♾️ No TIkTok.
Meta bans TikTok ads, in-stream ads now need 10 seconds for an engagement, and more.
In this issue
Good morning.
A few weeks ago, one of The Crew wrote the newsletter with a bag of frozen peas on a busted knee.
And what timing it was. Just a week later, Stanford scientists announced they’d regrown worn-out knee cartilage by blocking an aging protein. In mice. For now.
Still, we’d love to ask those mice for a referral. But they’re probably too busy doing squats.
Meta bans TikTok ads, LinkedIn explains its slop filter
It’s like Monopoly, house-rules edition.
Meta kicked its biggest rival off the board and wants everyone else to welcome its AI shopper.
Do not pass Go: Meta banned TikTok from advertising on its apps in the US, Canada, Japan, and four other markets.
That includes third-party ads linking to TikTok or other ByteDance properties. Sending Meta traffic to TikTok Shop? Time to reroute.
Let the bots in, please: Meta and Sierra are designing an open protocol so sites can authenticate Muse agents and see what they do.
Amazon already blocks Muse. The catch? Bot shoppers could skip your upsells and display ads.
Florida wants Meta grounded: Its attorney general asked a judge to bar all third-party ads for under-18s on Meta’s apps.
Also requested:
- Age checks and no under-14 accounts
- A 60-hour monthly teen usage cap
- Limits on “addictive” features
No ruling yet. Meta calls it meritless.
Gold stars, minus the copy-paste: Threads auto-awards Gems to public posts and direct replies that spark discussion with an original take.
Crossposts don’t qualify. US only, for now.
AI, meet your hall monitor: LinkedIn’s Tim Jurka shared how it catches AI slop. User reports train big “teacher” models, which train smaller detectors.
They now check every post shown beyond your immediate network at 94% precision. That’s the reach you post for.
Rivals, bots, teens, and recycled posts all face new house rules. Your campaigns play by them too.
Your YouTube engagement numbers changed, plus more updates to check before your next report
The skip button on a YouTube ad shows up at 5 seconds. Until recently, that was also enough for Google to count an engagement.
Count to 10: In-stream ads now need 10 seconds watched for an engagement. Also counted:
- A click.
- A full view of a shorter ad.
Older engagement and CPE numbers won’t line up with new ones.
Also, Demand Gen’s new Overlay on videos setting puts your text assets on your videos. It appears to be on by default, so check it.
Leave the bid blank: Video reach campaigns can now run without a bid in beta, with Google adjusting bids to spend your full budget.
Narrow audience plus big budget? Google warns CPMs can climb.
Closer to the store: With SDF v11, DV360 bulk uploads can target people near a business chain’s locations. Versions before v10 shut down in January 2027.
Your website, optional: A new PMax setup option can send clicks to a Google-hosted Business Profile. Conversions may shift to calls and directions.
All the way to checkout: Google’s Local Coupons pilot lets shoppers save deals they find on Search to their mobile wallet and redeem them in store.
Retailers pay only on redemption, tying a search ad straight to a store sale.
Before your next report goes out, check the overlay and PMax settings, and footnote any engagement numbers from before the 10-second switch.
When someone asks AI what to buy, be the answer
Search didn't die. It moved. Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity what to buy, and they act on the answer they get.
That answer is assembled from sources most companies have never looked at. If you're not in there, a competitor is.
ChatFeatured is the AEO platform that does the work to get you in AI answers:
- See exactly what AI says about you, and how you stack up against competitors on every major engine.
- Ask the built-in analyst agent why AI skips you, and get the specific fixes.
- Publish content engineered to get cited, then watch every AI bot that crawls your site.
One customer drove a 65× lift in AI-search visibility. Every customer sees results in under 30 days.
Your product name should say what it's for
- Your product page says "windbreaker."
- Your customer is thinking "something for the scooter ride to work."
If that doesn’t match, less people will buy.
That’s what Science Says found in a study on how product descriptions lift purchase intent.
Three extra words, 9.5% more buyers. Across four experiments, researchers at Dalian University of Technology tested broad descriptions against use-specific ones:
"Sleep-aid scented candle" instead of "scented candle."
People were up to 9.5% more likely to say they’d buy the former, and rated the product 9.7% more useful.
The Crew's take: that is stated intent, not checkout data. Still, a title change costs almost nothing, so it earns a test.
Specific names do the daydreaming for them. A broad name makes the shopper figure out where the product fits in their life.
A narrow one hands them the picture: the scooter commute, the 3am wake-up, the rainy walk to the office. Picturing it is most of the way to wanting it.
Searchers care more than scrollers. The lift was bigger for people looking for a specific product than for people casually browsing.
Our tip: rewrite the titles that meet searchers first. Shopping ads, marketplace listings, and the results of your own site search.
Don't name it for an audience of four. "Traveling scented sleep candle for moms of newborns" is precise and nearly unsellable. Narrow to one clear job, not one tiny persona.
Say who it's not for. The North Face names one backpack for its use and leaves the rest generic. Grouping the range into hiking, city, and travel packs would help shoppers decide faster.
Adding "not for multi-day hikes" to a daypack helps too, because ruling people out makes the right buyer more sure.
The research was B2C, but the logic should travel to B2B too. "Pro plan" tells a buyer nothing. "Plan for agencies running 10+ clients" tells them whether to keep reading.
Pick your least-clicked product or plan, give it a job in its name, and test it against the old one.
What if doing nothing beats 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
But over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals.
The edge isn't intelligence. It's patience, and that’s hard when your portfolio is an abstract index fund. Thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
This year, consumers may trade down
…but they won’t be trading out. That’s according to the data released by Ipsos recently.
They asked US households which money-saving moves they made in the past six months, and compared the answers with a year ago. Most cutbacks eased, but one went up:
Spending less on experiences (travel, dining out): 63%, up from 57% was the only cutback that grew.
The ones that eased:
- Skipping a trip or vacation entirely: 33%, down from 40%.
- Delaying a home purchase: 14%, down from 21%.
- Skipping medical treatment: 24%, down from 30%.
A lot of the things stayed the same. 69% still cook at home more, and 20% still struggle with rent or mortgage payments.
Fewer people are canceling trips altogether, but more are spending less on them. Consumers aren’t giving up the fun. They’re doing it on a smaller budget.
This is classic trading down. Shoppers are easing out of crisis mode, but they’re still counting every dollar.
They want the experience at a lower price: a shorter getaway, a cheaper dinner, a staycation.
Actionable tip: Offer budget-friendly versions of what you already sell. Smaller bundles, off-peak deals, and “lite” tiers get these shoppers to buy instead of leaving.
Those might be your Q4 and Q5 wins.
AI MARKETING: This daily newsletter condenses the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. They read the noise, pull out the signal, and explain what actually matters for work, strategy, and the tools your team is already using. Trusted by 700k+ readers. Subscribe right here.*
ANTHROPIC: Using Claude to plant fake independent sources for AI answers is now explicitly banned. From November 12, the usage policy prohibits feeding search engines or AI systems content that lies about who wrote it or who’s behind it, like site networks posing as unrelated sources. That includes commercial work, so review your GEO setup.
GOOGLE: Some late-September ranking drops in your tracker may not be real. SEOmonitor says Google returned incomplete results to automated searches from September 26, which regular searchers never saw. The spam update took nearly 14 days, September 24 to October 8, so check Search Console clicks and impressions for that period before blaming it.
GOOGLE ADS: The ads under AI Mode answers are looking more like regular search results. One test switched their titles from black to blue, the color people associate with links. Another dropped the grey box and added favicons and site names. If that rolls out, check how your favicon and site name look.
SHOPIFY: AI shopping agents can now see your discounts. The Catalog API returns your compare-at price when it’s higher than the current price. Stores that hide compare-at prices from EEA buyers won’t share them with those buyers. If you use that field for MSRP, check that sharing is off in Catalog Mapping.
*This is a sponsored post.
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