, and how users seeing both your paid and organic videos together leads to searches for your brand. Game changer?

🧪 Google is testing a new “View-Through Conversion Optimization” feature in Demand Gen campaigns. As of now, the beta applies to YouTube traffic, but more channels are “coming soon.” Keep in mind that a “view” counts when even 1 pixel of your ad is visible on screen.

💅 Pro Tip: Google’s Performance Max campaigns now support vertical 9:16 image ads. Google hasn’t confirmed where these vertical images will serve, though YouTube Shorts seems most likely.

⏰ TikTok is now alpha-testing a TopFeed + Secondary Objective. This feature allows you to optimize for both the primary objective—guaranteed impressions and reach, with a predetermined CPM—as well as a new secondary objective of 6-second view-through rate. File under: Top Feed getting smarter?

🎁  For advertisers looking to make a splash around holiday shopping time, TikTok is offering their Holiday Brand Burst: a 3-to-24-hour blitz that guarantees quick delivery for time-sensitive messages. This isn’t a unique targeting or ad format offering, but it is a way to guarantee that a large TikTok budget will spend out in a short window.

💫 Cool thing alert: if you’re looking to deeplink from a TikTok ad into Amazon — give us a shout. We’ve got a little special sauce that allows us to create custom instant pages with multiple buttons, which are then configured to deep-link. Boom: we just cut a click out of your funnel. 

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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