Platform ‘big ones’ this week happened while most of us were either chest-deep in a dirty lake or drenching our hot-dogs in condiments.

On July 7, Google Beyoncé-style-surprise-dropped Search Console into social analytics. No press, no keynote, just a blog post from a content writer and suddenly clouds opened, sun beams shined and you can suddenly see Google search queries pulling people to your Instagram grid. Hallelujah.

Reddit also started cracking the whip on AI by using it’s own AI (okay, lol) to hunt down citation-seeding tactics the industry has been billing clients for.

Aaaaand we finally got the real numbers on where AI sits in the purchase funnel, which turns out to be not even close to checkout. Cool.

Burn Notice is up top like always. Skim it, know it happened, get on with your day. The three stories that change how you actually work this week are down in The Safe.

Let’s ride.

Burn Notice

Free for everyone. Ten things that happened. Most need nothing from you beyond knowing they happened.

Meta added updated disclosure tags for AI-generated ads

Ads built or heavily edited with Meta’s gen-AI tools (Background Generation, Image Generation, Add Animation) now get an AI info label automatically, tucked under “About this ad” in the three-dot menu. Meta also reads C2PA metadata to catch third-party tools like Photoshop and DALL-E. The labeling happens without you, so there’s nothing to do. It’s worth knowing because undisclosed AI content is already one of the top three reasons ads get rejected this year.

X built a native iOS video editor to push original content over stolen reposts

I don’t always include X updates because most of the time they’re a waste of time, but this one caught my eye.

Caption overlays in multiple languages, Green Screen, segmented recording. Product head Nikita Bier pitched it as a way to reward original creators, and pointed out that video is now about half of all impressions on X. iOS only for now. If X isn’t in your mix, file it and move on. Worth a raised eyebrow: there’s still no built-in way for creators to report stolen work, which Meta and YouTube both have.

They’re starting to build a foundation for more original content on X, which is something I’ll keep an eye on, but for now it feels like they’re sick of seeing IG/TikTok reposts dominate views on-feed.

Facebook is testing view counts on posts

Only the creator sees them, which lines Facebook up with Instagram and Threads, where views has already become the metric that matters. Meta confirmed the test and gave no timeline. Nothing to do here. It’s just more evidence that Meta wants “views” to be the number everyone judges reach by, everywhere.

Instagram’s Edits app got auto-translated bilingual captions

Note: This is outside of this week’s news window, but I forgot to include this one last week, but it’s an important one to be aware of if you’re working internationally.

Fifteen languages, plus overlay support in templates, a clip-lock feature, and summer sound effects. It connects to Instagram’s push to surface translated content in Explore. If you’re cutting Reels in Edits for a multilingual or international audience, this is a genuine reach lever. Everyone else, good to know it exists.

The Supreme Court is letting Texas enforce its app-store age-verification law, for now

In a one-sentence order, SCOTUS declined to pause SB 2420 while the case plays out. The law makes app stores verify ages and tie under-18 accounts to a parent who has to approve downloads and purchases. The 5th Circuit hears the merits in August. No ad-account action, but if you market apps or aim at younger audiences, this is the age-gating friction that keeps spreading state by state.

Google started a small test of ads in AI Mode, beginning with healthcare.

Note: This one broke in early June, but some fresh coverage landed this week that it’s still in test mode.

Limited US and English test. Eligible campaign types: Performance Max, AI Max with search-terms matching, Shopping, and broad match. The first version leaves out creatives that use pinning or text disclaimers. Right now it only matters if you’re a US healthcare advertiser. For the rest of us it’s the tell for how AI Mode monetization reaches every regulated vertical next.

Google Ads updated its Terms of Service, effective July 1.

The new terms give Google explicit permission to use automated and AI features to format, pick, or generate your targets, ads, and destinations for you, while you keep full responsibility for whatever comes out. The expanded language also covers how your inputs get used, including what you type into conversational tools and any URLs you let Google crawl. Nothing to do. It’s just worth knowing where the responsibility lands as the automation keeps widening.

Google is testing black sitelinks in a bigger font on desktop

With a divider, in Search ads. It’s a cosmetic UI test. Know it happened, that’s the whole story.

Google launched PMax Channel Diagnostics

More visibility into how Performance Max is doing at the channel level. Incremental, but a real transparency win if you live in PMax.

Cloudflare’s new crawler rules could catch Google’s crawlers too.

An infrastructure story I’d not normally cover, but something to keep an eye on with downstream reach implications as AI-crawling and content-access rules tighten up. No action, but keep half an eye on it if you spend any time thinking about how your content gets accessed and surfaced.

The Safe

Paid-exclusive. Three stories worth your actual attention this week, translated to the account level with what to do about them.

Search Console is also a social analytics tool now

On July 7, Google launched a new Search Console property type called ‘Platform Properties’. You connect an Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube account and see how that content does in Google Search and Discover. No website required, no domain to verify. You authorize the account and it shows up in the property selector right next to your sites.

For years, social handed you in-app analytics. Views, likes, saves, the whole vanity buffet. What it has never shown you was how people found you through Google. That query data is the single most useful organic signal we’ve ever had for websites, and now you get it for your Instagram grid. Real terms, real clicks, real impressions, filterable by individual post and by query, and you can export the whole thing.

Last year, it was big news when Instagram posts started appearing in Google search, and it now is the complete link of marketing harmony to see how everything connects without owning the domain. Pure heaven.

Three reports come with it. Performance is the one that matters for the data-divas: total clicks and impressions, sortable by post and query, exportable. Insights covers traffic trends and the headlines for leadership and non-social team members, your top posts, and how people discover the account. Achievements tracks click-threshold milestones over a rolling 28 days, and you can safely ignore it.

Before you get excited, read the fine print, because two quirks will bite you in a client report if you walk in cold.

A click still counts when a video plays inside Google’s own viewer instead of opening the app. Instagram Stories log as impressions when they surface and as clicks when someone taps them. So “clicks” here does not mean “people who landed in the app,” and you want to know that before a client asks.

The second one is sneakier, and it’s the one that makes you look careless if you miss it. The Insights summary card counts clicks across web, image, video, and news search. The detail lists underneath it only cover web search. Your totals will not reconcile. That’s how it’s built, not a bug and not something you fumbled in the export. Drop a note in your report template now so future-you doesn’t lose an afternoon chasing a gap that was never real.

What Google is actually doing here is turning Search Console into one command center for visibility. AI Overviews and AI Mode reporting are already folded in. Social and video are the next layer. As discovery keeps sliding off homepages and into feeds, Google wants to own the measurement for all of it, and this pairs with the public Search profiles they rolled out in June. Platform properties are the private, analytics-only twin of those.

The read I keep coming back to: Google is making itself the referee of cross-surface discovery data at the exact moment the rest of us are scrambling to figure out where our organic reach even comes from.

What to do:

• Check whether the property type has reached your account yet. The rollout is gradual, over “the coming weeks.”

• Once it lands, connect every platform each brand is active on.

• Audit which platform earns the most Google Search impressions. The answer is regularly not the one the client would guess.

• Mine the query data for caption and content ideas, and tune bios, titles, and hashtags around terms already surfacing your posts.

• Add the summary-vs-detail caveat to your report template today.

When the client asks “does this replace our native analytics?” It doesn’t. Native shows in-app behavior. This shows how Google Search sent people to the content, which native tools can’t see at all. Set the expectation that the data starts thin and fills in as the rollout reaches you.

What we don’t know yet: full country availability, whether more platforms get added, whether access shifts by account size or category, and how far back any historical backfill goes. Google hasn’t said.

Your GEO play on Reddit just got riskier, and Reddit’s own AI is doing the hunting

Reddit announced on July 6 that its improved automated systems are now catching roughly 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day, which cut user exposure to that content by about 20% year over year. The target has a name: generative engine optimization. Marketing content planted in Reddit threads so that ChatGPT and Gemini, both of which license Reddit’s content, will quote it back as if it were a real person’s opinion.

Reddit is using LLMs to catch the subtle, coordinated patterns older systems used to miss, and it’s screening signals right at account creation. Human moderators still did the bulk of the work, driving more than half of removals through the back half of 2025, but the automated net just got a lot finer.

Then there’s the Cornell finding, which explains the whole mess. Researchers found that a snippet as short as 13 words in a Reddit comment could sway an AI-generated answer. In one test, a single planted comment pushed a fake dating app to the top of the recommendations. Thirteen words. That’s why brands started doing this, and it’s also why it’s nearly impossible to fully police.

Reddit is stuck in a trap it built itself. The licensing deals with OpenAI and Alphabet turned it into one of the most-cited sources in AI answers, and that citation value made it the most attractive target on the internet for stealth marketing. So Reddit has to protect the integrity of the corpus it’s selling, or the deals lose their worth.

So, let’s call it what it is: defensive infrastructure with a community-health story bolted on the front. Meanwhile the money keeps flowing toward GEO shops, with Profound crossing a $1B valuation after a February round. The tactic is professionalizing at the exact moment the platform starts punishing it.

This is organic and earned-media strategy. If you or a client have been seeding Reddit for AI citations, the risk math changed this week, and suspensions are ramping.

What survives is real participation: becoming an actual member of a subreddit, building a niche community, earning citations the slow way. One marketer in the coverage has clients become moderators and build their own subreddits, taking the takedown risk as the price of doing it honestly. Play the long game or don’t play.

What to do:

• Audit whether any current client’s “AI visibility” strategy leans on Reddit seeding, and flag the changed risk this week.

• Move toward real community participation instead of planted content.

• If you’re working inside niche subreddits, watch account health closely.

• Reframe the client conversation around durable presence, not exploits.

For the client chasing “get us mentioned in ChatGPT”: they need a reset, and this is the week to give it. The line I’d use: seed-and-pray now risks bans and wasted spend, and the durable play is real presence. It’s also a clean way to separate your practice from the agencies still selling the shortcut.

What we don’t know: Reddit’s false-positive rate, how much manipulated content still slips through and gets cited before takedown, and whether OpenAI or Google re-filter anything Reddit removes after the fact. We have Reddit’s side of the numbers, and only Reddit’s side.

AI owns the top of your funnel now. Search still owns checkout.

Similarweb dug into thousands of shopping journeys across three industries and came back with the cleanest behavioral picture we’ve had of where AI actually sits in the buying process. People lean on AI chatbots at the start, for product discovery, weighing options, getting their bearings. Then they go back to traditional search to compare prices and make the final call.

The pull of that first AI recommendation is not small. Brands mentioned by tools like ChatGPT saw 2.5x more visits. And the people who arrived from AI viewed nearly twice as many pages and spent double the time on-site compared to search visitors. That engagement gap is the part I’d underline. AI isn’t just sending traffic, it’s sending people who stick around and dig in.

But it stops at the deal. Shoppers still don’t trust AI at the moment of purchase, so they route back to search to check prices and buy. Which quietly retires the “AI is replacing search” narrative and hands you something more useful: two surfaces doing two different jobs.

This is the first solid data putting a number on AI’s spot in the funnel instead of the usual hand-waving, and it maps cleanly onto the Reddit story above and the healthcare-ads test down in Burn Notice. The whole ecosystem is repricing around AI as a discovery surface, and now we have proof of exactly where that surface ends. The deal-finding gap is the interesting part, because it says AI hasn’t earned trust at the transactional moment, and that tells you where your budget and your optimization should still point.

What to do:

• Map your current content to funnel stage, and be honest about the split between what’s built for discovery and what’s built for conversion.

• Get your product data clean and consistent enough that AI tools surface it accurately. That’s the new version of optimizing for discovery.

• Keep price and comparison content anchored where search shoppers convert.

• Watch the deal-finding gap. It may close as AI shopping tools mature, and if it does, the whole map moves.

For the client: this is useful for resetting anyone stuck at either extreme, the “AI is killing search” panic and the “AI is a fad” shrug. The data backs a both-and funnel strategy. Skip the conversation entirely if they’re not e-commerce or retail.

What we don’t know: the coverage never named the three industries studied, so category behavior may vary. And whether the deal-finding trust gap holds or just melts away as these tools grow up.

That’s the week.

Three stories that all point the same direction, which I didn’t plan and only noticed writing it: Google, Reddit, and a pile of shopping data all repricing themselves around AI as the front door and search as the register.

If the Search Console social property has already shown up in your account, go connect everything and hit reply to tell me which platform is winning your Google impressions. I want to know if anyones actually lines up with what the client swore it would be. I’ve seen some gnarly keywords driving to creator’s X and Instagram pages.

See you next Thursday. Xoxo,
Mckenna

The piece of advice I heard the most in college as an Advertising and Public Relations major was that if you want to move up and make a meaningful salary jump, you will have to move jobs every two(ish) years. Now, they didn’t know I would graduate in May of 2020 and all bets would be off, but that’s a lane that I don’t really care to revisit.

The second piece of advice (which to be fair was completely inferred) was that you need to pick a lane. Agency or in-house? Copy, design, or brand management? But, the funny thing about this was that my college only offered one course per speciality. I took one copywriting course, one brand management course, a few design courses (they really said make sure you KNOW Illustrator) and a few more random ones. So, at 18 not only was I presented with the pressure to pick a career, but I also was presented with just one chance at exploration for a niche within an industry that was built on mastering your niche.

I took all of this a little too literally. I stayed at my first job for 23 months, my second for 26 and then my third career job nine months (laid off due to business mismanagement, or maybe it was his home pickleball court construction? We’ll never know) and I’m just approaching 11 months at my current career position. Each one was a different niche.

1. Content Coordinator (Direct Mail and Donation Quality Assurance) at a non-profit marketing agency

2. Marketing Coordinator (for the brand of same non-profit agency)

3. Project Manager (for six clients) at an advertising agency mainly focused on outdoor recreation

4. Marketing Engagement Manager (I swear this was a fake made up position title because they had SO many rounds of layoffs) in-house

5. and currently, Paid Media Specialist for an in-house restaurant group supporting 14 brands and 40+ locations.

6. and also, owner of my own boutique social media agency, Spill Social, offering just about everything I’ve done and then some to my clients

All of that to say, I build the strategy, I build the creative, I write the copy, I architect the campaign, I know how to analyze what’s off and translate that into ‘client-speak’. The word for this is generalist. And for some reason, the stigma with that is that generalist translates to “still figuring it all out.”

And I know it is COMPLETELY ironic to say that the specialist owns the room and I own the hallway because I literally have specialist in my current job title, but you get what I mean.

Campaigns go to die in handoffs where those don’t understand the whole picture and don’t ask questions to paint it. Think the copywriter who has never run a media buy who writes lines for placements they can’t contextualize. The performance marketer who can’t on-the-fly create a new headline variation because that’s “not their job.”

When everyone stands in their own room, someone needs to own the hallway and open the doors. That’s where I feel I land. Maybe that’s the project manager in me coming out, but being a chameleon to your surroundings to develop into a multifaceted talent is invaluable, and I’ve received that feedback many times.

Let me give you a real one. I spent some time building a campaign not only in the financial services sector, but the businesses name had a women’s fertility buzzword in the company title. Talk about constraints. The audience was finally tight enough to where I wasn’t second-guessing it. Creative felt good and crispy (IYKYK) and I was proud as HELL. Launch and a dud.

It took me awhile to find what was wrong, and when I did, it was stupid. The hook in the copy specified one thing and then the creative oversimplified a promise. Not contradictory, just misaligned enough that a person coming across and spending more than three seconds probably noticed it. Client saw the copy. I had a friend take a peek, nothing. I ran it by my fellow social media managers when we bounce ideas, and it was all clean. The rip was invisible to everyone because it lived between their jobs, which is to say it kind of lived in no one’s ask.

That’s the thing about handoff failures. It’s no one’s fault. It just shows up as a number that everyone involved has an alibi for.

Picking up new skills has never been some ego-boosting, noble growth mindset thing. Half of it was out of annoyance of waiting for someone to reply to me in Slack. Some of it was hitting walls where I couldn’t fix something because I didn’t understand the next step in the user journey process, so I’d learn that thing. Other times, sometimes your people have life happen to them, and you just have to step in and do what you can to not only take something off of their plate, but to help hit the deadline.

Range isn’t shallow. Being knowledgeable enough to hold the entire funnel in your head and know which part needs adjusting at any day of the week is a real skill. There isn’t a clean title for this (maybe it’s Marketing Engagement Manager, lol), so it naturally gets undervalued right up until a campaign is on fire and suddenly everyone needs you without spinning up a war room and contracting four freelancers on a tight deadline who doesn’t know the brand.

The caveat of this is that yes, it does cost me money. The Generalist Tax. I’ve seen specialist quote rates I can’t say out loud to clients. Sometimes, this is what’s necessary. I’ve seen the backend of WebFlow and I just can’t pretend like I can do it. I can’t. Bring in help, please.

But, the specialist gets the higher day rate and often times the shorter engagement. They come in, they fix the singular thing, they leave and the brand keeps churning through the next specialist and the next. And the next. When you can touch the entire thing, you don’t get cut when things tighten, because cutting you means losing a whole lot more value. The specialist optimizes for the rate. I optimize for still having the client in eighteen months. Two games. I pick the latter. On purpose.

The reason I love what I do is because no day looks the same. It keeps me on my toes. I’m challenged. The work is genuinely fun. I like the entire process. I like the copy, the buy, the creative and the ROI at the end that tells you if any of it worked. Even if I fail, I like what I learn. It makes me better.

Owning one slice of the industry and never touching the rest is not focus that I jive with. I’d get antsy and restless and resentful. I don’t want to hate an industry that I love.

So, I won’t niche down. I’ll keep going wider, picking up that new platform, on purpose, with purpose and eyes wide open, windows down, at 70 mph. Those that can adapt and step up are the ones who stop being replaceable when things get hard.

But, at the end of the day, this is just pixels on a screen and I am (sometimes) able to just say, “It’s not that deep” and move on.

xoxo,
The Jack of All Trades, Master of The Funnel

Cannes wrapped last week, and every platform showed up to the beach with the same AI party favors. Reddit brought AI ad tools. YouTube brought Gemini. Meta brought a whole rebuilt Creator Studio. If you felt like your feed suddenly filled with “we’re bringing AI to X” announcements, that’s why. The festival is a launch pad now, not just an awards show.

One thing worth naming before we start: Meta is wedging AI into both ends of your workflow this issue. The stuff that reviews your ads before they run, and the stuff that answers your comments after they post. Keep that in the back of your head as you read. It’s less “three separate Meta stories” and more “one platform’s AI strategy showing up in three places.” This AI bubble is getting closer and closer to popping every week.

Burn Notice

The headlines you should know exist. None of these need you to open Ads Manager today.

Reddit opened split testing to every advertiser. Ad split testing is now generally available and self-serve in Reddit Ads Manager, no rep required. You run two variants with one variable changed, Reddit splits it at the user level, and a winner gets called at 65% confidence over a two to six week window. Reddit says four of five early tests found a winning variant on ROAS. If Reddit is in your mix, this is a real upgrade. If it isn’t, file it and move on.

Reddit also dropped a full AI ad suite at Cannes. Beyond split testing: a beta free-form ad generator that builds ads from your site plus relevant Reddit threads, “tailored creative assets” that suggest communities and headlines and image variants, and Shopping Listing Ads in alpha (a multi-advertiser carousel matched to conversations). All running on what Reddit calls Community Intelligence. Alpha and beta, so this is awareness only for now.

YouTube shipped Gemini-powered insights tools. Trending insights inside Google Ads Insights Finder (US), integrated brand pulse metrics, a new Content and Creator Insights API for agency media planning, and Gemini creative tips coming to Demand Gen. Relevant if you run YouTube or Demand Gen, or plan creator media at an agency.

Google finished its June 2026 spam update. It rolled out June 24 to 26, global, all languages, no new policies. This is a standard SpamBrain tune, not a core update. It’s an organic search item that sits at the edge of our lane, but if you or a client watches rankings, it’s on the record.

Google Ads API is sunsetting new Smart Campaign creation. Google’s Ads Developer Blog flagged (June 23) that you’ll no longer be able to spin up new Smart Campaigns through the API. Narrow. This matters to developers and tools built on the Google Ads API and anyone creating Smart Campaigns programmatically. Technical heads-up, nothing to do.

LinkedIn is testing topic-based feeds. Alternative feeds organized around topics, recommended by engagement and trending news, sitting alongside your main feed. LinkedIn trialed it with Cannes attendees first and early feedback is positive. This is attempt number two (last year’s version fizzled), now riding the LLM feed-ranking overhaul from March. If it ships broadly, topic-specific LinkedIn content gets a distribution surface beyond your own network. Not actionable yet, but worth a revisit for organic strategy if it graduates.

The Safe

A soon paid-only exclusive. Where the news gets translated into what to actually do about it.

Get 20% off forever

1. Meta built booking directly into Lead Ads

Here’s the thing that kills more leads than bad creative: the gap between the form-fill and the actual booked appointment. Someone raises their hand, then goes cold in the twelve minutes it takes for anyone to follow up. Meta just went after that dead air.

What happened. Meta launched Embedded Appointment Booking for Facebook Lead Ads Instant Forms. After a lead submits the form, a scheduling widget loads right on the Thank You page. Their name, email, and phone auto-carry over, they pick a slot, they confirm, and they never have to leave Facebook.

Confirmed booking partners at launch are HighLevel and Calendly, the two calendar tools with the widest adoption among lead-gen advertisers. Rollout is phased through HighLevel: 25% of advertisers as of June 24, 50% on August 10, full availability in November 2026.

Why it changes more than convenience. A booked appointment is a stronger optimization and reporting event than a form-fill. A form-fill is a maybe. A booking is a maybe who picked a time. Once you can set the booking as your tracked conversion, you can optimize toward the thing that actually correlates with revenue instead of the thing that correlates with a curious thumb. This minorly redefines in what you report as a “conversion,” and it’s worth thinking through before you flip it on.

Mind the gap. It’s Facebook-only at launch. If you’re running Instagram-heavy lead campaigns (and a lot of you are), those are excluded for now. Don’t rebuild your whole funnel around a feature half your placements can’t touch.

The catch nobody’s talking about. An in-ad booking becomes a second source of truth. If the booking lives in Meta and also syncs to your CRM, you now have two records of the same appointment and a real risk of double-counting or orphaning a lead somewhere between them. Confirm your sync before you scale, or your reporting gets fuzzy fast.

Your next moves:

1. Check whether your accounts are in the 25% rollout group yet.

2. Audit which clients can benefit. Anyone selling a slot in a calendar: consultations, demos, tastings, private dining, qualifying-service based opportunities.

3. Pick your booking partner before you build. HighLevel or Calendly is a stack decision, not an afterthought.

4. Set the booking as a tracked conversion and decide your optimization target: booking or form-fill.

5. Confirm CRM sync so you don’t end up with orphaned records.

Still unknown: When it will arrive and how it looks within Instagram, the full partner list beyond HighLevel and Calendly, exactly how the booking event flows into optimization, and how no-shows are handled.

2. Meta is moving 90% of ad and content review to AI

This is the one to pay attention to, because it changes something you touch every single week: ad approvals.

What happened. Per a Financial Times report (around June 25), Meta is accelerating a plan to move the majority of both content and ad review to its own large language models. AI handles roughly 50% of that work today. The target is 90%-plus by the end of 2026 for certain content types, covering policy violations, spam, and ad compliance checks across Facebook and Instagram.

Meta had previously signaled a slower, more human-in-the-loop transition. This is the timeline getting pulled forward, and it lands right after Meta cut around 8,000 jobs (roughly 10% of staff). For extra flavor, a recent exploit compromised about 20,000 Instagram accounts by manipulating Meta’s AI support bot. So that’s the system your appeals may soon route through.

What it means for you. Your disapprovals are about to change character. When AI gets it right, approvals get faster, which is great. When it gets it wrong, you get more baffling false rejections and a thinner human appeals path to fix them. There’s no toggle for this. Your only real lever is the creative itself. Tighten your copy and claims now, especially anything an AI will read literally. Vague-but-fine phrasing that a human reviewer would’ve waved through is exactly what a literal model flags. If you write like you’re being read by a machine that doesn’t do nuance, you’ll trip fewer wires. Health, wellness, before-and-after, and claims-heavy verticals (looking at you, med spa accounts) should get a copy audit first.

The adjacency angle. AI isn’t just reviewing your ad, it’s reviewing what runs next to your ad. If the model gets less precise about what content it allows on the platform, your brand-safety and adjacency risk goes up alongside it. Worth flagging to any client who cares deeply about where their name appears.

Start documenting more. Fewer humans in review means fewer humans in appeals. Your appeal on an AI disapproval may itself be judged by AI. Document everything. Screenshot the ad, save the copy, keep a paper trail on anything you’d want to contest, because “let me talk to a person” is getting harder to do.

Your next moves (this is a monitoring story, not a restructure):

1. Watch your disapproval rates over the coming months and note any spike.

2. Pre-empt sensitive verticals now: audit copy and creative for claims a model reads literally.

3. Keep a documented trail on anything likely to get flagged.

4. Do not restructure your strategy yet. Watch and prepare.

Get ahead of it with clients. Anyone in a sensitive category will see more disapprovals before they understand why, and they’ll assume you broke something. Say it first: “Meta is shifting ad review to AI. Expect more false flags on health and beauty claims over the next few months. We’re tightening copy proactively so we trip fewer of them.”

Still unknown (and there’s a lot here): which content types hit 90% first, whether ad review is in the first wave or lagging behind content moderation, what the appeals path actually looks like after the transition, and the real false-positive rate. Hold your conclusions loosely.

3. LinkedIn will now write your job applications for you

LinkedIn has a philosophy problem, and it’s kind of funny to watch.

The double standard. Back in May, LinkedIn cracked down on AI “slop” in the feed, positioning itself as the platform that wanted real human posts. Now it’s rolling out Premium Apply Assistant, which drafts your cover letters, pre-fills your applications, and hands you an AI-authored submission. So AI content is a problem in the feed but a premium feature in the application flow. Pick a lane.

What it does. For Premium Career subscribers (a ridiculous $39.99/month), the assistant surfaces high-match roles (including some not posted on LinkedIn), pre-fills application fields from your profile, drafts tailored cover letters, and attaches a confidence indicator scoring how ready each element is. It works on some supported external job sites too. You still review and manually submit. Here’s the key part: LinkedIn says recruiters see only the final submitted content, with no indication AI was involved.

Why this matters even if you’re not job hunting. When applications are AI-authored and undetectable, the early-stage screening signal collapses. A tailored cover letter used to mean someone cared enough to write one. Now it means someone has a subscription. Hiring shifts toward the things AI can’t fake yet: portfolios, in-person conversations, actual work samples. If you hire, weight those heavier and expect application volume up, signal down.

And the flip side. If applications become commodities, your actual LinkedIn presence becomes the thing that separates you. The content you post, the work you show, the way you talk about your field. That’s the part a confidence indicator can’t generate for you. For anyone building a personal brand on the platform, this is one more reason owned content beats a templated application.

Your move: mostly awareness. If you hire, adjust your screening toward portfolios and interviews. If you build a presence on LinkedIn, double down on original content, because it just became the differentiator.

Still unknown: whether this expands beyond Premium, whether recruiters eventually get an AI-disclosure signal, and how often people actually submit the AI draft unchanged versus editing it.

4. Most Americans want under-16s off social media

The headline is the ban. The story for your accounts is age verification.

What the numbers say. A Pew survey (fieldwork late May into early June, roughly 9,750 respondents) found 56% of U.S. adults support banning under-16s from social media, about 20% oppose, and roughly a quarter are unsure. It’s bipartisan, with more people on both sides in favor than opposed, and it spans age groups (young adults are the least supportive, parents the most). Related measures poll even higher: around 78% support time limits for minors, up from 69% in 2023, with strong support for age verification and parental consent. The poll landed two days after the U.S. House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, 267 to 117. Australia already banned under-16 use. The UK and Denmark and others are moving on age restrictions too.

Why the ban isn’t the point. A ban requires knowing how old people are. That means age verification, and age verification is what actually hits your accounts. It shrinks your addressable audience to verified adults, adds friction to the funnel, and worsens the signal loss you’re already fighting. Fewer verified-adult impressions can move your CPMs. That’s the real downstream effect, not the headline.

Platforms move before laws do. Teen accounts with default restrictions already exist. Expect more of them, and expect defaults that quietly suppress organic reach to younger cohorts regardless of what any bill does. Platforms would rather build the guardrails pre-emptively than get told how to build them.

The question your clients will start asking. Marketing to teens is reputationally hotter now. Even where it’s perfectly legal, “should we” is becoming a live client conversation, not a settled one. If you have youth-adjacent brands, be ready for that question before it’s asked.

Your move: monitoring. Audit whether any client depends on under-18 reach and scenario-plan if the answer is yes. Don’t restructure anything. Track two trigger events: the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act’s progress and platform age-verification rollouts. Those are your signals to act.

Still unknown: whether the House bill becomes law and in what form, how U.S. platforms would implement verification if required, and the real audience and CPM impact of verification gating.

5. Meta brought back Creator Studio, now with an AI that answers your comments

And here’s the other end of Meta’s pipeline. Story 2 was AI reviewing what goes in. This is AI handling what comes out.

What happened. Meta is reviving Facebook Creator Studio (which it killed in January 2023 for Business Suite) as a standalone AI companion app. Limited testing, waitlist open. The core is an AI Creator Assistant, an always-on chatbot that answers performance questions (”when should I post?”, “what are people saying in my comments?”), surfaces daily priorities, and tracks goals. The most consequential piece: AI-powered comment management that flags priority comments and drafts replies in your writing style for you to review and edit before posting. Meta is also splitting the Professional Dashboard into separate Creator and Business Dashboards over the coming months and bringing more Business Suite features (content calendar, bulk upload, expanded analytics) to desktop.

What changes about the work. Community management stops being “do the work” and becomes “approve the AI’s work.” That’s a real time saver on high-volume pages. It’s also a voice-and-compliance risk the second you’re managing a branded or sensitive account. An AI drafting replies “in your style” is fine until it confidently answers a customer complaint or a health question in a way you’d never sign off on. Guardrails first, scale second.

The skeptic’s note. The entire point of social is connecting with the people who show up. Outsourcing that connection to a bot is a strange thing to automate. Fast, sure. But you’re automating the one part that was supposed to be human.

The practical heads-up. The Creator versus Business Dashboard split is a “where did my tools go” situation waiting to happen. If you manage brand pages, some of your tooling is about to move. Know that before you’re hunting for a button mid-task.

Your next moves:

1. Join the waitlist so you can evaluate it firsthand.

2. Set an internal policy on AI-drafted replies for client pages before you enable anything.

3. Note the dashboard split is coming so the tool relocation doesn’t catch you off guard.

Flag for clients with managed pages: AI-drafted replies carry brand-voice and compliance risk. An approval workflow isn’t optional here.

Still unknown: wider rollout timing, whether the assistant covers brand and business pages or creator profiles only, and when the dashboard split actually happens.

That’s the week. Three of those Meta stories aren’t three stories, they’re one company deciding AI should touch your work at the front door and the back. The booking feature is the friendly face of it. The 90% review shift is the one that’ll actually affect us.

See you next Thursday.

xoxo,
Mckenna

You are roughly halfway through the year. When July comes around its that ironic dichotomy of feeling like ‘How is it July Already?’ and ‘It’s only July.’

Journaling is a big part of keeping me sane between the insane news environment, breathing between sprints of understanding platform updates and working a full-time job and owning my own business on the side.

I hate the pressure that comes with January 1st and the forced ‘resets’ moving from Q4 to Q1 and balancing the sheer amount of audits that always feel like a good idea to put on the backburner until you return from the holiday break.

So, let me spare you the overwhelming feeling where hopefully there aren’t too many audits for you and you have the space and mental capacity to take a couple of minutes and channeling the audit energy of the accounts, the spend, the funnel, the creative, the competitors and audit ourselves.

So here’s your dashboard.

Thirty-one prompts, one a day, built to be done in July because the halfway mark is the cleanest reason you’ll get all year to stop and check the gauges. But this also works whenever this happens to come across your desk. January. A bad September. The Sunday you had a breakdown about because you know you’re not going to make a deadline.

The point is, this is not meant to be one giant audit. Take it slow. Please. Our attention spans and our vagus nerve needs it.

A full self-reckoning dropped on you in one sitting is just another overwhelming task, and you have enough of those.

This is one question a day. Some take two minutes. Some may sit with you longer than you’d ideally like. Get a piece of scrap paper, your favorite notebook, whatever it may be, in-hand, because something happens when it’s not a text field and there’s no autosave.

Here’s the breakdown.

Week 1 — The Reckoning.

Where you actually are, honestly, before you start fixing anything.

Week 2 — The Inspection.

Notice how I left the word audit out. We don’t need that buzzword hanging around us in this space. You’ll work through what’s working and what’s draining you, separated out so you can tell the difference.

Week 3 — The Subtraction.

What to cut, renegotiate, or stop carrying. Most of this work is removal, not addition.

Week 4 — The Expansion.

Where there’s actually room to grow, and what you want to be present for in a career that usually demands you be present for everything.

Days 29–31 — The Brief.

You pull it all together into a one-page read on where you are, where you’re going, and what you’re doing about it. A personal strategy brief, the kind you’d build for a brand, except this one’s for you.

Grab a notebook. One you actually like. See you on the other side of the month.

Week 1 — The Reckoning

Before you change anything, you have to know what you’re working with. This week is just looking. No fixing yet.

Day 1 — The honest weather report.

Forget the version you’d give in a standup. If someone you trusted asked how work is really going right now and you had no reason to perform, what would you actually say? Write the unedited answer.

For this, I encourage you to find at least twenty minutes to sit down and write two full pages, uninterrupted. It may feel forced and awkward to do this, but start slow and just let the words flow out of you, whether they mean something or not.

This is not a race towards perfection or wanting this to re-read well, but more so a place to let your brain unravel the knot of thoughts you have about what we spend 40+ hours a week doing.

Day 2 — When did you last feel good at this?

Not busy. Not productive. Good. The kind of day where you remembered you’re actually skilled at what you do. When was it, and what was happening? If you can’t find a recent one, let’s note that.

If you can’t, this data. I don’t want ‘failure’ to consume you and make you feel unworthy, because there is room for everyone here.

Day 3 — The thing you’re carrying that nobody sees.

There’s something you’re holding that doesn’t show up in any report.

A relationship, a dread, a project you’ve quietly given up on, a metric you’re scared of. Name it. You don’t have to solve it today. You just have to stop pretending it’s not there.

Day 4 — Where did the time actually go?

Think about a normal week. Where does your energy genuinely get spent versus where you assume it does? Most of us think we spend our day on strategy and spend it on Slack, reformatting decks, and explaining the same thing three times. Map the real one.

Day 5 — The comparison that’s eating you.

There’s a person, an account, a peer, a former coworker now doing something shinier. The one you watch a little too closely, maybe even with some envy.

Who is it, and what specifically does looking at them make you feel? Be precise. “Behind” is not specific enough.

Day 6 — What you’ve stopped noticing.

When everything is always-on, you go numb to it. What’s a stressor or annoyance you’ve fully normalized that an outsider would look at and say “wait, that’s not okay”? The notification at 9pm. The scope creep. The thing you just absorb now.

Day 7 — The gap.

Where’s the distance between the marketer you thought you’d be by now and the one you are? Don’t moralize it. Just measure it. Some gaps are a problem. Some are just an old map you never updated. Which kind is this?

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Week 2 — The Audit

Now you separate signal from noise. Not everything that’s hard is bad, and not everything that’s easy is good. This week sorts it.

Day 8 — The list that lights you up.

Across everything you do, what are the tasks that you’d still want to do even on a hard day? The work that doesn’t cost you the way the rest does. List them honestly, even if they’re “small” or not the prestigious part of the job.

Day 9 — The list that drains you.

Now the opposite. What consistently leaves you flat, resentful, or exhausted in a way that’s disproportionate to how hard it actually is? Note which of these are hard because they’re complex versus hard because they’re misaligned with you.

Day 10 — What’s actually working.

Step back from the noise of constant change. What in your current setup, your routines, your role, your skills, is genuinely working right now? We’re so trained to optimize that we forget to clock the things we should protect. Find them before you go cutting.

Day 11 — The cost of staying current.

Every platform shift, algorithm update, new tool, and “you have to be on this now” takes a tax. What is keeping up actually costing you in hours, energy, and peace? And here’s the real question: how much of that keeping-up is necessary versus performed anxiety because everyone else seems to be doing it?

Day 12 — Who you’re really working for.

Not your employer. The actual humans whose approval, reaction, or opinion drives your day. A manager, a client, a stakeholder, a faceless internal audience. Who are you performing for, and is that performance earning you anything real?

Day 13 — The skill you’ve outgrown vs. the one you’re avoiding.

There’s something you’re great at that you’ve stopped finding interesting. And there’s something you keep circling but never commit to learning because it’s uncomfortable. Name both. The discomfort one is usually pointing somewhere.

Day 14 — The numbers conversation.

What you’re paid, what you’re worth, and what you tell yourself about the gap. When did you last get real about your rate or salary versus the scope you actually carry? Write down the number you’d ask for if you weren’t scared. Just the number. We’ll use it later.

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Week 3 — The Subtraction

Most of the relief you’re looking for is on the other side of removal, not addition. This is the week you decide what to put down.

Day 15 — The thing you’d stop doing if no one would notice.

If you could quietly drop one recurring task, meeting, report, or responsibility and no one would say a word, what would it be? Now sit with the fact that you’ve been doing it anyway. Why?

Day 16 — The boundary you keep almost setting.

There’s a line you’ve meant to draw and haven’t. The hours, the response time, the scope, the one client or coworker who gets too much of you. What’s the boundary, and what’s the actual fear stopping you from setting it? Name the fear. It’s usually smaller in writing.

Day 17 — What you’re tolerating that you could renegotiate.

Not quit. Renegotiate. A workload, a tool, a process, an expectation. Pick one thing you’ve treated as fixed that might actually be a conversation you haven’t had yet. Most “I’m stuck with this” situations have never once been challenged out loud.

Day 18 — The yes you should have made a no.

Look back at a recent yes that you regret. What did it cost, and what was it really about? People-pleasing, fear, habit, the worry that saying no makes you replaceable? Find the pattern, because there is one.

Day 19 — The noise you can mute.

Your feeds, your follows, your inputs. What are you consuming that consistently makes you feel worse, more behind, or more anxious without making you better at your job? You’re allowed to mute the industry sometimes. What goes first?

Day 20 — The story you tell that isn’t serving you.

“I’m not technical.” “I’m bad at self-promotion.” “I always do this.” “It’s too late to pivot.” We all run a few of these on a loop. Catch one. Write it down. Then write down what it would mean if it simply weren’t true.

Day 21 — The permission you’re waiting for.

What are you waiting for someone to grant you that you could just decide to take? The title, the rest, the focus, the change, the day off you’ve earned six times over. Who exactly do you think has to sign off, and what happens if you stop waiting?

Week 4 — The Expansion

Now that you’ve made room, what fills it? This week is about growth that’s possible inside your real life, not a fantasy version of it.

Day 22 — The version of this job you’d actually want.

Same field, same general situation, but reshaped. If you could redesign your role or your business to fit how you actually work best, what changes? Stay realistic. This isn’t a different life, it’s a better-fitting version of this one.

Day 23 — The skill worth betting on.

Of everything shifting in this industry, what’s one direction you’d genuinely want to grow toward, not out of fear of being left behind, but because it interests you? Curiosity is a more durable engine than panic. What are you actually curious about?

Day 24 — Where you have leverage you’re not using.

You have more than you think. Experience, relationships, a track record, a niche, results you’ve never put into words. What’s a real source of leverage you’ve been sitting on? And what would using it look like?

Day 25 — The thing you make for everyone but yourself.

You build brands, audiences, and presence for other people all day. What would it look like to point even five percent of that skill at your own name, your own work, your own visibility? Not a side hustle. Just no longer being invisible in your own field.

Day 26 — Who you want in your corner.

Careers don’t expand alone. Who are the people, peers, mentors, a community, one honest friend in the work, that you want closer this half of the year? Name them. Then name the one you’ll actually reach out to.

Day 27 — What “present” would mean for you.

You’re asked to be present for everything, which means you’re rarely present for anything. If you could be genuinely present for just a few things in your work, the parts that matter most, what would they be? What would you let go fuzzy so those could stay sharp?

Day 28 — The smallest real change.

Forget the overhaul. What’s one small, concrete change you could make this week that your future self would thank you for? Small enough that you’ll actually do it. Specific enough that you’d know if you did.

Days 29–31 — The Brief

You’ve spent a month gathering. Now you compile. These last three days turn 28 scattered answers into one clear read on where you are and what you’re doing about it. Flip back through your notebook as you go.

Day 29 — Where you are.

Read back through Week 1 and 2. In a few honest sentences, write the state of things. Not the performed version. The real one. What’s working, what’s draining you, what you’ve been carrying, and how you’d actually describe this chapter if you had to name it. This is your situation, summarized by the only person with the full picture.

Day 30 — Where you’re going.

Read back through Week 3 and 4. What are you putting down, what are you protecting, and what are you growing toward? Pick the few that matter most. Not a wishlist. The two or three shifts that would change how this work feels. Write them as decisions, not hopes.

Day 31 — The brief.

Pull it all into one page. The same way you’d brief a brand, except this client is you. Fill in the template below in your notebook. When you’re done, you’ll have something you can actually return to, the thing this whole month was building toward.

The Half-Year Brief

Copy this into the last page of your notebook and fill it in.

Where I am right now: (One or two sentences. The honest read from Day 29.)

What’s working that I’m protecting: (From Day 10. The things I will not cut.)

What’s draining me that I’m addressing: (From Day 9 and 11. Name it, don’t bury it.)

What I’m putting down: (From Week 3. The boundary, the task, the yes-that-should-be-no, the story I’m done telling.)

What I’m renegotiating, not quitting: (From Day 17. The conversation I haven’t had yet.)

The number I’m worth: (From Day 14. Write it again. Look at it.)

What I’m growing toward, out of curiosity not fear: (From Day 23.)

The leverage I’m finally using: (From Day 24 and 25.)

The one person I’m reaching out to: (From Day 26. A name, not a category.)

The smallest change I’m making this week: (From Day 28. The one I’ll actually do.)

What I want to be present for: (From Day 27. The few things that get the sharp version of me.)

That’s the month.

You started here with a vague sense that something needed attention and you’re walking out with a page that tells you exactly what and exactly where. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it. Mid-September, when the noise is loud again and you’ve forgotten half of this, flip back. The version of you who did the work left notes.

This is the kind of audit nobody schedules for you. You did it anyway. I’m proud of you.

xoxo,
Mckenna

By Thursday’s count: six AI product launches, two measurement updates, one creator infrastructure play, a congressional committee vote, and a 500M user milestone from a platform that still doesn’t have a desktop app.

The week’s thread isn’t all AI, exactly. (I hope we never get to the point where that’s all I have to write about because quite f*cking frankly the bubble can’t pop quick enough.) Let me clear my throat though, the thread is two instinctual evolutions running in parallel.

Platforms are building more automation into everything: agentic ads (buzzword overuse alert going off!), AI creative models (eye roll), and finally, machine-driven optimization at the asset level (trigger ten million LinkedIn(fluncer) posts about optimizing ads within AI platforms without touching anything).

But, ironically enough, Meta is simultaneously giving users more manual control over their own feeds. Instagram extending topic control to the main Feed. Threads launched Your Algo. Despite the obvious contraction, these are platforms are responding to the same problem: when AI-driven recommendations started surfacing content nobody asked for, engagement metrics held steady but trust didn’t. The “Your Algo” rollouts are the correction. The agentic ad tools are the revenue play. Both are live at the same time because they have to be.

Congress moved while all of this was happening. The KIDS Act cleared committee with bipartisan support. It’s not law, and the Senate version isn’t reconciled yet. But a bill that passes committee with that kind of margin is closer to law than a bill sitting in committee. The compliance clock starts before the signature.

This issue is a marathon, not a 5k (although it is 5k words). Grab your go-go juice. Let’s go.

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Burn Notice

Awareness-level headlines worth knowing.

Meta expands Live Video Ads globally + virtual card checkout

Meta opened Live Video Ads to all advertisers globally. Ads run inside livestreams with real-time interactive elements.

Virtual card checkout is the more interesting piece: product discovery to purchase without the user leaving the stream.

If your brand runs live shopping or live events on Facebook, this is available now. My call: test with some extra dollars before budgeting around it.

TikTok Shop bans AI-generated voices, prerecorded audio, and static images from promotional livestreams

US academy policy has been updated and is now being enforced.

Any use of AI narration, slideshows, looped footage and screen recordings are prohibited from TikTok Shop livestreams. All verbal communication must be real-time, spoken or signed. Still-frame content cannot exceed 50% of your screen.

Violations will run through the Creator Health Rating system and consist of: commission restrictions, content removal, and account bans are at stake here.

For recorded shoppable videos, here’s the requirements: minimum 3 seconds of dynamic content, creator’s face present on-screen, physical product present.

If any active TikTok Shop workflow depends on automated narration or static setups, audit it today.

Instagram rolls out per-slide carousel captions

20 photo dump, 20 captions. You can toggle multiple captions in the composer dropdown. I got access to this early and while requires more copy work, it’s a good way to add context to carousels without over-doing on-image text.

Only caveat I kind of need fixed? On web, this just turns into one long caption. Hopefully this is ironed out by launch.

Right now, this is rolling out globally and expected to be fully global by June 27th.

Carousels have routinely outperformed Reels in engagement since 2023. Per-slide captions increase slide-level context and will likely improve dwell time (and reach, we can only hope).

Edits app gets desktop version + AI production assistant

The Edits app was announced at a Meta creator event in LA. Desktop version confirmed, no ship date. This simply cannot come soon enough for those that hate CapCut (me).

Edit’s AI assistant will use Instagram performance data to surface content ideas and trending audio. Currently, Beta tab and expanded audience insights are live now. Meta reports Edits-created content has a 10% higher save rate and 2% higher reshare rate vs. non-Edits content.

Worth watching. Keep your eye on this.

Microsoft Ads adds LinkedIn job seniority targeting

Ten seniority tiers (CXO to Volunteer) have been added across Search and Audience campaigns in both targeting and observation modes.

LinkedIn-quality professional targeting on Bing are leveling CPC’s at $2-6 vs. $8-15+ on LinkedIn native.

For B2B advertisers already running Microsoft Ads: consider adding a seniority targeting as a test layer this month.

Meta’s Nielsen DMA → Comscore Markets deadline hit for automotive

Enforcement went live June 22. Automotive model ad campaigns using dma_codes stopped delivering.

Migration to Comscore Market IDs required via Catalog Manager or API. If you run automotive on Meta and saw a delivery drop around June 22, this is why.

Meta reportedly building a prediction markets app called Arena

I felt compelled to include this because of a gut feeling. Allegedly, this will be a smartphone app with a video game-style points system; real money possible later.

Meta has run a version of this before (Forecast, 2020-2022). Kalshi and Polymarket has a combined volume topped $130B this year.

Apparently ad revenue isn’t enough and they want a piece of the prediction market pie. Why not encourage and enable gambling addictions now that they’ve been been through the ringer for election interference, data-fraud and whatever else they’re probably paying out that we don’t know about that is ethically questionable. For those that have read Careless People, this is just adding so much more fuel to my Meta resentment.

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LinkedIn shipped four features at Cannes. One of them changes how you think about who posts.

LinkedIn dropped four features this week, timed alongside its headline B2B partner status at the Cannes. (Is it just me or is Cannes much bigger than I realized? Anyways.) Taken individually, each feature is incremental. Taken together, it feels a little more coordinated. Let’s break it down.

Collaborative Posts went live June 22. Now, multiple users and company pages can co-author a single post. Both contributors appear at the top; reach combines across networks. It’s LinkedIn’s version of the Instagram Collab feature, and on a platform where employee voice already outperforms company page reach by a wide margin, I like this.

Employee advocacy math has changed. The practitioner answer to “exec post or brand page?” has been “exec, because reach” for years. Collaborative Posts blurs that line. You can publish from the brand account, tag an exec as co-author, and surface to both audiences in one post. This is structural change for any B2B team running thought leadership through individual accounts.

The first thing to do is pilot it: pair an exec with the company page on a real launch announcement, measure reach against your single-author baseline, and find out whether combined reach actually adds up the way LinkedIn’s pitch implies it does.

Connected Apps on Profiles launched June 17. Users can now connect 12+ platforms to their LinkedIn profile: HubSpot, Fiverr, Beehiiv, Descript, Duolingo, Lovable, Replit, and others. The connected app generates a short description of actual usage. Not self-reported skills. Platform-verifiable activity.

LinkedIn’s old endorsement system was useless. Anyone could endorse anyone for anything, and most profiles had a wall of “Microsoft Excel” from coworkers who’d never seen their work.

Connected Apps replaces credential claims with platform evidence. Your HubSpot profile shows 47 workflows built. Your Replit profile shows 12 public projects. That’s a different quality of signal than “experienced in CRM.” That could be an entire hiring decision just from that social proof. For agency hiring and B2B sales, this is a real lever.

Practitioners: connect the tools you actually use, not the tools you want to claim.

The bundle is a coordinated B2B-creator push. LinkedIn is the Headline Partner for the B2B track at Cannes this year. Shipping creator-side and brand-side features in the same week it’s running B2B sessions at the Carlton isn’t a coincidence.

LinkedIn is formalizing its position as the B2B creator platform (and clearly spending big money doing it). The shift to professional network with a content feed to platform with creator infrastructure that B2B brands build strategy around feels extra real now. TikTok and Instagram can’t contest that position. They’re consumer-first by design.

Brand Kits (June 21) let you configure colors, fonts, and brand voice for LinkedIn’s AI-generated content. If your team uses LinkedIn AI for brand posts, configure Brand Kits before publishing anything else. Ungoverned AI content on a brand page is not a small risk. This is the guardrail that should have been in place before you started using the feature.

Animated posts (June 18) are native in the composer now. Minor feature. Worth knowing so you don’t spend 20 minutes troubleshooting why GIF uploads stopped failing (lol).

What we don’t know yet: Whether Collaborative Posts will be eligible for Sponsored Content amplification, Brand Kits API access for agencies managing multiple client pages, and the full Collaborative Posts rollout timeline beyond the Cannes pilot.

Actions:

1. Pilot Collaborative Posts the moment it’s available on your account. Baseline your current exec-post reach first so you have a comparison point.

2. Configure Brand Kits under Page Settings before using LinkedIn AI for any branded content.

3. Connect apps in your profile Skills section.

4. Update your LinkedIn SOP. None of this is in your current playbook.

Pinterest shipped four AI products in one day. The paid media story is getting undercovered.

On June 17, ahead of Cannes, Pinterest launched Business Assistant, an MCP server, an upgraded Performance+ Creative AI model, and a standalone shopping app called Ask Pinterest. Press coverage led with Ask Pinterest because it’s the most legible consumer story. The practitioner stories are the other three.

Performance+ Creative AI model is globally available now. This upgrade shifts optimization from the ad level to the asset level. Instead of selecting the best performing ad, the model evaluates a broader creative set and selects the best variant per impression.

Pinterest’s internal testing shows a 7.5% click-volume lift vs. the prior model.

For context: Performance+ is now driving approximately 30% of Pinterest’s lower-funnel revenue at 631M MAU and $1.008B in Q1 revenue (18% YoY).

If you’ve been writing off Pinterest as an intent-signal platform without real performance infrastructure, that read is out of date. The 2026 Pinterest brief is structurally different from 2023 Pinterest. The 30% lower-funnel revenue figure is the one that changes the Q4 platform mix conversation.

The practical implication of this asset-level optimization is that creative volume matters more than it did before. If you’re feeding three variants into an algorithm that selects per impression across a broader asset pool, you’re not using the feature. Audit your Pinterest creative volume before assuming Performance+ will do anything meaningful for your accounts.

Business Assistant is an AI co-pilot embedded in Ads Manager and on mobile. It surfaces trend data as graphs with actual Pins (not text walls), recommends Pins to promote and sends proactive mobile notifications. This is currently in closed US beta.

This is the SMB unlock Pinterest has needed for a while. Most small-budget brands skip Pinterest because the interface is intimidating without a dedicated media buyer. An embedded AI assistant that is able to tell you what to promote and shows you where the trends are changes who can actually run Pinterest ads.

Apply for the beta. Don’t budget around it yet.

Pinterest MCP is the one the trade press isn’t covering. Pinterest launched a Model Context Protocol server that lets external AI agents read campaign, analytics, and keyword data directly from your account. Alpha partners: PMG, Pacvue, Dentsu, Havas, Innovid by Mediaocean, and Omnicom’s Jump450. Those aren’t random names. They’re holding companies actively running agentic campaign workflows. Pinterest isn’t asking agencies to add another tab to their dashboard. It’s making itself available inside the AI stacks agencies already use.

As of this week, six platforms have first-party MCP servers: Pinterest, Microsoft Advertising, Google, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Reddit. Meta doesn’t. TikTok doesn’t. If you’re running AI-assisted campaign analysis using Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot, you can now pull Pinterest data natively. Request alpha access.

Ask Pinterest is experimental. This is a standalone conversational shopping app, web-based, US limited. Most AI shopping app experiments don’t survive their first year. Pinterest has a unique asset in the Taste Graph, but the competitive environment this week (Reddit shopping tools, Amazon Alexa+ Agentic Ads) is crowded. Honest read: interesting, not actionable.

Actions:

1. Audit creative volume on Pinterest accounts now. Asset-level optimization needs variants to function.

2. Apply for Business Assistant beta via Pinterest Ads Manager. If your team runs an AI stack for campaign analysis, request Pinterest MCP alpha access.

3. Add Pinterest to your Q4 platform mix evaluation if you’ve been ignoring it. The platform you wrote off in 2023 is not the platform running 30% of lower-funnel revenue in 2026.

Threads crossed 500M users. The reach question just became a platform planning question.

Threads hit 500M monthly active users on June 16, adding 100M since August 2025. The milestone came alongside two feature launches: Your Algo and the graduation of Communities out of beta.

Threads opened globally to ads just in February of this year. For the first year, the practitioner response was “watch this.” At 500M MAU, that response is overdue for revision. 500M MAU isn’t a signal of future potential. It’s a reach number. Every additional user is monetized inventory. If Threads isn’t in your paid media plan for Q3/Q4, the conversation is no longer “should we eventually test this.” It’s “why haven’t we.”

Your Algo lets users tell Threads to show more or less of specific topics for 1, 3, or 7 days. This has been rolling out in US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The organic reach variable to track: when users can configure their topic feed at the platform level, distribution gets less predictable for accounts that don’t cleanly map to a named interest.

Ask this for every brand you manage on Threads: if a user filtered your content category down for a week, does your account survive that? If the answer is no, that’s a content positioning signal, not a platform problem.

Communities graduated out of beta with custom icons, a Communities Hub, and expanded champion recognition. The Instagram Groups parallel is obvious. The LinkedIn Groups parallel is more instructive. LinkedIn Groups had enormous early community value, then organic reach dried up and engagement collapsed. Threads Communities is early enough that the outcome isn’t predetermined. The read for B2B brands: monitor which communities form in your category now. First-mover advantage in early-stage community features is real and doesn’t last long.

Actions:

1. If Threads isn’t in your paid media plan for Q3/Q4, add a test line item. 500M MAU is the inflection point for that conversation.

2. For organic: audit your content topics against how a user might configure their topic preferences. Could someone name what you post about and filter for it? If not, that’s the adjustment to make.

3. For B2B: identify relevant Communities forming in your space now, before the space fills up.

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Instagram gave users control over their main feed algorithm. That affects your distribution.

Instagram extended “Your Algorithm” topic control to the main Feed this month. Just outside the strict window for this issue, but the main feed expansion is the story, and most practitioners haven’t processed what it means yet.

Timeline:

• Reels in October 2025.

• Explore in April 2026.

• Main Feed in June 2026. Three surfaces in eight months.

That’s not a feature rollout cadence. That’s a stiff chiropractic adjustment for the platform.

Under Settings → Content Preferences, users can now see which topics Instagram’s AI has connected to their account and manually add or remove them. This is the user-level override of the recommendation algorithm on the main feed, not just secondary discovery surfaces.

The reach implication for niche brands is real and being underreported. Accounts with clear, named topic categories (fitness, food, travel) are probably fine. The algorithm’s categorization likely maps to what those accounts already produce.

Accounts with niche, mixed-topic, or categorically ambiguous content are more exposed than they were six months ago. If your account doesn’t cleanly match a topic a user would recognize and configure, your distribution has a new variable you don’t control.

Mosseri, Mosseri, Mosseri. He acknowledged publicly that AI-driven recommendations had eroded users’ sense of control. That’s the platform chief confirming the algorithm broke something and this is the fix.

For practitioners: algorithmic distribution is now partly user-governed. Content that earns saves, deliberate follows, and clear topic alignment is more resilient than content that relies on pure algorithmic push. You can’t fully optimize your way into every feed anymore.

The pattern tells you where this is heading. Reels, Explore, main Feed. If Instagram extends user-level topic control to every surface, the optimization question changes from “how do I get the algorithm to show this” to “how do I become the account a user actively wants in their feed?” Those questions have different answers. The second one is harder to fake and more durable over time.

Actions:

1. Review your accounts through the lens of topic clarity. Could a user name what you post about and find you by searching that topic? If not, that’s a positioning question that is now also a reach question.

2. Follow Adam Mosseri if you don’t already. His public statements are the closest thing to early warning practitioners get on Instagram.

3. Do not treat this as a consumer feature with no brand implications. User-level algorithmic control on the main feed affects every account that depends on algorithmic distribution.

The KIDS Act cleared committee. The US is late to this, and it still isn’t done.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved H.R. 7757 on June 22 with bipartisan support. The bill packages a rewritten Kids Online Safety Act with 13 additional child safety measures. It’s not law. But a bill that passes committee with that margin is closer to law than a bill sitting in committee, and the compliance window is shorter than most practitioners think.

The compliance clock is already running. The bill’s effective date is 18 months after enactment. For brands running teen or family-targeted campaigns, the audit starts now. Not when it passes the Senate. Not when it’s signed. The moment to map which accounts and audiences are in scope is before everyone else is scrambling to do the same thing.

Federal preemption is the structural change. Right now, national campaigns require navigating California, Texas, Arkansas, Utah, and a growing list of state-level child online safety frameworks separately. A federal standard collapses that patchwork. One standard, not fourteen.

The catch: the floor rises everywhere. States with looser requirements get pulled to the federal baseline. That affects targeting parameters, ad creative standards, and platform availability for any brand whose audience includes users under 18.

The Senate fault line. The House version dropped the “duty of care” provision that the Senate KOSA version requires. Senate sponsors said a bill without it is dead-on-arrival. What actually passes will be determined by whether the chambers can reconcile on that provision.

I have to include this quote: “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA—it’s a blank check to Mark Zuckerberg to exploit children. The House’s toothless & tepid capitulation is dead in the Senate & a betrayal of families suffering from Big Tech’s greed,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a co-author of the Senate version, posted this on socials this week.

The practitioner read: don’t act on the House version alone. The version that becomes law will look different. Watch the Senate reconciliation before restructuring anything.

The US is behind, and the gap is wider than most practitioners know. Australia passed a law in November 2024 banning users under 16 from social media entirely, with the enforcement burden placed on platforms, not parents. The UK’s Online Safety Act is rolling out now with specific provisions governing how platforms design experiences for children at scale. The EU’s Digital Services Act has child protection requirements for large platforms already in force. The common thread: the legal burden has shifted to the platforms, and the threshold for what counts as adequate protection keeps rising.

The US version, even if it passes with the duty of care provision intact, is more conservative than what’s already enforced in Australia and the UK. But the direction is the same. The US tends to follow on platform regulation, not lead. It’s following. If your brand markets to families, teens, or anyone under 18, look at what compliance looks like for brands operating in Australia right now. That’s the closest working preview of where US requirements are headed.

Actions:

1. Identify every account and campaign where the target audience includes users under 18. This is your scope list for compliance planning.

2. Audit current targeting and creative for those accounts against existing state laws (California, Texas, Arkansas, Utah). Federal preemption will eventually replace this work, but you need to know your baseline now.

3. Watch Senate reconciliation on the duty of care provision. That’s the variable that determines how significant this legislation actually is.

4. Look at what Australian brands are doing on compliant social media. It’s a working preview of the US in 18-24 months.

TikTok’s agentic play: Symphony Agent writes your briefs, Custom Creator Networks replaces your influencer software.

TikTok dropped two products at Cannes that are easy to underestimate because they sound like adjacent-to-ads features. They’re not.

Custom Creator Networks is the bigger story for anyone running creator marketing. TikTok is building proprietary creator management pools inside TikTok One.

Brands can vet and save creators, centralize briefs and contracts, and track performance in a single dashboard. The tools this competes with: Grin, AspireIQ, CreatorIQ, and the spreadsheet-plus-email-chain workflow most teams still run. Third-party creator marketing platforms charge subscription fees for functionality TikTok is now providing natively. That’s either a cost saving or a lock-in play, depending on how you look at it.

If you’re running creator marketing on TikTok through a third-party platform, compare what you’re paying against what TikTok One now provides. And think about what happens to your creator database if it migrates into TikTok One. Creator relationship data is an asset. Know where it’s housed before you move it.

Symphony Agent lets advertisers input a brief and receive creative concepts, scripts, and strategic recommendations. Not a copy generator.

The play is compressing the gap between brief and first creative pass for teams without a full in-house creative workflow.

The honest caveat: anyone who has briefed an AI tool on a nuanced brand voice already knows what happens. It produces content that looks structurally right and reads tonally wrong. The vocabulary is present. The brand voice isn’t. Symphony Agent is faster at first draft. It is not better at final output. Use it for brief-stage ideation: three directions in less time than one. Then evaluate and build from there. The practitioners who treat it as a starting point will get value from it. The ones who activate-and-publish won’t.

Actions:

1. Evaluate Custom Creator Networks against your current creator marketing stack. If you’re already managing TikTok-specific creator relationships, the case for a separate subscription just got harder to make.

2. Use Symphony Agent for brief-stage ideation on campaigns where speed matters. Do not use it as a shortcut past brand voice review.

3. Confirm where your creator data lives before migrating anything into TikTok One.

Google Ads will auto-classify your Customer Match lists in August. You have eight weeks.

Starting in August, Google Ads will automatically classify Customer Match lists against its Sensitive Category policies. Lists that contain or are inferred to include users flagged for sensitive categories (health conditions, financial status, political beliefs, religious affiliation) will be restricted or barred from targeting.

Eight weeks is not a comfortable runway. Audit your active Customer Match lists now and map them against Google’s Sensitive Category definitions. You don’t find out at enforcement. You find out when a campaign stops delivering on the day you were expecting to launch something.

The broader read. Google has been systematically pushing advertisers toward first-party data that is clean, consented, and categorically unambiguous. Customer Match built from your own purchase history, direct email subscribers, or loyalty program data is the low-risk zone.

Customer Match built from third-party lists, enrichment services, or broad CRM exports is the risk zone. Google is narrowing the acceptable surface area for audience targeting, and the direction it’s narrowing toward is data you collected directly with explicit consent.

This is a structural posture shift playing out in increments. The advertisers building clean first-party data infrastructure now will have fewer compliance disruptions in 2027 than the ones treating each update as a one-time patch.

Actions:

1. Audit active Customer Match lists before August. Export list names and sources, evaluate against Google’s Sensitive Category definitions, and flag anything built from third-party data or enrichment services.

2. Brief clients with significant Customer Match usage before they find out from a delivery drop.

3. Start mapping first-party data collection touchpoints for every brand you manage: email sign-ups, loyalty programs, purchase history. Clean lists now are a structural advantage in an environment where the audience targeting surface is shrinking.

Amazon launched agentic ads inside Alexa+. Here’s what that actually means.

Amazon launched Alexa+ Agentic Ads at Cannes. The premise: an Alexa+ user asks to “find and book a restaurant for Saturday,” and the ad surfaces, selects, and executes the transaction without the user leaving the conversation.

The conversion funnel doesn’t get shorter. It disappears from the user’s perspective.

Amazon’s position here is structurally different from every other platform making agentic ad claims. No other platform has the combination of purchase intent signals, transaction history, Prime membership behavior, and voice commerce infrastructure at Amazon’s scale.

When Amazon makes an agentic ad play, it does so from a data position that Meta, Google, and TikTok cannot fully replicate. The intent data isn’t browsing signals. It’s purchase completion data.

What agentic ads actually mean for the buy side. Traditional ads ask users to click. Agentic ads ask an AI agent to execute on the user’s behalf. Here, you’re buying a position in the agent’s decision stack. How those decisions get made, what signals determine which advertiser the agent acts on, and whether attribution exists in a transaction the user never actively approved: these are open questions without industry answers yet.

Honest read: too early to act on. Alexa+ Agentic Ads are in early access. No CPM benchmarks. No attribution standards. No practitioner case studies. The budget case doesn’t exist in any standardized form yet. The right posture is understand the format and watch the early access data. Don’t allocate budget until the measurement story is clear.

Actions:

1. If you manage brands with Amazon presence (retail, restaurants, services), request early access to understand the format before your competitors do.

2. Watch Q3 for CPM and conversion benchmarks from early adopters. Start thinking about what “winning an agentic recommendation” looks like in your category. The optimization discipline for agentic ad placements will be real, and the practitioners who understand it earliest will have a meaningful head start.

YouTube updated its ad measurement stack. The attribution gap is narrowing.

Google announced expanded YouTube ad measurement tooling on June 23, including Insights Finder, currently in beta. The existing stack (Brand Lift, Search Lift, Conversion Lift) now has additional tools accessible via beta application.

The measurement gap YouTube has always had. Meta’s attribution tools are imperfect, but they’re mature and well-understood by practitioners. YouTube’s measurement have historically lagged.

Brand Lift studies require minimum spend thresholds. Conversion Lift attribution relies on Google’s modeled signals rather than direct data. The full-funnel case for YouTube has been harder to prove to clients than it should be for a platform with the reach that it has (say it LOUDER).

A more complete measurement stack is the infrastructure that closes that gap. If it works as described, the data case for YouTube in full-funnel budget conversations gets materially stronger. That changes what you can say to a client who keeps pulling YouTube budget to put into Meta.

Apply for Insights Finder beta now. Beta access matters because early users influence how the tool develops. If YouTube measurement is a priority for your accounts, being in the evaluation period is worth more than waiting for GA and reading someone else’s case study.

The honest caveat. The research on what Insights Finder actually does is thin. The product page is light, and no practitioner reporting exists yet because the beta is new. Apply for access. Evaluate once you have it. Don’t restructure your YouTube measurement approach based on a product description. Find out what it actually does before telling a client it exists.

Actions:

1. Apply for Insights Finder beta via the YouTube Ads product details page.

2. While waiting: audit your current YouTube measurement setup against the full Brand Lift, Search Lift, and Conversion Lift suite.

3. If you’re not running all three on eligible campaigns, start there. When access comes through, build a test case with one campaign before applying it broadly.

Reddit launched its most significant ad product suite. One number is worth acting on now.

Reddit dropped four products at Cannes under the Community Intelligence umbrella: Free-form Ad Generator (Beta), Tailored Creative Assets (Beta), Redditor Highlights (GA), and Shopping Listing Ads (Alpha). All built on 25B+ posts and comments as training data.

The data asset is genuinely different from what other platforms have. Meta knows what you click. Google knows what you search. Reddit knows what communities actually say to each other about specific products and problems. Unfiltered, in depth, at scale.

Tailored Creative Assets uses that community content to inform ad creative. The premise: if you know what a subreddit actually says about your product category, you can make ads that don’t read like ads. Whether the execution delivers on that premise is the real question (more on that below).

The number worth acting on now: 130% VTR lift and 71% completion lift for 6-second video optimization. Reddit’s new 6-second engaged video view optimization goal produced those numbers in early testing. If you’re running video on Reddit, or have avoided it because completion rates were mediocre, test the 6-second format with this optimization goal before anything else. That’s not a “watch this” stat. That’s a “run a test this quarter” stat.

Reddit’s creative problem is real and is not solved by an AI tool. Brands fail on Reddit because ads that perform everywhere else don’t perform there.

Reddit users are specifically hostile to content that reads like marketing content in a space they didn’t opt into marketing content. Tailored Creative Assets uses community language to try to solve this natively.

The honest question is whether an AI model trained on community content produces ads that actually feel native to a subreddit, or whether it produces ads that use the right vocabulary but still read like an outsider guessing. No external validation exists yet.

Start with what’s at general availability. Of the four products, only Redditor Highlights is GA. Everything else is beta or alpha.

Don’t restructure your Reddit strategy around tools that may change significantly before general availability. Add the 6-second video test, apply for beta access on Free-form Ad Generator and Tailored Creative Assets, and evaluate from there.

Actions:

1. If you’re running video on Reddit: test the 6-second optimization goal this quarter. The early performance lift is significant enough to warrant a real test with budget behind it.

2. Apply for Free-form Ad Generator and Tailored Creative Assets beta access.

3. Use Redditor Highlights now. It’s live, and understanding your Reddit audience before building creative is not optional.

4. If Reddit isn’t in your current stack: don’t add it reactively. Evaluate whether the audience is there for your specific category first.

That’s Issue #3. Longer than usual because Cannes Lions turned into a platform product summit for the ages while Congress decided to move at the same time. Not the easiest week to run a newsletter. The sun has set.

Until Next Thursday,
Mckenna

CITATIONS

BURN NOTICE

Meta Live Video Ads + Virtual Card Checkout

NetInfluencer, June 2026: https://www.netinfluencer.com/meta-launches-live-video-ads-virtual-cards-and-expanded-affiliate-partnerships-in-cannes-commerce-push/

Social Media Today, June 18, 2026

TikTok Shop AI Voice Ban

Social Media Today, June 16-17, 2026: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-bans-ai-generated-voices-in-shopping-livestreams/822977/

PYMNTS, June 2026: https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2026/tiktok-bans-ai-voices-from-livestreams/

NetInfluencer, June 2026

Instagram Per-Slide Carousel Captions

Russh, June 18, 2026

Edits App Desktop + AI Assistant

TechCrunch, June 11, 2026

Social Media Today, June 2026

Microsoft Ads LinkedIn Seniority Targeting

PPC Land, June 15, 2026

Meta Nielsen DMA → Comscore Markets

Common Thread Co., June 2026: https://commonthreadco.com/blogs/coachs-corner/meta-cannes-2026-live-video-ads-virtual-cards-dma-deprecation

Meta Arena

New York Times via Tech Brew, June 24, 2026

THE SAFE

LinkedIn Cannes Bundle

Social Media Today — Collaborative Posts, June 22, 2026: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-adds-collaborative-posts/823470/

Social Media Today — Brand Kits, June 21, 2026

Social Media Today — Connected Apps on Profiles, June 17, 2026

Social Media Today — Animated Posts, June 18, 2026

Pinterest AI Bundle

Pinterest Newsroom, June 17, 2026: https://newsroom.pinterest.com/news/cannes-2026/

TechCrunch, June 17, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/pinterest-launches-an-experimental-ai-shopping-app-called-ask-pinterest/

PPC Land, June 17, 2026: https://ppc.land/pinterests-mcp-server-and-ask-pinterest-app-rewrite-the-discovery-playbook/

Threads 500M MAU

Meta Newsroom, June 16, 2026

TechCrunch, June 16, 2026

Instagram Your Algorithm — Main Feed

Social Media Today, June 10, 2026

KIDS Act

Bloomberg Government, June 22, 2026

The Hill, June 22, 2026

TikTok Symphony Agent + Custom Creator Networks

TikTok Newsroom, June 22, 2026: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/tiktok-at-cannes-lions-2026-where-creative-solutions-creator-voices-and-culture-turn-creativity-into-business-impact

NetInfluencer, June 22, 2026: https://www.netinfluencer.com/tiktok-unveils-symphony-agent-custom-creator-networks-at-cannes-lions-2026/

MediaPost, June 23, 2026: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/415987/tiktok-unveils-ai-ad-agent-dentsu-integration-cr.html

Google Ads Customer Match Auto-Classification

Search Engine Land, June 2026: https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-to-automatically-classify-conversion-based-customer-lists-480433

Amazon Alexa+ Agentic Ads

Amazon Ads Newsroom: https://advertising.amazon.com/library/news/alexa-agentic-ads

Digiday, June 24, 2026: https://digiday.com/marketing/amazons-latest-ad-format-offers-a-glimpse-of-advertisings-agentic-future/

YouTube Ad Metrics Tools

Social Media Today, June 23, 2026

Reddit Community Intelligence

Search Engine Land, June 22, 2026

Welcome back, or welcome! You survived Issue #01 and came back, which means it landed or you haven’t cleaned out your inbox yet. Happy to have you here. It’s a bit quieter this week (kind of like my Google rep who ghosted me after offering “complete campaign setup support.” But, nonetheless, there were a few floaters that came through to flag.

Three updates from this week that landed in the “relevant” bucket. One may already be running in your campaigns without a benchmark in sight. Two have action windows that close before you’re ready if you don’t move now.

Here’s last week’s news from June 9-16, 2026.

Burn Notice

TikTok + Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Now Offering Real-Time Lead Sync, No Code Required

On June 9, TikTok launched a no-code lead generation integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Leads captured through TikTok ads sync directly to SFMC in real time. No manual CSV export. No batch import loop. Lead hits the form, it lands in Salesforce.

The integration will live on Salesforce AppExchange.

File under: relevant if you’re running TikTok lead gen for any client on a Salesforce CRM. For most local brand accounts, not your concern this week. For any service-business client where speed-to-contact is the delta between a converted lead and a cold one, flag it.

Google Ads Promotion Mode Is in Beta

Promotion Mode is a new beta that lets advertisers pre-schedule a temporary ROAS target adjustment plus extra daily budget for a defined campaign window. Set the start and end dates, set the adjusted targets, and the campaign pushes harder during that period before reverting automatically.

This fixes a genuinely tedious problem: manually adjusting your ROAS target for a flash sale and then forgetting to reset it two days after the window closes. (This has happened to everyone. We don’t need to discuss it.) Still in beta with limited access. If you manage accounts with predictable sale or launch windows, request early access now.

Google Ads API: Offline Conversion Import Has a New Front Door

Starting June 15, Google Ads API is no longer accepting new adopters for offline conversion imports, including enhanced lead conversions. The Data Manager API is now the required entry point for all new setups. Current users can continue running on the Ads API while they migrate, but migration is now the expected path.

Operational ops item, not an emergency. But don’t file it under “someday.” If any third-party tools handle offline conversion imports for accounts you manage, confirm with your vendor that their integration is already Data Manager-compliant. Do not assume.

The Safe is a section for paid subscribers. For now, it’s free. Until it’s paywalled, I’m offering 20% off forever through July 15th.

Get 20% off forever

The Safe

Instagram Just Opened Reels Post-View Ads to Everyone. You Might Already Be Running Them.

Before anything else: pull your Reels placement breakdown right now. If you’re running Advantage+ placements or a broad placement mix, this format may already be serving in your campaigns. Instagram expanded post-view ads for Reels to all global advertisers on June 8, 2026. If you’re on auto-placements, you have live data you haven’t benchmarked yet.

That’s the operational part. Here’s what it means.

What post-view actually is

The format displays a promotional video after an organic Reel has finished playing. A five-second countdown appears on the original Reel before the ad begins. Users can skip via a manual button and return to the Reel they were watching. Swiping moves them to the next Reel in the feed.

One detail that matters more than any CPM number you’ll see in month one: the placement only serves after organic Reels that are longer than 60 seconds. It’s available through existing Reels ad tools in Campaign Manager.

That qualifier is what should actually change something in how you work. More on it in a second.

Meta is building a stack. They’re not just launching features.

Post-view isn’t a standalone test. Instagram is also testing trending ads, which let advertisers place promotions alongside trending Reels content. Post-view, trending, standard in-feed. Three distinct placement contexts, all inside Reels, all targeting different audience states.

This is TrueView logic applied to short-form. TrueView, for anyone not deep in YouTube ads, is the architecture where ads attach to content a viewer chose to watch rather than interrupting something mid-play. YouTube built an entire ad revenue model on that foundation. Meta is running the same play inside Reels, piece by piece. If you’re still treating Reels as a single placement type, you’re going to keep encountering formats that behave differently from anything in your current campaign structure.

The numbers Meta will lead with every time they do this: half of all time spent on Instagram goes to Reels, and users share more than 4.5 billion Reels across Instagram and Facebook daily. Both are real figures. They’re also doing a lot of work. Meta leads with them for every new Reels placement expansion because they need to. Time-on-platform and ad attention quality are not the same measurement. A user completing a 90-second Reel is a materially different signal than a user passively scrolling past one. Post-view is betting on the former. Whether CPMs reflect that attention premium in the first weeks of delivery is something you’ll have to benchmark yourself.

They’re building a stack. The stats justify the expansion. Both things are true.

The creative brief problem nobody’s addressing

The 60-second qualifier is the part that should actually change how you brief your next Reels asset.

Your ad is attaching to someone who just chose to watch long-form Reel content from start to finish. That is a completely different audience state than someone mid-scroll. They’re in content consumption mode, not browse mode. A repurposed Feed ad does not belong here.

Someone who just watched a 90-second cooking tutorial is not in the same headspace as someone scrolling between brunch photos. Build for the moment. The opening frame needs to earn the next five seconds before they decide to skip. That is a specific brief. Treat it like one.

What to do this week

• Pull your active Reels campaigns and check placement-level breakdown. If you’re on Advantage+ placements, filter for Reels and look for post-view impressions. You may already have data.

• If you’re running it: don’t touch it for at least two weeks. New inventory runs lower CPMs while the auction develops. Let it breathe before you benchmark it.

• If you want to test it intentionally: add it as a manual placement to an existing awareness-objective Reels campaign. Do not launch a new campaign for this.

• Set a CPM and CPV alert so you catch when the auction fills and costs normalize.

• Revisit your creative brief for any Reels assets going into Q3. Post-view needs creative built specifically for this context, not repurposed from Feed.

Source: Instagram expands Reels post-view ads to all advertisers, Social Media Today, June 8, 2026

Google Auto-Linked Your YouTube Channel on June 10. The Opt-Out Window Has Closed. Here's the Audit.

Google activated automatic YouTube channel-to-Google Ads linking on June 10, 2026. Eligible accounts were connected silently. The opt-out window is now closed. The question is not whether to do something about it. It’s what got connected, what you now have access to, and whether there’s a client conversation you need to start before they bring it up first.

Run the audit

Google Ads > Tools and Settings > Linked Accounts > YouTube.

If there’s a connected channel you didn’t set up manually, it was auto-linked on June 10. If you see nothing, the account either wasn’t eligible or was already linked before the rollout.

Do this for every account you manage. If you’re in a manager account, check each client account individually. Not just at the MCC level.

What just unlocked

Six YouTube-based audience segment types are now available inside Google Ads: channel subscribers, all video viewers, viewers of specific videos, users who liked or commented, people who visited the channel page, and anyone who engaged with the channel in any way.

Those segments are available for targeting and exclusion, and they feed into Smart Bidding, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns as engagement signals. If you’ve been running PMax without YouTube channel data connected, the signal quality just improved without you touching a thing. Remarketing to someone who watched a three-minute product video is a fundamentally different audience than a cold interest stack. You can now build that list directly in Google Ads.

The agency piece

If your agency has manager access to a client’s Google Ads account and that client has a YouTube channel, their channel data may now be flowing into your reporting and audience pool.

I doubt your clients are this in the weeds, but if they do ask, the best move is a proactive one-liner: “Google auto-linked your YouTube channel to your Google Ads account on June 10, which gives us access to YouTube engagement audiences. Here’s what that means for your campaigns and how we’ll use it.” Most will think it’s great. A few will want to understand it before they’re comfortable. That’s a fair ask. Or they may not care. Keep clicking buttons. Whatever!

What this actually is

This is not a feature announcement. It’s Google standardizing YouTube engagement data as a baseline input across their full ad stack. It follows the same pattern as first-party data, CAPI, and enhanced conversions. Google is building toward a model where the quality and richness of your inputs determines performance more than manual bidding and targeting decisions do. The auto-link is one more step in that direction.

If you’ve been treating YouTube as a channel separate from paid search and shopping campaigns, that wall is getting harder to defend. And for most accounts, it probably shouldn’t have been there to begin with.

What to do this week

• Run the audit: Tools and Settings > Linked Accounts > YouTube. Every account you manage.

• For newly linked accounts, confirm the right channel is connected. If a client has multiple YouTube channels, verify the match.

• Open Audience Manager and check whether YouTube-based segments are now available. If they are, build lists from channel subscribers and video viewers now.

• For active PMax campaigns: Google will use the new data as a signal automatically. Note it as a variable if you see performance shifts in the next few weeks.

• For agency accounts: send a brief proactive note to any affected clients before they bring it up themselves.

Google Is Changing How Bidding Works for Budget-Capped Campaigns on August 17. Here's What "Can Affect Performance" Actually Means.

Google announced this update with a bone-chilling phrase across every account you manage: “this can affect performance.” That is as close to a warning label as Google puts on a bidding algorithm change. Most practitioners read it as standard boilerplate. It isn’t.

Here’s what it actually means, why it connects to something else Google announced the same week, and what to do before July 6.

Read the language carefully

A campaign is “limited by budget” when your daily budget is consistently too low for Google to hit your CPA or ROAS target at full scale. The algorithm knows this. It has been optimizing inside a constraint.

On August 17, Google is updating backend bidding target optimization for those campaigns. Notifications start July 6. The recommendation is to review historical performance and adjust targets before the deadline. The technical specifics weren’t released, but the implication is clear: if your CPA or ROAS targets are miscalibrated against what your budget can actually support, the algorithm’s behavior is changing. Performance can shift before your reporting catches it.

Direct version: campaigns running budget-capped for months with targets set at launch and never revisited are not a conservative spend strategy. They’re accounts where the structure and the budget were never calibrated against each other. August 17 is Google forcing that conversation.

These two announcements came out the same week. That’s not a coincidence.

Smart Bidding Exploration went globally live the same week. SBE is now available for all languages, PMax without feed, and Search campaigns, with Shopping still in beta.

SBE is Google’s mechanism for temporarily bidding above your CPA or ROAS target to find incremental conversion volume. It has been running quietly on many accounts, possibly budget-capped ones, without much practitioner attention.

Here’s why that matters: if you have a budget-capped campaign running SBE, the algorithm has been pushing bids above your target threshold to find conversions while simultaneously constrained by your daily budget ceiling. The August 17 update changes how bidding targets are optimized in exactly that scenario. If you don’t know whether SBE is active on your budget-capped campaigns, go check now. Campaign-level settings. SBE has its own toggle.

The account management problem underneath all of this

If you’re running a campaign at $100/day with a $45 target CPA, Google is trying to generate 2.2 conversions a day from that account. That’s either realistic at your budget or it isn’t. August 17 will help you find out the hard way if you haven’t figured it out first.

Worth being direct with clients here too. A campaign that has been “limited by budget” for months is not a sign of careful budget discipline. It’s a campaign that was never set up to match what the budget could actually deliver.

What to do before July 6

• Pull a campaign report filtered by “Limited by budget” status. Every campaign in that filter is in scope.

• For each: review your current CPA or ROAS target against actual 30-day performance. Is the target realistic at your current daily budget?

• If targets need adjusting, do it now. Before the July 6 notifications start.

• Check whether Smart Bidding Exploration is active on any of these campaigns. If it is, factor that into your target review.

• Capture baseline CPAs and ROAS for every affected campaign before August 17. You need a clean pre-change benchmark to compare against.

• Set a calendar reminder for August 18 to pull performance and compare.

The July 6 notification is not the deadline. It’s Google telling you to do something you should have already done.

One (or three) last thing(s)! I’m still running 20% off founding reader subscriptions forever (!!) until July 15th. If you can’t support right now, I get it. Sharing would mean the world to me.

Also, if you want to catch me between issues you can find me @spilledsocial on Instagram for more general social things and spill-social.com/blog for longer reads.

If you want IG pings as well for when new and bonus issues hit, @burnyourfeed on Instagram is my second home.

That’s all.

See you next Thursday.
xoxo, Mckenna

Welcome to the Feed Report. While Tuesday was the introduction and the why behind Burn Your Feed, The Feed Report is the real meat and potatoes of what I’m doing.

This week (luckily for myself) is a big one. Lot of moving on Instagram, Google deadlines to be aware of and minor policy changes for most and seeing Threads evolve to take the X stragglers once and for all. Maybe.

For your context, this was written on June 9th, so news has been pulled from June 2nd-9th, 2026.

Burn Notice

Platform moves worth knowing, but not necessarily canon to your strategy for most.

Google Ads Data Retention Is Now Capped at 37 Months.

Google has always stored your historical reporting data indefinitely. If you wanted to look at campaign performance from five years ago, you could. But, starting this month, that changes. Google is putting a cap on how far back certain data granularities go.

What’s getting capped:

• Daily breakdowns

• Weekly breakdowns

• Hourly breakdowns

What will stay available for up to 11 years:

• Monthly aggregated data

• Quarterly data

• Annual data

So, you can still see what campaigns spent in Q4 of 2021, what you lose is the ability to see a specific spend amount on November 20th, 2021.

The accounts this hits hardest are those using detailed historical data for benchmarking or audits. If that’s you, export what you need before this window closes. Think back to product launches, seasonal campaign planning using past data, etc.

It may be worth a quick pull just to file, but with the way marketing and inflation changes YoY, it won’t be relevant for most.

TikTok Shop Revised Its Product Listing Policy.

Updated June 2. New rules cover origin claims, political content, and sympathy-based promotion. Enforcement has been retroactively applying updated standards since spring 2026, and the Account Health Rating system replaces Violation Points in July. If you’re running TikTok Shop campaigns, a content audit now is better than a freeze later.

LinkedIn Live Streaming Requires a Scheduled Event Starting June 22.

Spontaneous LinkedIn Live ends June 22. Every broadcast will need a pre-created LinkedIn Event page before you can go live. You can create the Event minutes before you start. The change is the process, not the lead time. Update your workflow before then.

LinkedIn is doing this because events are discoverable and encourage more posting and promoting within the platform. Spontaneous streams are invisible until they’re running.

This will mostly affect anyone managing LinkedIn for clients and brands. This is a workflow change that needs to get built into your content calendars for those who run livestreams.

Meta AI Business Assistant Is Now in Ads Manager Globally.

Meta expanded its AI business assistant to all advertisers and agencies globally. If you missed this release weeks ago, there has been a conversational AI interface within MBS powered by Meta’s Manus. You can ask it questions like “Why did my CPA go up this week?”

I got called by a Manus employee and entertained the walkthrough of the platform. I did not sign up for a pro account and by asking a simple question about weekly performance, the prompt took ten entire minutes to run. Not really worth it at this point with that amount of time burned by something most people can get by looking at a third-party dashboard tool or even within one look at the live campaigns within Ads Manager.

It lives inside Ads Manager and is designed to help with campaign setup, optimization suggestions, and performance questions. Early access. Limited utility for now. Worth knowing it’s there. Not worth building around yet.

If you’re a new practitioner this could be helpful or for new account managers looking for account context. For experienced practitioners, it feels more like a liability then support.

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Google Search Console Added AI Performance Reports.

Google Search Console now surfaces how your content performs inside AI Overviews and gives you the ability to block your content from appearing in AI responses entirely. You can see how many impressions that generates and whether those impressions are producing clicks.

The AI overviews answer user questions inside Google without requiring a click into your website. For many content categories, they’ve been pulling organic traffic downward since AI Overviews have been introduced. Until now, you had no way to see if your content was being cited or if they were driving traffic to your site.

Anyone managing SEO, this is a larger conversation. But if organic is part of the broader scope, even informally this is a new data source that may explain things that your clients may be asking about.

Google May 2026 Core Update Is Complete.

Google periodically makes broad changes to how it ranks content (where it appears in search, for example, first position, on the second page, etc.). These aren’t targeted at spam tactics. They’re comprehensive algorithm shifts that can move rankings up or down across every topic and every site simultaneously. They take two to three weeks to fully roll out, during which rankings are in flux and nothing you see is stable.

While these updates are rolling out, ranking changes are temporary. Sites gain and lose positions daily as the update evens out. Drawing conclusions from volatility is unreliable. Once these things are complete, whatever you see is now your new baseline.

Rollout confirmed stable as of June 2. If client organic performance shifted in May, the dust has settled. Pull rankings now and compare against pre-update baselines. Nothing to act on if performance held steady.

Canva Magic Layers Is Now Inside Gemini and ChatGPT.

Announced June 7. Canva’s Magic Layers feature turns AI-generated flat images into fully editable layered designs. It now works directly inside Google Gemini and ChatGPT, which removes the generate-download-re-upload cycle from production workflows.

The Safe is below. Paid subscribers only, but the next three weeks are free so you can see me walk the walk instead of just talking the talk. Six stories this week with full breakdowns, action steps, and resources. Discounted at just over $5 a month to access from here out. Offer expires 7/15/26.

Get 20% off forever

The Safe

The Instagram Grid Reorder Is Live. Think Before You Touch Anything.

On June 8, Instagram rolled out the ability to reorder your profile grid to all users globally. Adam Mosseri posted “Finally.” That’s the whole announcement. Here’s what you need to know before you start moving things around.

May I just say, for the amount of work we do on every single post and for him to post white text on a black screen and drop this is just crazy. Respect. But also don’t piss me off. Hahahahahahaha.

What it does.

Long-press any post on your profile, tap Reorder Grid, and drag posts into any arrangement you want. Original post dates are preserved. Likes and comments stay intact. Pinned posts stay anchored and show as locked in the reorder view so they don’t accidentally shift.

Why this matters for brand accounts.

Instagram’s switch to a 3:4 vertical grid in January 2025 ended a lot of carefully built brand layouts overnight. Grid reordering is the fix. For brand accounts, the profile can now function as a curated landing page rather than a chronological archive of whatever went out when the brief got approved.

Before you touch anything.

Your current grid is already telling a story. Even an unintentional one. Most visitors to a brand profile won’t scroll past the first six to nine posts before they’ve made a decision about the brand. Whatever gets rearranged below that threshold may not register with anyone.

Before reordering, ask:

• What is the current top row communicating about this brand?

• Is the visual or narrative problem real, or is it a preference?

• Would a first-time visitor notice the difference, or are we moving furniture in a room they aren’t walking into?

How to approach it if the answer is yes, reorder:

1. Screenshot the current grid first. You’ll want the reference.

2. Identify the top six to nine posts. These are the only ones that matter to most visitors.

3. Decide what the first row should communicate. Put the strongest, most representative content there.

4. Use the feature to resurface high-performing posts that were buried by timing, not quality.

5. Address the 3:4 transition damage by bringing visually cohesive content into proximity.

The bigger signal.

Mosseri said “Finally.” Feels like he’s been fighting the good fight on this maybe longer than we think. Instagram is moving toward treating the profile as a deliberate creative space, not a reverse-chronological holding area. Expect more profile-level controls. This is the first.

Google Consent Mode Changes June 15. Four Days.

If you manage Google Ads or GA4 for any client, read this before Sunday.

What’s changing.

Starting June 15, Google removes the dual-control model for advertising data. Right now, two settings together determine whether Google Ads receives advertising cookies: the Google Signals toggle in GA4 and the ad_storage parameter in Consent Mode. After June 15, the Signals toggle is eliminated as a control. Ad_storage becomes the only authority.

What this means in practice.

The outcome is binary.

Ad_storage granted: Google Ads links advertising data to signed-in Google users across all available signals. Full picture.

Ad_storage denied: Google Ads is restricted to URL parameters only. No behavioral signal data.

If you or a client has been using the GA4 Signals toggle as a soft privacy override (a way to throttle ad data flow without fully disabling ad_storage), that lever disappears June 15. The toggle’s effect is gone. Whatever Signals was quietly doing to limit data flow, ad_storage takes over completely.

What to check now:

1. GA4. Admin. Data Settings. Data Collection. Note your current Google Signals status.

2. Check your Consent Mode implementation. Confirm how ad_storage is being granted or denied by traffic segment.

3. Pull your remarketing audience sizes in Google Ads. If Signals has been doing meaningful work, expect fluctuations after the 15th.

4. If your client is in a privacy-sensitive category (healthcare, finance, legal), confirm that granting ad_storage is compliant with their privacy posture before the change takes effect. This is not a decision to make without them.

For client communication.

Most clients don’t know this is happening. You don’t need to escalate it. A one-paragraph note in your next report documenting the change and confirming their consent configuration is intentional is enough. Put it in writing.

Resources.

Google Consent Mode documentation: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10000067

Google Ads Updated Its Terms of Service. Effective July 1.

Less urgent than the Consent Mode deadline. Still worth reading before July 1.

What changed.

On June 2, Google updated its Google Ads Terms of Service to expand language around how advertiser-provided inputs (creative assets, campaign data, audience signals) can be used across AI-powered and automated Google tools. The updated terms also reinforce that advertisers are responsible for campaign outcomes even when automated systems are making the calls.

What this means.

Two things.

Google now has broader formal language covering how your assets are used inside automated tools like Performance Max and AI-powered creative. This is not new behavior. It is new documentation of what was already happening. The ToS is catching up to the product.

The advertiser responsibility language is the part worth sitting with. When automated tools make campaign decisions and results disappoint, the terms are clear that the advertiser is still accountable. How you document campaign settings and automated decisions in client reporting is worth a second look with this in mind, especially on Performance Max accounts.

What to do.

Read the updated terms before July 1. Focus on sections covering advertiser-provided content and automated campaign management. If you’re running heavy Performance Max or AI-powered creative tools, confirm your understanding of what Google can do with your inputs inside those systems.

Awareness item with a deadline. Not a workflow change. Read it.

Instagram Plus Is Live at $3.99/Month. Here’s What It Changes for Brand Accounts.

Instagram Plus launched globally in early June alongside Facebook Plus ($3.99/month) and WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/month). The subscription is a consumer product, not a brand tool. But a few things inside it are worth tracking if you manage Instagram for clients.

What Plus subscribers get.

• Pin up to 6 posts (free accounts are capped at 3)

• 48-hour Stories instead of 24

• Story Spotlight, which pins a Story to the top of the viewer’s tray so it appears first for all followers

• See who rewatched your Stories, not just who viewed them

• Anonymous Story viewing. Plus subscribers can watch Stories without appearing in the viewer list

• Custom app icons and bio fonts

What this means for brand accounts.

Three things to watch.

Anonymous Story viewing. If a meaningful portion of your audience upgrades to Plus, Story viewer counts will start reading lower than actual reach. Your analytics are not broken. Your audience can just hide. Benchmark your Story view averages now before adoption grows so you have a real baseline to compare against.

48-hour Stories and Story Spotlight. These create new content behaviors in your audience. If you’re tracking Story engagement benchmarks for clients, expect drift as Plus subscribers start leaving Stories up longer and surfacing them at the top of the tray. The numbers will move. Know why before a client asks.

The six-pin slot. Free brand accounts with three pins have been making real strategic decisions about what occupies those spots. If Instagram expands the free pin count in response to Plus (not confirmed, worth watching), pinning strategy changes for everyone. File it as something to monitor.

Meta One: Creator and Business Tiers (In Testing).

Meta is also testing Meta One Essential at $14.99/month and Meta One Advanced at $49.99/month for creators and businesses. The Advanced tier’s most notable claim: higher rankings in Instagram and Facebook search.

If that’s accurate, paid placement in organic discovery is a different conversation than paid reach. It’s not confirmed at scale and it’s not live broadly yet. Monitor it. Do not build strategy around it until it is.

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Threads Has Real Ad Formats Now. Check Your Placement Breakdowns.

Two new formats are live globally for Threads: static carousels and video ads. Brand safety verification through Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, and Scope3 is now in place. Threads is no longer an experimental line item.

What this means for Advantage+ campaigns.

If you’re running Meta Advantage+ with all placements enabled, Threads inventory is now getting real budget. Go into your placement breakdown reports and look at cost per result by placement. See what Threads is delivering relative to Feed and Reels before you decide whether it stays in the mix.

If Threads is underperforming, two options: exclude it from the placement set, or test dedicated Threads creative. The new formats combined with Placement Asset Customization mean you can now tailor creative specifically for Threads inside Advantage+ without running a separate campaign. Test before you exclude.

Brand safety.

The IAS, DoubleVerify, and Scope3 partnerships mean brand safety verification is now available for Threads placements for the first time. If you manage brand-sensitive clients, confirm your verification settings extend to Threads.

The honest take.

Threads ad performance data is still early. The platform is text-heavy and discovery-driven. Creative that performs on Reels does not automatically translate. Run Threads as a test placement with enough runway to generate useful data before making a final call. Do not pull budget after a week.

Meta One-Click CAPI Setup Is Live. The Technical Lift Argument Is Retired. THANK THE LORD.

Meta released a one-click setup for the Conversions API. Zero technical skills required, no cost, no ongoing maintenance. If you have clients who have been avoiding CAPI because of the implementation complexity, that reason is gone.

Why this matters.

First-party signal coverage is one of the highest-leverage improvements available in a Meta account. Pixel-only tracking loses data wherever cookies are blocked, browsers restrict tracking, or users decline the prompt. CAPI sends event data server-side, directly from the website to Meta. No browser dependency.

The gap between Pixel-only and Pixel + CAPI accounts shows up in three places: Event Match Quality score, audience quality, and attribution accuracy. Accounts with low EMQ scores are handing Meta incomplete signals and Meta is optimizing on what it receives. Incomplete signals, suboptimal optimization. That’s the whole story.

Who this affects most.

• Any client whose EMQ score in Events Manager is below 7. Below 6 is a problem that’s actively costing performance.

• Clients in privacy-sensitive categories (healthcare, finance, legal) where cookie acceptance rates are lower than average.

• Any account where Meta-reported conversions and backend conversion data are meaningfully out of sync.

How to implement:

1. Go to Meta Events Manager. Select your Pixel. Open Settings.

2. Look for the one-click CAPI setup option. Rolling out to all accounts now.

3. Connect the client’s platform. Meta has native integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, and major CMS platforms that work inside the one-click flow.

4. After setup, check Event Match Quality within 24 to 48 hours. A clean implementation should improve EMQ by at least 1 to 2 points.

5. Monitor your duplicate event rate. One-click CAPI can create duplicate event firing if Pixel is still active and sending the same events. Use Meta’s deduplication key settings to resolve this.

Resources.

Events Manager → your Pixel → Settings → Conversions API

Meta CAPI documentation: developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/conversions-api

If a client has told you CAPI is too technical to implement, this is what you send them.

That’s Issue #1. See you next Thursday.

Anything I left unanswered? Feel free to reach out.

xoxo, Mckenna

I’m Mckenna. I am a Paid Media Specialist managing ads for 14 restaurant concepts by day and by night, I own Spill Social (@spilledsocial), a boutique social media management agency. The hats I’ve worn through my marketing career could fill an entire stadium and then some. I’ve QA’d direct mail for nonprofits, been a project manager for an agency on multi-million dollar accounts, designed emails, community-managed, been an impromptu web designer and then about ten thousand other things.

Most importantly, I am a creative at heart. Journaling, music, fitness, cooking, reading. They are what fill my cup when the days get long. The beauty about my career is that I get a lot of creative gratification designing ads, organic posts, blogging and whatever else I need to do to fuel my creativity and my livelihood.

I created Spill because I was burnt out from watching social media turn into a riddle. Brands chasing likes, copying competitors, drowning in the noise and forgetting why they showed up in the first place. I knew there had to be a better way.

Spill is my way of saying: you don’t have to do it all, and you don’t have to do it the way everyone else does. You deserve to use social platforms as a means to support your goals, share creative that feels true to your brand and all while gaining a partner who cares about your growth like it’s their own.

This isn’t just my business. It’s my belief: social media should be fun. Not more overwhelming.

Here’s everything I despised about my feed.

The announcement for a new platform feature and ‘explanations’ while no one actually knew what it was.

Think pieces about “what this means for brands” from someone who hasn’t touched Meta Business suite in weeks.

A press release recap with zero indication of what it means for my brands.

A LinkedIn post about algorithms that aged out within three hours.

And my personal least favorite, gimmicky hooks about marketing strategy, ‘best practices’ or ‘hot takes’ that are either aged by five years, reek of gen-AI or are just wrong.

Maybe, if I got lucky, was one update that was going to matter and be delivered in a manner that didn’t speak to me like I knew how to log into Facebook without asking for help. Things like delivery changes in the ad algorithm that would explain why my CPM’s shot up $10 overnight and how softly pivot. New formats that were being favored and best practices not to overdo it. The things that I should subtly encourage out of my audience so my posts didn’t fall deeper into the cave of where reach goes never to be seen again.

I couldn’t find it. So I’m solving the problem.

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The overarching industry problem.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed an entire new subset of marketing that involves marketers marketing marketing to marketers. Say that 10 times out loud and fast. Anyways, its completely out of hand.

Someone copies a trending hook format, it gets half of a million views and suddenly they have a course on hooks. Never mind that the original hook worked because the original creator had a unique perspective or commentary on the original point. But, ripping off someone else’s idea with a loud first line and nothing to say behind it. Substance sells hooks, but that’s a harder sell these days.

Then there’s the person who had a couple thousand Instagram followers by the end of college and then rebranded themselves as a social media manager because they know how to swap some text out in Canva but not follow a standard brand kit and thinks they know everything. There is always something to be learned and there are true fundamentals of this industry that you need to dedicate yourself to growing with. You cannot learn marketing by watching 100 reels explaining marketing. You make mistakes, go and grow through it.

And my final point: fear-mongering. Every year someone shouts “Instagram is dying!” “Organic reach is dead!” or “Social media doesn’t work!” It’s wrong. I truly, deeply believe that. People want you scared. This industry is made up of a lot of Type A, (probably)anxious and high-functioning individuals. These people either want to sell you something or a small business owner is seeing this and making a real decision based on that noise to pull budget from things that do actually work.

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My belief.

When a small business owner hands you their budget and their brand, they are handing you their life’s work. They are handing you something they most likely went into debt for. Something they built while scared and not knowing what they were doing. But most importantly, they are handing you something they genuinely believe in and that they believe will help people in some way, shape or form.

This is my bottom line on why I have remained in this industry. I love feeling the passion when I zoom with a new client and I interrogate them in regards to everything about their brand. You are constantly learning about things and making relationships with people you normally wouldn’t have. There is so much joy in this.

Where there is joy, there is also pressure to support them and make their hard-earned money work even harder. This pressure doesn’t go away because you know how to resize a graphic in Canva, or you can write a hook and understand ‘You don’t need to be posting everyday!’ type of advice. The fundamentals of this industry: the audience, what they need to hear, how to build trust, these are not optional. They are the job. Pretending otherwise, whether to gain a new client or get yourself some vanity followers is a lie that small business owners pay for.

Practitioners deserve better information. People trusting practitioners with their businesses deserve the best practitioners. Or SMM’s or marketers, just insert your role there.

These are the four tenants I stick to with everything I do online:

1. Cultivate magnetic, natural connection.

2. Speak authentically. Be honest where you have knowledge gaps.

3. It’s only worth saying if there’s a fresh, inherent perspective on the topic.

4. Make it unmistakably yours. Creatively.

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And on the ninth day of June, Burn Your Feed was born.

Here’s my vow to you. A weekly newsletter, every Thursday addressed for the people running brands online. I feel inclined to emphasize (again) this is not for the people writing about running brands online who are trying to sell you something.

For my marketers who have their hands dirty, at the bar uploading a Reel that failed to schedule, the paid media folks, the agency superheroes and the solo operators holding down their own brands with whatever bandwidth and twenty minutes they can find on a Tuesday at 10 PM.

The question I am answering is simple.

“What if marketing news was delivered to you in an actionable brief?”

Every issue is called The Feed Report. It consists of two parts:

• Burn Notice (free): The week’s headlines and platforms that are worth knowing for context, but not for panicking about. Not worth dissecting, contextualizing, all of the other buzzy analyst words.

• The Safe (subscriber-only benefit): This is the meaty part. I take the most important actionable stories of the week and break it down in what I can only call a brief-like format. Next steps. Strategy audit directives. Context on how it may impact you, your clients or your creative. No BS. No buzzwords. You won’t need 90 tabs to understand and contextualize things. You just need this one.

  Burn Your Feed is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The cost.

I, like everyone else, am tired of everything having a monthly cost. I hate the Adobe subscription model. I hate that Canva has somehow managed to scale a $15/monthly cost to a $28/monthly cost. I hate that photo apps will charge you $60/year or $10.99/weekly to slap a bad filter on photos.

So, I am promising that for at least two years, my prices will not change. And if they somehow do (I do not think it will) it will never feel like a bulging shock. You will be supporting a solo-female entrepreneur who is simply trying to make her car payment and provide real, genuine help to others in a very selfish and impostor-y industry (at times).

Free gets you the headlines and Burn Notice. Paid gets you everything plus The Safe and any 911 news drops on the fly and extra posts as inspiration strikes. (Probably once or twice a month.)

I’m starting the paid tier out at $7.77 a month. A medium coffee a month and endless time saved. I am also offering referral and group-subscriber discounts as well. My DM’s are always open.

For the next four weeks, the entire thing will be free. You deserve to know what you’re getting and make an informed decision on if this will be good for you. (This is me secretly hoping that the news stays at least semi-juicy so I am not over-explaining Social SEO for two thousand straight words.)

See you Thursday.

The inaugural issue will drop two days from today on June 11th.

I encourage you to join my email list to get this delivered straight to your inbox in the morning so you can drop some knowledge on Slack by 10 AM and look like the office hero. I also will post weekly on Instagram (@burnyourfeed).

You’re on your way to feeling more grounded by algorithm updates. Let me soften the blow and make it easy for you. I know that’s what I have needed for years now.

Welcome to Burn Your Feed. I’m deeply thankful that you’re here.

xoxo (from the trenches),
Mckenna