Daily Marketing News, September 17, 2026: Telegram Ads launched ads inside bots with targeting

ChatGPT is OpenAI's chatbot, and ads in it launched in August 2026 in more than 30 European countries, among them Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria, with the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea added later. Ads run only on the free tier. There are two mechanics: product recommendations with links and prices baked straight into the model's answer and not labeled as advertising, plus a separate ad block at the end of the answer leading to the advertiser's site. Geo is determined by the connection, so a person browsing through a VPN endpoint in Latvia can get a Latvian vet clinic in response to a cat food question. The practical takeaway for advertisers: traffic and orders from these placements can arrive from countries you never bought.

Google Ads is Google's advertising system, and Spend benchmarks is a report in the Account "Overview" section showing account spend. Previously it only compared you to your own dynamics, now it shows whether you spend more, less or about the same as comparable advertisers: Google builds the comparison by industry and by the geography of your impressions. In an example posted on LinkedIn by specialist Thomas Eccel, weekly account spend was €284 against €268 for similar companies, with 912 clicks against 765. The nuance the report will not show: companies in the same industry have different margins, conversion rates and average order values. So a benchmark is a reason to open your own numbers and check them, not a reason to raise the budget because the neighbour spends more.

Merchant Center is the console where shops upload their product feed for Google Shopping and shopping ads. The AI performance insights report, which shows how products perform in answers generated with AI, is now officially generally available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the US: in practice the rollout was noticed two weeks earlier, but there was no announcement. Integration with the Universal Commerce Protocol, the checkout protocol inside Google surfaces, also got simpler: handing the cart over to the shop's site, checkout right inside Google, user identifier linking, plus dedicated analytics on these purchases. Features are enabled gradually, the US, Australia and Canada get them in early 2027. Google also advises shops to fill in the video link attribute and conversational attributes, and to connect loyalty program data.

A cashtag is an X format made of a dollar sign and a company ticker inside a post, and in April 2026 a card with market data was attached to it. Now from that card you can go to a broker and buy or sell securities and crypto by logging into your account with the partner. Launch partners are Interactive Brokers, Moomoo, Gemini, Kraken and Coinbase, and the feature works for users in the US. This continues X's push into financial services: X Money payments already work in the US and as of September 2026 became the only payout method for creators. For anyone promoting financial products or running market content, the path from post to trade now happens without leaving the app, which makes the post a point of sale, not just a point of attention.

Search Console is the free console for site owners showing impressions, clicks and average position of pages in Google Search. According to Mueller, position and impression metrics will evolve along with the products themselves: separately for regular Search, separately for AI Overviews, the summary AI writes above the results, and separately for AI Mode, the Search mode where AI gives the whole answer. Google had already said that positions 1 through 10 became hard to map onto what a person actually sees on screen, now it is about the reporting itself. What this means in practice: historical average position trends may become incomparable between periods, and reports of the "it was 8.4, now it is 6.1" kind will lose their meaning. Google did not say what exactly changes or when.

Right now a click on a product result in Google Search opens a Google side panel with product details, prices and a list of sellers, and only from there does the person go to the seller. In the test that panel disappears and the click goes straight to the shop or retailer site. In Bing, Microsoft's search engine, product filters mostly lived in the shopping tab, and in the test they appear on the left of the general tab for shopping queries, which makes the page look a lot like Google's general tab. Both changes point the same way: the path to the cart is shorter, and part of the choice happens before the click. These are tests, with no timing or coverage announced.

A collab on Instagram is a joint post by a brand and a creator that appears in both accounts' feeds. According to the study, such posts published from the creator's side perform better than regular brand posts and than collabs where the brand is the publishing party. No specific percentages or sample size are given in the coverage. For anyone buying creator integrations, the takeaway is simple and free: negotiate not only what the post says, but which account it goes out from. That is a clause that costs nothing and that usually nobody brings up.

This is about business accounts in the messenger, the ones companies use to answer customers. Per the outlet, brands can now set up their agent profile and standard replies without deep coding skills, while such an integration previously required developer work. For anyone selling in chat, this is about answering around the clock without your own support shift. What matters before launch: the agent will answer in your voice on any question, including prices and delivery times, so the scenarios and the limits of what it may say are on you. No pricing, limits or list of supported services in the announcement.

Snap is the company behind Snapchat, and until now it had shown Spectacles only as a developer device. This is a consumer model: around 2,200 dollars, a 51 degree field of view, and the outlet openly asks whether ordinary buyers want such a device at all. For marketers this is potentially a new surface for AR effects, which Snapchat has been selling as an ad format for years. There are no details yet on country availability or ad options inside the glasses, so it does not touch budgets today.