New users are hard to come by, so everyone’s fighting for the old ones

The land grab is over. Now everyone’s just redecorating.

Growth stalled, revenue didn’t: Pinterest pulled in $1.18 billion last quarter, up 18% year over year, while US, Canada, and Europe usage went flat.

But all of the growth came from the Rest of World, where revenue per user is lowest.

AI-powered matching is carrying that revenue. You’re buying sharper targeting. The audience, however, is not expanding that much.

And Disney raids the For You page: Disney+ will feature TikTok fan videos about Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars inside its Verts feed.

A new Creator Ambassador Program gives those creators library access, events, and rewards. Streaming inventory is starting to look like social inventory.

The challenger took the crown: TikTok Live claimed 50.9% of global live-streaming hours in Q2, more than every legacy platform combined.

Legacy platforms fell 6% year over year. YouTube Gaming dropped 19.3%.

Worth noting where the money is. TikTok won the hours. Twitch and YouTube still monetize a viewer better, according to all reports. Still, TikTok Live is slowly gaining traction.

Double the canvas: TikTok’s Symphony suite now generates 30-second AI video ads, up from 15, with up to 50 multimodal references.

Timing’s interesting, though. Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn are all currently tuning their algorithms against AI slop.

What we think: It seems like nobody’s finding new eyeballs, so everyone’s fighting harder over the ones they’ve got.

Smart Bidding and AI Max updates land soon, Shopping ads get urgency badges, and more.

Google’s calendar just showed up uninvited, carrying three deadlines and two instruction manuals.

Mark the August 17th: Smart Bidding will get an upgrade that should change how budget-limited campaigns behave.

Campaigns consistently beating their Target CPA or ROAS will start optimizing toward the target you actually set, rather than overshooting it because the budget ran out. Nice.

Then mark the 1st: From September, Google auto-upgrades eligible Search campaigns to AI Max.

Running Automatically Created Assets or campaign-level broad match? You’re in, no opt-in required, with search term matching and text customization enabled.

Homework included: Google also published three Help pages for Performance Max pay-per-lead goals, covering campaign settings, service areas, and targeting. Check it out.

Tick tock: Meanwhile, Shopping ads are testing Deal Ends annotations, badges reading “3 days left” beneath eligible prices.

No opt-in here either. But accurate Merchant Center promotions, genuine discounts, and correct expiration dates improve your odds.

And papers, please: From Oct. 5, advertisers promoting government documents and services need explicit authorisation, linked from an official government site.

Google Ads have been busy. If you’re running them, make sure you’re up to date, too.

How to stop your content from sounding like a robot wrote it

We’d tell you to stop using AI to write, of course. But nowadays, that sounds impossible.

Still, you know that feeling when the structure and copy seems clean and yet something feels… off? Oskar Duberg over at WordStream calls these the tells of AI-generated writing.

He lists 14 of them. Whoa. But here are the ones that stood out the most for us.

1) Everything marches to the same beat: When every sentence is the same length and shape, readers smell a template. Break the rhythm. Like this. See?

Drop a short one. Let emphasis, not symmetry, drive the pacing.

2) Big promises, zero boundaries: AI loves a safe generalization. “Improves results” means nothing.

Add scope, add limits, show where your thing doesn’t apply. Constraints make claims believable.

3) Your headline could belong to anyone: If a competitor could paste your headline onto their site without changing a word, it’s not doing its job.

Add a specific outcome, a clear audience, something uncopyable.

The Crew’s take: This is the fastest fix on the list. Rewrite one headline to be impossible to steal, and you’ve already separated yourself from half the internet.

4) No examples, no proof, no numbers: Claims without evidence read as untested.

One real use case, one rough figure, one concrete scenario. That’s all it takes to anchor the abstract.

5) It reads like nobody wrote it: No stance, no experience, no point of view. That’s also a big one.

AI generalizes across sources instead of committing to a perspective, and you can clock the absence of ownership immediately.

The result? People don’t always analyze why your copy feels generic. They just quietly trust you less.

What we think: Add some of the tips from Oskar directly in the instructions of your favorite AI, and it should help your AI sound more “you” and less “beep-boop.”

Funny, yes. But it works.

The engagement struggle is a matter of stuff… and staff

If engagement is the goal, what’s getting in the way of good content?

Let’s break it down:

• Limited content creation resources (38%) says there’s not enough hands on deck or dollars in the pot.
• General lack of time/resources (30%): The clock is the enemy.
• Limited design resources (24%): Content might be smart, but if it looks dull, no one engages.

Surprisingly, SME cooperation is the least of their worries, cited by only 6%.

Marketers are being asked to do more with less. The pressure to be “engaging” is high, but the bandwidth to produce high-quality visual or interactive assets is often missing.

Our tip? Repurpose your top-performing text assets into simple visual formats.

A great blog post can become five LinkedIn carousels or three short-form videos using basic AI design tools.