🎯 Search Still Funds Google AI

Hi, Marketers!

Today’s signals are about control: brands setting AI boundaries, platforms tightening ad systems, and retail shelves reshaping DTC playbooks.

Search Still Funds Google AI

TL;DR: Alphabet’s Q2 results showed Google Search ads growing 17% to $63.3 billion while the Google Network segment slipped 1%. PPC Land’s read is that search remains the cash engine behind Google’s AI buildout, with AI Max, Gemini integration, YouTube strength, and retail demand still supporting the core advertising business this quarter at scale. Read more ->

Stanley Keeps AI Backstage

TL;DR: Stanley 1913 is using AI behind the scenes while drawing a clear line before consumer-facing ad creative. The lifestyle brand is treating automation as an internal operating tool, not a replacement for the taste and judgment that shape what shoppers see, making its AI posture more controlled than the usual race to automate campaigns. Read more ->

TikTok Courts Basketball Creators

TL;DR: TikTok is using its NBA and WNBA creator deal to sit between leagues, creators, and fans as basketball audiences keep fragmenting across platforms. Kat Marquez framed the partnership as a way to connect rights holders with creator-led storytelling, turning TikTok from a distribution channel into a broker for sports attention and sponsor-ready culture. Read more ->

Clarity Sorts AI Citations

TL;DR: Microsoft Clarity added Query Topics to its AI Citations dashboard, grouping raw grounding queries into ranked themes by citation count and share of authority. The beta feature gives publishers and brands a way to turn messy AI visibility data into reportable topic clusters instead of reading every citation query one by one inside the dashboard. Read more ->

Criteo Expands African Retail Media

TL;DR: Criteo won a retail media partnership with Massmart, Walmart’s South African subsidiary, covering digital properties tied to more than 280 stores across sub-Saharan Africa. Sponsored Product Ads are already live on Makro.co.za, with onsite display formats adding another layer as retail media spreads beyond its U.S. and European center of gravity. Read more ->

ChatGPT Share Gets Fragmented

TL;DR: Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Landscape report shows ChatGPT still leading standalone AI web visits, but losing share to Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek. PPC Land also notes that ads appeared in 26% of U.S. desktop ChatGPT chats in June, making AI discovery larger, more commercial, and more fragmented for marketers to measure reliably. Read more ->

Meta Pushes Ad Webhooks

TL;DR: Meta is pushing advertisers and developers away from constant API polling and toward webhooks that send ad account updates as events happen. The new ads subscription endpoint covers more than 88 notifications, including delivery status and insights changes, giving agencies and martech tools a faster way to catch problems before budgets drift overnight unnoticed automatically. Read more ->

Google Tightens Image Assets

TL;DR: Google Ads updated its Search image asset rules, requiring eligible accounts to be at least 60 days old, policy-compliant, active, and spending on Search text ads. The policy also rejects blurry, distorted, poorly cropped, or overly text-heavy images, raising the creative floor for advertisers using visuals in search campaigns going forward everywhere now. Read more ->

Google Closes Old Appeals

TL;DR: Google Ads closed the in-account appeal path for policy decisions more than six months old, publishing and enforcing the change on July 21. PPC Land notes that the clock starts from the original enforcement date, making old disapprovals and account actions harder to contest if teams let them sit across large client portfolios unattended. Read more ->

Nexxen Adds Acxiom Signals

TL;DR: Nexxen added Acxiom consumer data to Nexxen Discovery, bringing interest, purchase, and household-level signals into its audience planning tool. The move gives advertisers another targeting layer as third-party signals weaken, combining Acxiom’s identity assets with Nexxen’s contextual, behavioral, and viewership data across its platform for planning, activation, measurement, segmentation, and campaign optimization workflows. Read more ->

Social Data Misses Leaders

TL;DR: Social Media Today reports that only 14% of social media professionals think their organizations use social data properly. The gap is not a lack of dashboards, but a failure to move insights from execution teams to decision-makers, leaving social listening underused in product, brand, customer experience, and broader business planning meetings across teams. Read more ->

Hanes Gets Comfortable With Risk

TL;DR: Hanes launched a bolder creative direction with Get Comfortable, using awkward scenes like a man getting pantsed at a bar or a woman shopping in underwear. The 125-year-old basics brand is repositioning comfort as confidence, trying to make socks and underwear feel more entertaining on screen after Gildan acquired HanesBrands late last year. Read more ->

Curie Redesigns For Walmart

TL;DR: Curie is overhauling its packaging, website, logo, and messaging after expanding into 4,300 Walmart stores. Founder and CEO Sarah Moret told Adweek the deodorant brand’s new look is shaped by in-store shopping data, showing how DTC brands have to redesign for physical shelves once national retail becomes the primary growth channel at scale. Read more ->

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