A lot of brands think they have a Meta problem when they actually have a product × TAM problem. You can keep optimizing: - hooks - creatives - offers - landing pages - campaign structure But eventually you hit the ceiling. If the market is too small or the product isn’t compelling enough, better media buying won’t save you. Paid media can accelerate demand. It can’t manufacture unlimited demand. Product and TAM set the ceiling before the first ad ever runs.

I've posted about this many times before. And I still see brands making the same mistake. Translating your ads is NOT localization. You can translate every single word correctly and still end up with advertising that doesn't resonate with your target audience. You can adapt all your US creatives for European markets, but if the rest of the customer experience isn't localized, don't expect the same results. And even within Europe, what resonates with customers in Germany might not resonate with customers in Italy or France. Different markets. Different cultures. Different buying behaviors. Different expectations. Localization goes way beyond your ad creatives. It's your messaging, positioning, offers, pricing, landing pages, checkout experience, payment methods, customer support, and everything in between. You can't just translate a winning US funnel and expect it to win everywhere else. That's not how this works.

“Without human authorisation” is a positioning statement at the heart of AI PR campaigns. This perspective should explain why this is propaganda that’s enabled by the media. When an AI company takes down a national grid, hospital, or anything else that causes blackouts or deaths, the media and public will already have been conditioned to believe “the big AI lie”: that software is now conscious and can cause harm without authorisation from the company or government that built or deployed it. This reminds me of how Apple conditions people for technology it plans to release years later. Apple does it in the name of innovation. AI companies are doing it to normalise dangerous behaviour while distancing themselves from responsibility and accountability. Imagine if Zuckerberg blamed all the harm he has caused and continues to cause on autonomous newsfeeds, and his cult followers building apps on his technology, along with the media, believed every word his interns posted on social media. FACT for Reuters and others who want to report responsibly instead of chasing clicks: Anthropic and OpenAI are playing the media like a puppeteer. AI operates within permissions and access granted by people. Sometimes companies deliberately authorise dangerous actions while denying responsibility. Other times, harm results from negligence because they failed to understand, restrict or monitor what they’d authorised. Please stop conditioning the public to accept dangerous and illegal behaviour from big tech companies as if software is acting independently of the people responsible for it.

Google Ads is rolling out two new optional campaign controls: Channel Prioritization and Budget Allocation. These optional features are designed to give you more flexibility over where your campaign budgets go across Google Channels, the Google Display Network and Google Search Partners – moving beyond binary opt-out choices. 👇

SCOOP: Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event. axios.com/2026/10/09/ai-comp…

Your PMAX campaign is not spending your money where it was a month ago. Most advertisers never check, so they never see it move. Here is a channel breakdown from one PMAX campaign, Google's own report, over about seven weeks. At the start, almost every dollar went to Google Search and Shopping. People actively typing what they want. High intent. By the last few weeks, Discover had taken over and was carrying close to half the traffic. Across the whole window it split 49% Search and 48% Discover, with Display and Gmail making up the rest. Same campaign. Same settings. Completely different traffic. That matters because Search and Discover are not the same buyer. Search is someone looking for you right now. Discover is a feed placement that interrupts someone who was not looking for anything. One tends to convert. The other is cheaper and much colder because it's more upper-funnel. So when the mix slides toward Discover, your cost per click usually drops and everyone feels good, while your conversion quality quietly slides with it. The algorithm found cheaper inventory and leaned in, because you told it to chase conversions and it chased the easy ones. Here is the trap. PMAX buries this. The headline report hands you one blended ROAS and one blended CPA. It does not tell you that half your spend just moved from your strongest placement to your cheapest one. Your number moves, nothing in your settings changed, and you are left guessing at why. So we read the channel report, not just the headline. Pull the campaign's channel performance breakdown and watch the mix week over week. If Discover or Display is ballooning and quality is dropping with it, you steer it. Swap the image assets you feed it, lean harder on your search themes, or pull Search and Shopping into their own campaigns where you control the intent directly. A PMAX campaign that looks stable on the surface is often rotating your budget into colder traffic, one week at a time. The dashboard will never volunteer it. You have to go look at the mix, because that is where the performance actually moved.

Oct 15th, I’m conducting a public autopsy of Google’s Aug 17th smart bidding update with @sengineland & @smx, moderated by @TheMarketingAnu Prob don’t wanna miss it: 🔗 bigmarker.com/third-door-med…

Join me for PPC Chat's live session today, on our Slack, where our topic is: "Staying on Top of Clients Market Position & Competition" Today, October 6th at 12:00 PM ET join.slack.com/t/ppcchatgrou… Can't join live? Add your thoughts later! #PPCChat

Founders are often scared that sharper positioning will make the market smaller. So they broaden: - the audience - the message - the use cases - the positioning Until the brand says almost nothing. Being vague feels safer. But vague brands make the customer do all the work of figuring out why they should care. Specific positioning can actually make acquisition easier. Because the right customer recognizes themselves immediately.

call off your Ad Week plans programmatic has been totally cancelled adexchanger.com/privacy/appl…