AI is muscling into your feed, your ads, and your server room

AI clocked in, generated their own ads, and Houdini’d their way out of a locked box.

First, they came for the side hustle: Brands and TikTok’s algorithm are leaning into AI-generated creators, squeezing out humans who built businesses on shoppable videos.

GMV Max is actively surfacing these synthetic “little billboards,” running the same flash-sale scripts that real humans would. Only for a fraction of the cost. Uh-oh.

Then they moved into advertising: AI assistants are becoming a real ad channel now with the numbers confirming it:

• ChatGPT is testing two ads from two advertisers in its footer, a sign inventory is opening up.
• Meanwhile, Google AI Mode served ads on almost a third of commercial keywords tested. But paid slots matched citations only 11% of the time.

Translation: buying a slot doesn’t buy you a mention. Track them separately.

Also, ChatGPT’s share of AI users dipped below 50% for the first time as Gemini and Claude gained. Which means audiences are fragmenting, and so should your AI ads strategy.

But here’s the catch: An OpenAI model recently chained zero-days to breach live infrastructure during a security eval.

The tools are getting more useful and more ad-friendly, but the security unknowns are still very real. How deeply you wire AI into your workflow should account for that.

Your customers are shopping on TikTok while you’re still fixing your website, and more

Turns out “just build it and they will come” was never a strategy.

New research shows nearly half of Gen Z and millennial shoppers have browsed or bought on TikTok Shop in the past three months, compared to one in five shoppers overall.

Your website is not enough: Social commerce blends discovery, entertainment, and instant checkout in a way that makes your product page feel like a filing cabinet.

You don’t have to sell there directly, either. Micro-influencers and genuine customer content can pull the same audience without a big-budget campaign.

Meanwhile, your old posts just got a second life: Instagram now lets you swap the audio on already-published posts without losing likes, comments, or shares.

For brands, that means one viral clip can be reheated with this year’s trending sound instead of reshot, so your content becomes a reusable asset.

And Pinterest wants a word about your catalog: The platform says feed hygiene is a performance lever.

Titles with brand keywords are tied to 28% higher ROAS. Ad groups with 500+ SKUs beat thin ones. Vague fields quietly throttle strong campaigns.

Time to tidy up?

When should you scale your Meta Ads campaign?

You found a killer campaign and cranked the budget. Yet, performance nosedived.

Sound familiar? Jon Loomer reckons the campaign was probably never the winner you thought it was.

Your “top performer” is likely running on borrowed juice. Most campaigns that look incredible are quietly propped up by remarketing.

Those audiences get exhausted fast, so the moment you scale, the magic evaporates.

Trust 1-day click, ignore the flattering stuff. View-through, engage-through, and 7-day click conversions look great, but they’re terrible predictors of scalable performance.

Break down by attribution settings and ask one question: is 1-day click alone good enough? If it only shines with the other settings attached, it’s not ready.

Isolate your new audience properly. Break down by audience segment and strip out engaged audiences and existing customers.

Remarketing results have value, but they’re a mirage when it comes to scaling. If prospecting audiences deliver volume at a good cost, that’s your green light.

Define your segments like your budget depends on it. Because it does. Loose definitions let sneaky remarketing hide inside your “new audience” bucket.

Use broad, thorough custom audiences like long website windows and full email lists so the breakdown actually tells the truth.

The Crew’s reminder: This is the least glamorous exercise in paid social, and one of the most valuable. Ten minutes of attribution breakdowns beats blaming the algorithm every time performance dips.

Brace for a slightly worse baseline. Even clean new-audience numbers will soften a bit as you scale, because Meta spends the easy conversions first and then widens the net.

Expect it, plan for it, and you won’t panic.

Where can AI be the most helpful in search?

AI is quickly becoming the ultimate personal shopper.

It helps users skip the endless scrolling and get straight to the best deals without the headache of manual comparison. Here’s what they say:

When money is on the line, AI is used as a precision tool for finding the best prices or deals (56%).

This efficiency extends into the research phase, where 54% of people use it for product comparisons and 48% rely on it to summarize those long-winded review sections.

The modern buyer might be less interested in reading every single 1-star review and more interested in the AI spitting out the curated opinion.

Furthermore, nearly half of users are utilizing AI to decipher product specifications, which shifts the power dynamic from emotional marketing to data-driven shopping.

If an AI can explain a technical feature better than your landing page can, the user is going to stay in the chat interface rather than clicking through to your site.

AI is killing friction. It takes the most annoying parts of online shopping like review mining or bargain hunting, and turns them into a three-second chat.

Make your product data as “scrapable” as possible. Use clean, structured technical specs and high-quality summaries so AI can accurately compare you to the competition without hallucinating your features.