More ad formats, fewer return headaches

Five new toys and a shared bill? TikTok’s feeling generous.

Count them with your fingers: NewFronts 2026 has brought five new ad formats designed to help you ride trending moments and tap into high-engagement windows:

• Logo Takeover co-brands your visuals with TikTok’s graphics. It may help you with major launches where you need instant presence.
• Prime Time serves up to three sequential ads to the same user within a 15-minute window during live events, so you hit them repeatedly while attention is high.
• TopReach bundles TopView and TopFeed into one placement, if you want to blanket a single day’s feed at product launch.

Finally, Pulse Mentions targets conversations already happening around your brand, while Pulse Tastemakers lets you hand-pick creators and plug directly into their audiences.

What this means: TikTok is expanding in two directions at once. Broader reach formats if you want to make noise, and tighter targeting tools if you want to be surgical about it.

And it’s picking up the tab, too: From April 8, TikTok will share the return shipping cost on non-fault returns, so you stop footing the bill for things outside your control.

The catch? Your Shop Performance Score determines how much of that shared cost you actually pay.

If you sell on TikTok Shop, this is a meaningful shift in unit economics. Returns have always been a margin killer, and now you can share the burden.

Take a look at your returns policy and double down on your performance score, because both will directly affect your bottom line.

New placements, new AR toys, and some context around numbers

You don’t get a second chance at a first impression.

Snapchat’s making sure of that: The platform’s new formats give you more ways to catch your audience both initially and mid-scroll.

• Total Takeovers guarantee first-ad placement across every tab in the app which can help you promote high-stakes moments like product launches.
• Offers embed promotions directly into Snap Ads and cut the engagement-to-purchase path.

Who to target on Snap? Younger audience. The more tabs they visit, the more chances you get.

And AR was just the warm-up: Snapchat is letting developers build AI image-to-video Lenses using closed prompts and user-uploaded photos.

If you have a creative or developer resource, this is an early opportunity to build branded Lens experiences before the space gets crowded. Especially since sponsored AR historically performed well on Snapchat.

However, Snap numbers come with an asterisk: Snapchat is boasting 2T Snaps created in 2025. That’s 5.5B per day, 3.8M per minute. It’s pretty staggering… until you zoom out.

User growth has been flat in North America and Europe for two years, and Q4 2025 saw an overall decline. A big number without context is just marketing.

Snapchat’s existing audience is still large and engaged. But this is a reminder to pressure-test platform claims before adjusting your budget. Just saying.

How to build a digital PR strategy in 3 steps

Unlike attention spans, digital PR never left.

And Chloe Osunsami breaks down why and how to build a strategy that still holds up in this new era.

GEO and the evolution of search have made authoritative brand mentions and links more valuable than ever. Especially since they’re now both ranking factors and trust signals for AI.

Here’s how to get it right.

Step 1: Review competitor performance: Your audience is comparing options, so you should too. Use SEO tools to find competing domains, but verify the overlap is real.

Similar keywords don’t always mean similar products.

Don’t ignore challenger brands. Electrolux launched the same year as Hoover, then quietly took the top spot in the ’30s. Hoover wasn’t watching. Don’t be Hoover.

Key metrics to track: Organic traffic, domain authority, top-ranking keywords, referring domain quality, and AI visibility.

Step 2: Identify coverage and AI visibility gaps. You’re looking at multiple things:

• Link gap: where your competitors are getting links and you’re not.
• Brand mention gap: where your brand is getting mentioned, and you’re not.

A link intersect tool handles the backlink gap analysis. Google search operators can surface competitor coverage.

Once you have the quality gaps, dig into how competitors earned those placements. Was it proprietary data? Thought leadership? A content format you’re not using?

Then map the media landscape, focusing on publications that are both relevant and regularly trusted by LLMs.

Step 3: Bring it all together. Brand knowledge, SEO priorities, audience needs, competitor intel, and media landscape findings.

The output should be a data-backed plan for the next 6, 12, or 24 months.

Before you hit go, pretend you’re a stakeholder. Ask yourself if you’d fund this if it were your budget?

If the answer’s yes, you’re ready.

Your customers probably feel the need for delivery speed

Waiting a week for a package used to be standard. Now, it feels like an eternity.

Modern shoppers want their products before they’ve even closed the browser tab.

What can we see from this?

• Over 60% of consumers find delivery in under 30 minutes or same-day to be “impressive” features that would directly influence a purchase.
• Nearly 50% feel the same about next-day delivery, but the “too slow” sentiment starts creeping in fast once that window expands beyond 24 hours.
• For close to 50% of shoppers, a one-week window simply doesn’t cut it. Only about 30% find it impressive at all.
• The ability to schedule a specific day and time is a standout feature, with nearly 60% calling it a major purchase influencer.

The Crew’s Take: In a world of instant downloads, physical shipping is the final friction point. Logistics used to be a back-office concern but nowadays it’s a front-facing marketing asset.

If your delivery dates are vague or slow, you’re essentially handing customers to competitors with better supply chains.

But the fix doesn’t have to be radical: highlight your fastest shipping option directly on the product page, and if same-day isn’t possible, offer scheduled delivery.

Giving shoppers a sense of control over when something arrives can be just as powerful as getting it there fast.

Logistics just became your competitive advantage. And Pro subscribers get deep dives such as these when you can’t out-Amazon Amazon. The cost? $349/year for up to 10 teammates.