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Google Has An Illegal Monopoly! 😬 Reddit's New Partners Page 🤝 Google Ad Strength Guide Best Practices 🏆

Also: Apple Rebrands Part Of Ad Business In Major Expansion

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🗞 Marketing News

Google Has An Illegal Monopoly In Ad-Tech Market [4 min read]

A federal judge ruled that Google illegally maintained monopoly power in the ad-tech business by tying together its publisher ad server and ad exchange, marking the second antitrust case lost by the internet giant in the past year. While the court found in Google's favor regarding one portion of the complaint about advertiser ad networks, it determined that Google violated the Sherman Act through its publisher tools and will now proceed to determine appropriate remedies, which could potentially include requiring Google to divest certain products. Google plans to appeal the ruling on publisher tools while maintaining that publishers choose their services because they are "simple, affordable and effective."

Reddit's New Partners Page In Business Manager [2 min read]

Reddit has launched a new Partners page within Business Manager, enabling businesses to collaborate by sharing profiles and credit lines with partner organizations. This update fundamentally changes how advertising agencies work on the platform, allowing them to create their own businesses, manage permissions, and centralize client activities for more efficient collaboration. Reddit plans to continue enhancing this feature by adding more shareable business assets such as pixels, audiences, and ad accounts to support additional partnership opportunities in the future.

Google Ad Strength Guide Best Practices [3 min read]

Google has released a new ad strength guide offering best practices to help advertisers improve their overall ad strength, described as "a real time feedback tool to guide you on the best practices for optimal asset group set-up to maximize performance across all inventory." The guide provides specific recommendations across five different asset categories—text assets, image assets, video assets, logo assets, and URL expansion—with detailed tables showing minimum requirements, recommended amounts, and maximum limits for each type. For each asset category, Google includes specific technical requirements such as including 11 headlines and 4 descriptions for text assets, adding up to 20 images with specific dimension requirements, and having at least 3 videos of different orientations (horizontal, square, and vertical) to help advertisers optimize their Google Ads asset groups for better performance.

Apple Rebrands Part Of Ad Business In Major Expansion [2 min read]

Apple has rebranded its "Search Ads" business to "Apple Ads" to reflect that its advertising options now extend beyond just search results within the App Store, including placement in the Today tab and "You Might Also Like" sections on specific app pages. The company's justification for the change is that their advertising placements have expanded significantly since the original 2016 launch when they offered only a single ad placement at the top of search results. While not confirmed by Apple, this rebranding could potentially signal plans to further expand their advertising business into other services like Apple Maps to generate additional revenue streams.

🤖 AI

Advertising's Next New And Improved Title, The CAIO [3 min read]

The advertising industry is witnessing the rise of Chief AI Officers (CAIOs), as exemplified by Momentum Worldwide's recent appointment of Jason Alan Snyder to integrate AI throughout all business operations rather than merely following industry hype. This trend reflects where advertising executives believe their industry is heading, similar to previous C-suite title evolutions like Chief Digital Officers and Chief Innovation Officers that have risen and fallen in popularity over time.

Anthropic's Claude Can Now Read Your Gmail [3 min read]

A new Google Workspace integration for Claude, allows the AI assistant to access and reference users' Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs for more personalized responses with proper citation of sources. This integration is initially available in beta to subscribers of Anthropic's premium plans including Max, Team, Enterprise, and Pro. Also, Anthropic is launching Claude Research, a competitive feature that quickly conducts multiple web searches to generate comprehensive answers, as part of their strategy to attract more users to their subscription services.

🧠 Hacks & Tactics

A/B Testing Guide: A 6 Step Process For Higher Conversions [28 min read]

The cornerstone of effective A/B testing is following a systematic six-step process that moves from pre-test research through to implementation, ensuring a methodical approach to optimization. Statistical significance stands as the critical foundation of reliable A/B testing, requiring a 95% confidence level to validate that observed differences between variations represent genuine improvements rather than random fluctuations. A/B testing delivers substantial benefits through improved performance metrics and data-driven decision making, with seven distinct testing strategies available to suit different optimization needs, from small incremental changes to major transformational updates.

7 Actionable Tips To Improve Your Net Promoter Score [14 min read]

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a vital metric that measures customer loyalty through a simple 0-10 scale question about recommending the company, categorizing customers into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors to gauge business growth potential. To improve NPS, companies can implement seven key strategies including quick feedback response, creating customer success roadmaps, empowering support teams, converting feedback into features, personalizing experiences, creating educational content, and celebrating customer wins. These strategies can be effectively implemented using specialized tools like Canny Autopilot, Userpilot, Chameleon, Appcues, and FullStory, which help companies collect and analyze customer feedback systematically.

The Myth Of The Consideration Set [4 min read]

The longstanding marketing concept of a "consideration set" - a fixed group of brands that consumers evaluate before making a purchase - has been proven flawed because consumer decision-making is inherently contextual and dynamic, not static. Traditional survey-based methods of measuring these consideration sets are problematic since they fail to capture real-world decision-making patterns, with research showing that consumers often consider very few brands and their choices vary significantly based on the situation. A more effective approach is the Category Entry Points (CEPs) framework, which focuses on understanding the mental cues and contexts that connect consumer needs to brands, recognizing that consumers begin with specific situations or desires rather than a predetermined list of brands.

🏗️ The Founder

Lessons From 17,784 Hours In 5 Years As A Startup Founder [20 min read]

Startup founder Sam Corcos defies conventional wisdom about burnout by showing how he maintained high productivity through five years at Levels by focusing on energy-giving tasks rather than limiting work hours. His company's journey through three distinct engineering approaches reveals that founders should remain connected to product development, as stepping away from the codebase led to bureaucracy and reduced velocity. Corcos also implemented unconventional leadership practices—eliminating recurring 1:1s, conducting quarterly "Think Weeks," and maintaining many direct reports—demonstrating that traditional management structures aren't necessary as startups scale.

Why Raising More Than You Need Can Harm Your Startup [3 min read]

Overvalued startups often face significant challenges in subsequent funding rounds, with increased dilution and difficulty securing follow-on investments. Taking excessive early capital typically creates inefficiency, leading to unsustainable burn rates and making it harder to scale effectively. Although both founders and investors tend to avoid them, valuation resets through down rounds can ultimately be the healthiest path forward for overvalued companies with strong fundamentals.

🔮 The Future

TikTok Testing Footnotes [2 min read]

"Footnotes" will allow eligible U.S. users to add contextual information to short-form videos, helping viewers better understand complex topics, misleading statistics, or updates about ongoing events. The feature employs a bridge-based ranking system where only footnotes deemed "helpful" by contributors with differing opinions become visible to the broader community. This initiative complements TikTok's existing integrity measures like content labels and fact-checking programs, ultimately aiming to enrich discussions and improve the experience for the platform's 170 million American users.

YouTube Rolls Out A Free AI Music Making Tool For Creators [2 min read]

YouTube is launching an AI music generation feature within its Creator Music marketplace that allows creators to create custom instrumental backing tracks for their videos using text prompts. The AI-generated music is completely free to use and eliminates concerns about copyright claims, offering a valuable alternative to licensed commercial music. This feature is being gradually rolled out exclusively to U.S. creators who are part of the YouTube Partner Program and have access to Creator Music, building upon YouTube's earlier "Dream Track" experiment powered by DeepMind's Lyria.

World's First Interactive 3D Holographic Display [2 min read]

Spanish engineers have created the world's first physically interactive 3D holographic display called FlexiVol, which uses elastic diffuser strips to allow users to safely manipulate holograms with familiar touchscreen gestures. This innovation solves a fundamental safety problem with traditional swept volumetric displays, where interaction could damage equipment or harm users due to rapidly moving rigid components. Testing demonstrated that the FlexiVol system outperformed conventional 3D mouse interfaces in speed, accuracy, and user confidence, with future improvements planned to incorporate haptic feedback through focused ultrasound or conductive threads.

OpenAI Is Building A Social Network? [3 min read]

OpenAI is secretly developing a social media platform resembling X with a prototype that incorporates ChatGPT's image generation capabilities into a social feed. This initiative follows competitors like X with Grok and Meta who have already begun integrating AI features into their platforms. If launched, this social network would provide OpenAI with valuable real-time user data for training their AI models, which is increasingly important as fresh training data becomes scarcer and competition in the AI space intensifies.

👩‍🏫 Vocab

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost spent on gaining a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses. It helps businesses understand how much they're spending to attract each customer. CAC is important for measuring marketing efficiency and profitability.

Example: If a company spends $1000 on ads and acquires 20 new customers, their CAC is $50 per customer.

ROI (Return on Investment): The ratio between net profit and the cost of investment to measure how well your marketing efforts perform. It shows how much revenue you generate for every dollar spent on marketing. ROI helps determine which marketing activities are most profitable.

Example: A business spends $1000 on an email campaign that generates $5000 in sales, resulting in a 400% ROI.

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