GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, is shutting down due to an antitrust lawsuit being brought against it by Elon Musk and X, as reported by Business Insider.

GARM is a cross-industry initiative established in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to help the industry address the challenge of illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization through advertising.

​​The WFA told its members today that it was “discontinuing” activities for GARM following the lawsuit filed against the company earlier this week.

In an email to WFA members, according to Business Insider, CEO Stephan Loerke said the decision was “not made lightly,” but since GARM is a not-for-profit organization it has limited resources and would not be able to fund itself against the social media giant’s lawsuit.

The WFA will contest the allegations against GARM members, which include CVS, Mars and Unilever, and believes the outcome of the case would “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”

The lawsuit had already been a source of much contention in the industry, with media buyers reconsidering their willingness to buy ad space on X, with Musk going into battle mode, saying, “We tried peace for two years, now it’s war” as he reposted CEO Linda Yaccarino’s bizarre video announcing the lawsuit.

In a statement provided to ADWEEK, Claire Atkin, co-founder of adtech watchdog group Check My Ads, said, “Advertisers know a bad ad placement when they see one. The reality is today’s decision means even more advertisers will flee X, and quickly so they’re not targeted in the future.

“Everyone can see that advertising on X is a treacherous business relationship for advertisers,” she added. “And we know, based on public reporting, X doesn’t have all that many too lose.”

There’s no word yet on what will happen to initiatives that began under GARM. Last year, the group and Ad Net Zero unveiled a plan to address media’s climate impact: The GARM Sustainability Action Guide to Reduce Media Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

Reddit’s quest for advertiser performance budgets has kicked into high gear.

The platform reported second-quarter earnings of $281 million, largely driven by growth in non-endemic verticals and spending from small and midsized businesses, putting it on track to generate $1 billion this year.

And artificial intelligence is going to further power the performance of those ads.

Last week’s acquisition of creative AI startup Memorable AI (which went from founding to strategic exit in three years and counts clients like Hellmann’s, Katana and NotCo) for $19.9 million will let buyers identify, test and serve the predicted best-performing creative across Reddit’s environment.

Chief operating officer Jen Wong reveals the strategy behind the Memorable acquisition, plus how it can grow to a $2 billion ad company, (and rival the ad revenue of Pinterest and Snap, per eMarketer).

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What’s driving you to $2 billion in ad revenue?

It’s the work that we’re doing. I feel really good about our strategy. We can still make the ad platform easier and more automated. There’s a lot of headroom in performance. Yes, we doubled click volume, but [we can] improve our models and signal collection even more to drive efficient conversions and volume of conversions for advertisers.

You see us testing ads in comments. That’s very, very early. It’s a very important, high-intent page, not a contributor to our revenue, but that’s an opportunity for us, in addition to other spaces on Reddit, like search. We continue executing against our strategy, which is to be the leader in contextual and interest advertising, to be a full-funnel solution for advertisers large, midmarket and SMB, and there’s a lot of headroom.

There are a ton of creative AI startups. What was special about Memorable AI?

We’re always looking at [developing] pieces of our ad stack. We were planning to organically invest in insights related to the best creative. Memorable is one of the leaders in this area. It’s an expert in understanding what kind of creative can really drive action and outcomes for advertisers.

We’ve done a number of these acquisitions very successfully—Spiketrap was one—where we bolt them onto our company. In this case, we have technology, as well as talent. Starting next year, we’ll be able to see the benefits of that integration

There’s so much hype around AI. What tangible outcomes did you find while scoping out Memorable?

That was a big part of our evaluation and due diligence, actually talking to customers and looking at case studies of the impact of those who work with Memorable. It has an excellent reputation for driving value for advertisers, giving very specific insights into creative organization.

That’s a great opportunity for driving performance for advertisers, as well as, frankly, automating part of the campaign setup and onboarding process.

Has news of the acquisition prompted any new buyers to get in touch?

There’s excitement about it, and some of our customers are their customers, so it makes a lot of sense for them. They’ve already had positive experiences, so they’re excited that this will become just the core capability. It’s been really positively received.

Can you quantify the impact of AI on Reddit’s business?

We’re slowly adding pieces like the AI-generated headlines. Then there are the raw productivity tools that make the productivity of our sales team even better.

We do watch productivity metrics. We do watch revenue per sales, FTE [full-time equivalent] and the productivity of our teams, how many accounts they can handle, etc. We have seen that grow, and there’s a lot more headroom.

Are there other AI acquisitions on the horizon?

We will continue talking and looking at companies that can accelerate our roadmap.

Other revenue in your earnings grew by 690% year over year to $28.1 million, nearly 10% of your total profit and loss, thanks to deals with Google and OpenAI to license Reddit data for their AI products. Do you want to do more deals with AI search engines?

AI is a nascent tech that will be transformational. We believe in the open internet and users getting access to information. What’s happened is that the world of search and AI and data all collided, so it’s become more complicated. We have said publicly that we are stewards of Reddit’s data, and if you want to use Reddit data, we need to have a conversation about that. We are open the partnerships. We’ve actually done a lot of partnerships, big and small, over the past six months.

It’s hard for me to say how many more will be able to do because what’s important is being able to come to an alignment about Reddit’s terms and policies, as well as commercials.

Do you plan to grow the portion of revenue coming from licensing deals? The danger is being reliant on companies cutting you checks, and then those checks stop coming.

There is an enormous runway and headroom for our advertising business. The addressable market for our users is everybody—those we’ve been building for years and we have a lot of control [over].

It’s a very uncertain landscape. We don’t know with the future holds. We’ve done medium-term deals—not one year but not forever—because this landscape is moving so quickly. So we’re very conscious and we’ve been very thoughtful about that. But the advertising business is our core.

X is back to warring with advertisers, and advertisers are back to executing caution when engaging with the platform, buyers told ADWEEK.

Two buy-side sources who have advertised on X this year said X’s new lawsuit against the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM), an advertising trade body, makes them reconsider future investment in the platform.

X today filed a lawsuit against GARM, the World Federation of Advertisers (of which GARM is a subsidiary), and GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever for using their influence to inspire brands to boycott X and depriving the platform of ad revenue. GARM is an industry organization that was formed in 2019 offering standards and guidelines to help brands avoid monetizing illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms.

X owner Elon Musk said on the platform today, “We tried peace for 2 years, now it’s war,” as he reposted CEO Linda Yaccarino’s bizarre video about the lawsuit.

This is an about-face from Musk’s conciliatory presence at the Cannes Lions Festival earlier this summer, where he called brand safety “critical,” and said that “advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they think fits with their brand.”

One buy-side source, who is not authorized to speak with the media on the record, said a brand they work with had paused advertising on X last year after Musk made antisemitic comments in November but returned to the platform this year as the dust settled around that controversy.

“A lot of brands had slowly warmed back up,” to advertising on X, the source said, noting incentives X has given to advertisers.

Today’s lawsuit will likely change that calculus.

“Every advertiser needs to stop and think very hard right now and decide if Twitter just doesn’t fit a campaign, and [a brand is] not going to spend with them on this quarter or this initiative, is Elon going to just tell Linda Yaccarino to sue?” the buyer said. “Here’s a guy … who can fund any lawsuit forever.”

A large brand that advertised on X around the Olympics said the lawsuit would make the brand reconsider whether to even post organically on X. Their paid activation has ended.

“Why would I want to be in any way, shape or form, involved in a place that wants to sue individual advertisers and the bodies that authentically represent them for choosing to not advertise there?” the source said.

X currently takes the most time for VaynerMedia employees to monitor for their clients out of every other platform, given the myriad controversies and drama on X, said Anthony Scarola, vp of media and programmatic lead at VaynerMedia. He said today’s lawsuit is another example of the volatility of the platform, though noted the platform’s reporting on brand safety has become more granular, and thus has flagged more brand safety issues as a result.

“We’ve definitely had those conversations as to is the juice worth the squeeze?” Scarola said.

Leaving X isn’t all about brand safety

X’s lawsuit comes on the heels of a report from Republican members of the House of Representatives which found GARM limited choice for consumers by organizing to demonetize content it doesn’t favor, specifically pointing to X and conservative creators and outlets, like Fox News and The Daily Wire.

But sources said there were many reasons brands chose to stop advertising on X, starting with Musk’s takeover in 2022, that had nothing to do with politics or brand safety. Axios reported that X is supposed to make $2 billion in advertising revenue this year, compared to the $4.5 billion in revenue in 2021, the last full year X reported its earnings publicly.

First, the most successful digital media companies like Meta and Google typically attract performance budgets, which are focused on linking advertising with sales. X has never been good at this and still isn’t, the first buy-side source. “It’s never been about cost per acquisition,” they said.

Plus, at the time of Musk’s takeover, brands had concerns about X’s operational capacity that sparked a reconsideration of ad spend, said Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at industry watchdog Check My Ads, who served as chief privacy officer at ad buying giant UM Worldwide at the time of the Musk takeover.

“You had agency reps that were just gone. You had no one to speak to about brand safety issues. The platform was in complete turmoil,” Garcia said. The first buyer source said there is more support from X reps than during Musk’s initial takeover.

“It’s interesting the way that they’re positioning all of this, when the reality is that brands were making decisions based on a whole host of different factors. Brand safety itself was only one of them,” Garcia said.

ADWEEK has requested comment from X and will update the story if the platform responds.

In its latest marketing campaign, Tinder riffs on some classic romantic comedy tropes straight out of a 1990s Jennifer Lopez flick, with adorkable, clumsy characters, chance encounters on busy city streets and rain-soaked embraces.

The message is that meet cutes happen on Tinder all the time, although maybe not exactly the way they do in Hollywood movies.

The nostalgia-steeped effort, delivered with a wink by agency of record Mischief @ No Fixed Address, would have been unthinkable before last year, when Tinder was largely considered a place for one-night stands and nothing more. The coveted demographic of young women, in fact, had derisively likened it to “a sleazy bar.”

The difference between then and now? “It Starts With a Swipe,” an Effie Award-winning campaign that dropped in February 2023 and changed the trajectory of the legacy dating application, spiking its third-quarter-2023 revenue by 11% year over year to $509 million.

As the brand’s first global work, the ads didn’t shy away from the app’s ingrained bad rep. And while that may seem counterintuitive, the goal was to show that initial human connections via Tinder, no matter how impulsive or visceral, can lead to something more meaningful.

“The real unlock on Tinder was not trying to change the perception that Tinder is a hookup app, but instead changing the perception of what a hookup can be,” Jeff McCrory, chief strategy officer and partner at Mischief, told ADWEEK. “We wanted the world we were creating for Tinder to be hopeful—young singles want to meet people, explore and see where it takes them.”

Heavy competition, high stakes

The stakes were high, with Tinder having just posted four straight quarters of declining revenue while feeling the heat from well-funded, aggressive competitors in the space like Hinge, Bumble and OkCupid.

As a prime mover in dating apps, having debuted in 2012, Tinder had carved out a high-profile place in popular culture but didn’t have a well-defined brand platform to speak to existing, lapsed or potential users, according to Stephanie Danzi, its senior vice president of global marketing.

“It was absolutely time for us to take control of our brand narrative,” Danzi told ADWEEK. “In a sense, we reintroduced Tinder to the world to prove why we matter to a new generation of singles.”

While the category had become jam-packed with looking-for-love options since Tinder’s groundbreaking entry onto the scene, dating app fatigue had also set in more recently, especially with Generation Z. 

Women in that age group had left Tinder for other apps or ditched the scene entirely. After a decade of almost consistent double-digit revenue growth, Tinder saw a decline in the first quarter of 2022, followed by a second, third and fourth.

Against that backdrop, Tinder couldn’t afford a fumble, with Danzi saying, “It’s impossible to overstate how important this was,” although Tinder’s widespread brand recognition acted as a bit of a double-edged sword.

“Because of our prominence in the space, and culture as a whole, Tinder is a bit of a lightning rod for social commentary,” Danzi said. “We’ve seen how recent brand missteps can be amplified across channels like wildfire.”

Rom-com but make it punk

After extensive brainstorming and refining, the creative team infused its approach with “a touch of whimsy,” McCrory said, “but not overly saccharine and sweet—like a rom-com/punk rock mashup. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world like that?”

The resulting campaign featured an all-inclusive cast of Gen Z daters representing the app’s core membership and the various relationship categories they fell under. They aimed to give a modern take on dating gone right, showing that users could define relationships in their own ways.

Color-saturated ads were inspired by the throwback look and feel of romance novels, complete with swirly font treatments and clever copy that heralded relationship milestones like leaving a toothbrush at a crush’s house.

One eye-catching 15-second video centered on a couple pawing each other on a nightclub dance floor but later going on a furniture shopping excursion together. The tagline: “Some Tinder dates turn into one-night stands. But some turn into two nightstands.”

Media buys were as strategic as the creative message, with Tinder blanketing social and digital channels, for obvious reasons, while also hitting streaming platforms such as Hulu, Roku and YouTube.

“It Starts With a Swipe” dropped initially in the U.S. and Europe before expanding to South America, Asia and Australia, representing more marketing firepower than the brand had ever used before. Its out-of-home ads in well-trafficked locations made a splash in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, London and Madrid.

Stellar outcome

Results of “It Starts With a Swipe” went far beyond expectations. Tinder’s “first choice” score rose from 22% to 36% in two months, which is 280% over the brand’s stated objective. Post-campaign, more women under 30 said they felt that Tinder was a place for “any type of relationship,” rising from 31% to 48%, 340% over objective.

Brand consideration increased by 16 points, with a 15% bump in young female consumers who said, “Tinder is a brand for people like me.”

Parent company Match Group credited the campaign with boosting user sign-ups, particularly among women and young demos, returning the brand to positive growth and overtaking competitors in brand preference.

“It Starts With a Swipe” will continue as an umbrella campaign for the foreseeable future, per the brand, with the team adding new facets and executions. 

The latest incarnation, for example, uses celebrities for the first time, with actors Lana Condor from Netflix’s To All the Boys franchise and Evan Mock from HBO’s 2021 Gossip Girl remake. Expect another push for the traditionally busy back-to-school season.

Tinder has “just warmed up our marketing muscle,” Danzi said. “We’re looking to step into culture in ways that make sense for the brand but also get people talking.”

Elon Musk and his X leadership team still have a long way to go to lure advertisers back to the platform following the owner’s bid to smooth relations at the Cannes Lions Festival last month, six sources told ADWEEK.

Musk dialed back on his 2023 provocative “go fuck yourself” comment to advertisers, explaining that X is using artificial intelligence to improve ad targeting capabilities.  

“There’s still a long way to go to get buyers back on X,” the first agency executive, who wasn’t authorized to speak to media, told ADWEEK. “What also has to happen is more tangible updates to the products, and not just lip service of ‘come back.’”

Further, Stagwell CEO Mark Penn’s comments that Stagwell is telling clients to “absolutely test advertising [on X] and see if it works” are not currently consistent with what at least one Stagwell agency is telling clients, which is to be cautious as brand safety concerns still loom, according to a second executive familiar with the matter.

“Clients have been holding back on ad spend,” the second executive said. “X doesn’t have the manpower to help agencies for direct connection, and we haven’t seen enough to have full confidence in brand safety.”

In June, X had 26.2 million daily active mobile application users in the U.S., down 13% year-over-year, according to Sensor Tower estimates. The firm also estimates that 73 of the top 100 advertisers have stopped advertising on X since October 2022, shortly before the acquisition, concerned with how the platform handles content moderation and brand safety.

Ad dollars on X dropped 20% year-over-year in 2024, from $788 million in 2023 to $628 million, per MediaRadar. The number of companies advertising on X also dipped 11% year-over-year, from nearly 12,000 in 2023 to 10,600 in 2024 during the same period.

“It’s wartime, and dollars are hard to come by in general,” the first agency executive said. “Because of brand safety issues, [not spending on X] is an easy decision to make.” Musk’s history of amplifying antitrans and antisemitic comments to his 188.6 million followers still has buyers nervous.

For its part, X has seen some brand safety developments under CEO Linda Yaccarino’s leadership, including a partnership with Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify. The latter, however, apologized in April after erroneously providing wrong data for X to advertisers.

But with the upcoming U.S. elections, Musk’s free-speech agenda adds to the platform’s volatility, sources said.

“There’s going be a lot of [political] content on X,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, executive vice president of paid social at Jellyfish. “How does X manage that and make brands feel safe to be in that space?”

X had not responded to comments by press time.

Using a chatbot to streamline ad targeting

Details of X’s AI-powered ad targeting capabilities are scant.

Other platforms have been offering some type of AI-ad targeting for years, with Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ ratcheting up the most recent headlines for being effective but also not entirely transparent.

In the past month, the first agency executive was shown a preview of an AI targeting tool from X that had a similar interface to ChatGPT. Buyers can type in their target audience—for instance, people who enjoy running or are in running clubs.

“The current status quo is that you manually toggle targeting options like demographics or psychographic behavior,” the first agency executive said. “[The AI tool] is trying to make that streamlined.”

However, because not much active spending is happening on the platform through this agency, it has yet to test the tool on a live campaign.

This exec also noted that X lacks the performance-driven tools available on rival platforms such as Meta, TikTok and Snap.

“There’s no shortage of platforms for advertisers to spend their ad dollars,” said Chowdhury. “How does X make a claim for the budget when they don’t necessarily have the ad products that are competitive to their peer set?”

Ad spend on TikTok year-over-year has been growing, but that growth has cooled since a potential U.S. ban was announced in March.

Meanwhile, the platform’s user growth, especially among younger people, is flagging, according to data shared by five sources.

TikTok’s ad spend in March—the month the potential ban was announced—was up 19% year-over-year, according to MediaRadar. In the months following the announcement, that growth slightly cooled, with ad spend increasing 11% YoY and 6% YoY in April and May, respectively.

From January through May 2024, ad spend on the platform exceeded $1.5 billion, an 11% YoY increase from the nearly $1.4 billion spent during the same period in 2023.

A separate study found that nine out of 20 advertising categories saw increases in month-over-month ad spend in April 2024, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

Consumer services, which include companies like carpet cleaner Stanley Steemer and online printing service Vistaprint, had the largest increase in U.S. ad spend, up 115%, followed by jobs and education at 20%, financial services at 17% and both real estate and software at 16%.

The average daily spend on TikTok dropped by only 2% month-over-month in April 2024, per Sensor Tower.

However, four of the top 10 advertisers on TikTok reduced their spend in April compared to the previous month. That included Target (which decreased by 30% MoM), DoorDash (down 25%), Bayer (20%) and Procter & Gamble (10%).

Still, advertisers find value in TikTok.

“Until all users are gone or they’re forced to go because of the ban, there’s too much attention to ignore TikTok,” a creative agency executive told ADWEEK.

Shifting to a more performance-centric mindset

Since the potential ban was announced, some brands have shifted their focus on TikTok from upper-funnel objectives, like brand awareness, to more performance-driven return on investment goals to maximize their ad spend, according to the first agency executive.

“We’re seeing ad spend decelerate a bit YoY,” the first agency executive said. “That’s because the ban triggered more of a performance-centric mindset, and TikTok stands weaker in performance compared to Meta.”

This agency’s ad spend grew between 20% and 25% in the first quarter of 2024, dropping to about 18% YoY in the second quarter. “It’s been more resilient than you’d think,” they said.

At this agency, TikTok’s CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) for upper-funnel metrics were up by 15% year-to-date.

According to Obele Brown-West Hinsley, president of data intelligence platform Tracer, “Advertisers, as well as TikTok users, are committed.”

Looking at CPMs over the months, Tracer saw a 7% increase in March compared with February, which continued steadily through April and May, indicating growing advertiser interest and competition driving up the prices, according to Tracer.

While many platforms experienced CPM declines from May 2023 to 2024, TikTok instead saw a significant 19% YoY increase.

Additionally, user engagement on TikTok grew, with a 27% increase in click-through rates in April compared with March, per Tracer.

TikTok loses some luster in younger people

For the first time, TikTok, which boasts 170 million users in the U.S., has seen its user growth stagnate and is experiencing a notable decline in younger people.

According to YouGov, the percentage of weekly TikTok users aged 18 through 24 has fallen from 35% in 2022 to 25% in 2024. The percentage of users aged 35 through 44, meanwhile, has risen from 16% in 2022 to 19% in 2024.

During a congressional hearing in January, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said the average age of a TikTok user in the U.S. is now over 30.

Daily time spent on TikTok has also seen a slight decline. According to eMarketer, average daily use dropped by 1.2% in 2024, decreasing from 52 minutes to 51 minutes.

“Overzealous users, likely young Generation Z, are spending less time on the platform than they would have 12 to 24 months ago,” said Oscar Orozco, senior forecasting analyst at eMarketer. “[And] news about a potential ban is also contributing to these declines.”

Paul Hiebert contributed to the reporting.

Welcome to this episode of the Marketing Vanguard podcast. Today’s guest is Alex Schultz, chief marketing officer and vp of analytics at Meta. 

We discuss Schultz’s career journey, the role of the CMO at Meta, the integration of brand and performance marketing, understanding different audiences, and the challenges and opportunities in the marketing landscape. He also shares his passion for marketing and how he turned it into a career, as well as Meta’s strategies for promoting their products and working with creators. 

“People have got too hung up on the distinction between brand and performance. I think all marketing should deliver results for the company,” he said. “You should combine brand and direct response because they both work together to deliver outcomes.”

Schultz has held the top marketing job at Meta since 2020, overseeing marketing, product analytics, and global experience, design and creative. He’s also led the product analytics team since 2015 and the global experience team since 2011. Notably, in 2021, Alex and his team led the company’s rebrand from Facebook to Meta.

Stream the new episode below and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or find it on Spotify.

CANNES, France—Elon Musk dialed back his infamous GFY comment to advertisers last year, saying he only meant the message for brands that would not enable free speech. 

The owner and chief technology officer of X (formerly Twitter) is at the Cannes Lions Festival this week on a mission to win back advertisers after many fled the platform over brand safety concerns and Musk’s own controversial posts. Last November at the DealBook conference, Musk singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger for pulling ad spend from the platform, saying that brands ceasing advertising on X over such concerns were effectively committing “blackmail.”

On Wednesday, speaking on the Cannes stage with WPP chief executive Mark Read, Musk took a softer tone and touted the platform’s “influential” users and ad-targeting capabilities. 

Musk clarified that his previous comment was not “to advertisers as a whole,” but rather to those “insisting on censorship.” He emphasized that it is important X remains a “free speech platform, where people from a wide range of opinions can voice their views.” 

“Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they think fits with their brand. That’s totally cool. What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content they disagree with on the platform,” Musk said. “If there’s [a choice between] censorship and money or free speech and losing money, we’re going to go with the second … that was the right moral decision.”

His message to advertisers that have left X altogether—that includes Disney, IBM and Apple —is that the platform “is worth trying out” because its users are “the most influential people in the world.”

Musk said brand safety is “critical” and insisted that “every third-party reviewer has given us an A+ on brand safety.”

He also said that X is working on using AI to improve its ad targeting capabilities.

“Previously with old-school Twitter, there was essentially no targeting or matching of users to ads,” he explained. “We’re very focused on having ads shown to people they’ll find interesting.”

Last year, Musk missed attending the Cannes Lions, the biggest gathering of the advertising industry. X chief executive Linda Yaccarino is also at the event, and both are trying to reassure brands wary of the ad-funded platform and its provocative owner, who has often posted controversial and right-wing opinions.

X’s ad revenue tanked by nearly 50% in 2023, and its market value has likely declined by roughly 70% since Musk bought it in 2022, according to Fidelity. 

Brands are still risk-averse

Kara Swisher, journalist and co-host of the podcast Pivot, said during a live podcast recording at ADWEEK House on Tuesday that X’s proposition is a “difficult sell” for Yaccarino.  

“Elon Musk no longer wants advertisers to go fuck themselves,” she observed. “How do you manage the owner and his antics? [Yaccarino] doesn’t seem to think there’s a connection … [but] everyone I talk to is worried about being called out by this guy.” 

Pivot co-host Scott Galloway added that X hosts “a lot of incredibly toxic content,” pointing to a 2020 survey from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) that found 49% of all child exploitation content found online in the last three years originated on Twitter. 

“Brands don’t want to be in the business of ever taking that risk,” Galloway said. 

Meta announces the launch of Threads API to help businesses and creators effectively manage their content on the platform.

This API will simplify the process of sharing content with its communities through third-party applications

Key API features:

• Authentication, post publishing, and content retrieval: Businesses and creators can log in, create posts, and access their content using the API.
• Management capabilities: Users can retrieve replies to their posts, interact with these replies, set controls for who can reply, and choose to hide or unhide specific replies.
• Media and account-level insights: Users can access data such as the number of views, likes and replies on their content, providing metrics on how posts are performing on Threads.

Why we care: Nearly a year after Threads’ launch, brand activity on the platform has slowed. Brands are seeking more tools to drive awareness and growth, and ultimately see value on Threads.

With 150 million monthly active users on Threads (per Meta), performance-related tools can help brands assess their presence on the platform and understand how users are interacting with their content.

Push for mainstream gen AI: Meta continues its push to make generative AI more consumer-facing by introducing Llama 3 to handle customer queries on Messenger for brands.

Meta is training Llama 3 with the most popular questions business receive on Messenger, such as sizing for clothes or longevity of make-up items and responding in a natural, human-like manner to consumers.

Cost-cutting: A Philippines medical apparel company, White Coat Manila, was able to save 20% on customer support costs and focus on business growth instead, thanks to Meta’s AI chat feature.

Meta is testing this tool with select businesses in the Asian market. Meanwhile, consumers have the option to switch to a human agent at any time.

Why we care: Meta recently brought Meta AI to consumers through the search bars on Instagram and Facebook.

Meanwhile, the tech giant’s AI investments in its ad products are yielding significant returns for businesses. A recent study with the University of Berkeley found that campaigns using Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns saw $4.52 in revenue per dollar spent, with a 22% increase in ROAS for new users.

It remains to be seen whether Meta’s consumer-facing AI will drive similar long-term sales for brands.

Paid marketing comes to Messenger: Meta is allowing select advertisers to create and send paid marketing messages on Messenger via Ads Manager, for events like back-in-stock alerts or holiday discounts to consumers opted-in to hearing from brands.

“We’ve heard from businesses that sending updates on Messenger and WhatsApp can be a great way to engage their customers,” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of global business group at Meta said in a statement.

Meta is testing this tool with select businesses. The tech giant declined to share specifics.

Pinterest is introducing Performance+, its version of artificial-intelligence-powered media buying tools similar to Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max.

“The key difference with Performance+ campaigns from traditional campaigns is that the setup is optimized to drive the maximum performance possible for advertisers on Pinterest with significantly less effort,” Pinterest chief revenue officer Bill Watkins told ADWEEK.

Pinterest’s ad revenue is projected to increase 17.2% this year, reaching $2.66 billion, up from 5.8% in 2023, according to eMarketer. An AI buying tool will likely add another boost to its fortunes.

CPA and CPC improvements:

• Early testing saw over 10% improvement in cost per acquisition for conversion and catalog sales campaigns.
• Consideration campaigns saw a more than 10% improvement in cost per click.

Advertisers can set inputs like budget, country, age or product groups they want to focus on, and Pinterest Performance+ manages the placement, decreasing campaign creation time by 50%, the company said.

Ad buyers evaluate performance in the platform’s ads manager. 

Why we care: To compensate for signal loss, platforms including Meta, TikTok, Google and most recently Yahoo have leaned into automation and machine learning to recommend and manage ad placements for advertisers. In return, these platforms promise better campaign performance.

While convenient, buyers are skeptical of some of these shiny AI tools for not offering details about where ads are ultimately placed.

Nearly one year after the launch of Meta’s Advantage+, some marketers have been underwhelmed, finding the results inconsistent.

What’s next: Pinterest is also testing a collage ad format for advertisers to make content more shoppable and discoverable through promotion.

Furniture and home goods company Wayfair is seeing some success, creating collages with decor and furnishing, driving 28% more efficient CPC and 5.4 times higher engagement compared to retail vertical benchmarks. The company didn’t share specifics.