The changes that matter to advertisers, with the sources behind them and a practical next step. Pick a topic and catch up at your own pace.
Google Business Profile
Darren Shaw has flagged a new "About this place" section appearing in Google Business Profiles on desktop: primarily for food and drink businesses: that pulls Reddit threads directly into the profile. Valentina Vasileva first spotted the section, and Darren confirmed it shows Reddit content alongside the standard GBP information.
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI has confirmed that the ChatGPT Ads pilot will expand to the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico in the coming weeks. Benji Shomair (OpenAI) has flagged the geographic expansion alongside a hiring announcement for Client Partner and Customer Success Manager roles in each new market; David Dugan (OpenAI) has confirmed the same expansion with additional team-building context.
Amazon Ads
Amazon Ads has launched Sponsored Brands Auto Product Collection ads: a new auto-product-selection format for Sponsored Brands. Akshay Tarpara has flagged the launch with its mechanics: a single SB ad unit promotes multiple related products, with Amazon's AI dynamically grouping relevant ASINs based on campaign targets and shopper search queries.
Amazon Ads
Amazon Ads and LinkedIn have announced a partnership bringing LinkedIn's CTV Ads inventory to Amazon DSP, combining LinkedIn's professional-audience targeting with connected-TV inventory delivered through Amazon's DSP. Alan Moss has flagged the partnership and its strategic relevance to B2B advertisers, particularly as we head into the upfront commitment season.
OpenAI
OpenAI has launched GPT-Realtime-2 in the API: its most intelligent voice model yet, bringing the GPT-5.5 reasoning architecture into the real-time voice surface. The model is positioned as the new foundation for voice-driven interfaces, voice agents, and conversational commerce applications built on the OpenAI API.
Microsoft Advertising
Joey Bidner has shared a practitioner read on Microsoft Advertising dynamic remarketing: a surface he previously dismissed, assuming Google's market share made Microsoft's inventory irrelevant. The actual results: strong campaign attribution and holistic account lift across multiple test accounts, with dynamic remarketing performing materially better than expected for a non-Google audience surface.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has opened up its Marketing Mix Modelling API to all advertisers: previously a restricted-access surface that required negotiation through Amazon account teams. Oleksandr Kovalov has flagged the launch's practical significance: getting Amazon ad and retail data into custom measurement models used to be operationally messy, requiring manual exports, reconciliation, and gap-filled estimation.
Google Ads
Ginny Marvin (Google Ads Product Liaison) has detailed AI Max's URL-targeting capabilities in reply to Gabriele Benedetti's question about parity with DSA campaigns. The clarification corrects the assumption that AI Max lacks landing-page targeting: AI Max does support a combination of URL rule types: URLs, custom labels in page feeds, and URL combo rules: similar to DSA.
Amazon Ads
Shopify has begun rolling out AI-powered insights inside the Analytics dashboard. Vivek Gupta has flagged the rollout: the new insights surface quick performance summaries and automatically highlight trends, giving merchants a high-level view of store performance without having to dig into individual reports.
Meta Ads
Meta has updated the audience retention window for Purchase events from 180 days to 730 days, letting advertisers keep historical buyers in custom audiences for up to 2 years. Bram Van der Hallen has flagged the launch with its strategic implications.
Google Merchant Center
Emmanuel Flossie has flagged that Google Customer Reviews can now be installed natively and free of charge inside Shopify, removing the third-party connector requirement that has historically been the friction point for Shopify merchants. Google Customer Reviews provides seller ratings that appear on Shopping ads and free listings: a meaningful trust signal that Shopify merchants often leave unconfigured because the installation path is cumbersome.
Google Tag
Ahead of Google Marketing Live on 21 May, Ginny Marvin has previewed Google's measurement update set, framing the announcements as a shift from measurement as a report card to a growth engine. The release covers several substantive additions.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft Advertising has expanded custom columns to support all Microsoft Advertising conversion metrics: closing a gap that practitioners had been requesting through community feedback channels. Navah Hopkins has flagged the launch with the practical scope: advertisers can now create custom metrics based on all conversions or primary conversions data, with revenue and ROAS metrics anchored to the values set at the conversion-goal level.
OpenAI
OpenAI has announced a partnership with PwC to reimagine the CFO's office through AI agents. The partnership delivers a structured set of agentic workflows for enterprise finance teams: building on the broader move (visible across Anthropic's Financial Services Suite, Google's Meridian, and now this PwC × OpenAI partnership) toward production-grade AI in finance functions rather than just experimental tooling.
OpenAI
OpenAI has updated the ChatGPT ad policy to remove the categorical block on advertising inside medical, legal, and financial advice contexts. Anthony Higman has flagged the change with its practical implication: previously regulated verticals that were structurally excluded from ChatGPT Ads can now bid, provided their creative and landing pages comply with the platform's broader advertising rules.
TikTok Ads
Alphabet's Q1 2026 results show Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20.0 billion, with operating income tripling from $2.2B to $6.6B year-on-year. Search queries are at an all-time high, with AI features cited as driving continued usage.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft has reported Q1 results showing Bing and ad revenues up 12% year-on-year. Total revenue grew 18% to $82.9B, Azure grew 39% in constant currency, and the AI business reached an annualised run rate of $37B, up 123% year-on-year.
Amazon Ads
Mansour Norouzi has flagged that Amazon is testing "Hear the Highlights": a feature that auto-generates short audio conversations between two AI hosts about a product listing. The hosts discuss product features, pull review themes, and answer shopper questions in real time.
Meta Ads
Jasmine Vyas has flagged a new class action lawsuit against Meta in Washington D.C., using the District's unfair and deceptive practices (UDAP) law. Internal Meta documents published in December 2025 showed Meta projected $16 billion in revenue from scam and banned product ads: the basis for the legal argument that Meta has knowingly profited from advertising it should have prevented.
Amazon Ads
Ivan Marynych has flagged Amazon testing a new mobile search flow that redirects some users away from traditional product results to Rufus, the AI shopping assistant. The test is currently limited to a small percentage of mobile searches, but the direction of travel is clear: Amazon is moving discovery from keyword-matched results toward conversational, AI-mediated shopping journeys.
Google Ads
Google Merchant Centre has detailed new requirements for local inventory ads and free local listings. A new pickup_cost attribute lets merchants specify pickup costs for in-store products, enabling accurate total costs to be shown on local inventory ads and free local listings.
OpenAI
OpenAI has updated its privacy policy, effective 30 April 2026, to allow the sharing of user data with advertisers. The change lands as ChatGPT uninstalls have surged, and as OpenAI is in court with Elon Musk over allegations that the company has abandoned its founding principles.
Google Ads
Google has launched Search campaigns for Travel, consolidating previously fragmented travel campaign types into a single AI Max-powered workflow. Travel advertisers had been managing different campaign types across separate interfaces: Hotel campaigns, Search ads with travel-specific feeds, and other vertical-specific formats: each with their own setup, reporting and optimisation patterns.
Meta Ads
Emirhan Bayutmuş has flagged that Meta has refreshed the campaign setup interface with a simpler objective structure and cleaner navigation. The objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, Sales: are now presented more clearly at the entry point, with a tightened design through the rest of the setup flow.
TikTok Ads
Uber has launched Hotels on Uber, announced at its premiere consumer event, GO–GET. The product extends Uber's existing role in the travel journey: airport transfers, in-city transport, food delivery: into hotel booking, with the goal of making Uber the single app a traveller uses across the full trip.
Google Ads
Emirhan Bayutmuş has spotted a new Results tab appearing inside Google Ads Recommendations, surfacing the actual performance impact of changes: budget updates, bid adjustments: that the advertiser has accepted. The tab is rolling out gradually and is not yet available in every account.
TikTok Ads
Adobe has completed its acquisition of Semrush, consolidating Semrush's SEO, content marketing, and competitive intelligence tooling into the broader Adobe marketing stack. Oliver Ewbank has flagged the completion.
Google Ads
Jyll Saskin Gales has announced Inside Google Ads Live: Toronto, a one-day Google Ads conference at the CN Tower on 29 October 2026.
Google Ads
Google has confirmed via direct email to advertisers a new data retention policy for Google Ads, effective 1 June 2026. Hourly, daily and weekly performance reporting will be available for the most recent 37 months only.
Google Ads
Google Ads has improved the precision of urban-rural targeting in India, enabling advertisers to achieve tighter control over delivery across the country's varied geographic and economic segments. The update lets campaigns specifically target urban or rural areas, allowing for sharper segmentation of audiences that previously fell into mixed targeting buckets.
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