Daily Marketing News, October 24, 2026: YouTube pulled Subscriptions from the bottom bar

This is about Advantage+, the set of automated AI features in Meta's ad manager for Facebook and Instagram. The agency Exverus saw added sitelinks, translated copy, generated images and carousels made from customer photos in its clients' ads, including in cases where the media buyers had not turned those enhancements on. The bookstore Bookshop.org found an illustration in its ad that nobody at the company had drawn: an account update had switched on a generative feature by itself. From October 30, Meta's Commercial Terms, its contract with businesses, will include a section called "AI Features". According to Adweek's reading, the advertiser becomes "solely responsible" for anything Meta's AI creates or changes in an ad, even if Meta turned the feature on itself. Consent is passive: if you keep running ads after October 30, you've accepted the terms.

Until now the Performance section of a profile mostly showed views, calls, website clicks and direction requests. The new version adds metrics for engagement, reviews, search trends and audience, top recommendations and a more detailed breakdown of reviews. Not everyone sees the test: Barry Schwartz, who runs Search Engine Roundtable, doesn't see it himself, and 2 people sent him screenshots. Separately, Google launched a beta of Google Business Home, a standalone dashboard for business profiles, with access granted by email. In Business Home you can create, publish and track content in 1 place and manage several locations at once. Owners of cafes, salons and multi location businesses should check their inbox and their profile: this means more data on who finds the business and how.

Previously a publisher selling ads in a video player through AdSense had to put the player in a specific spot on the page and make it "sticky", meaning it stayed on screen while scrolling. Google updated its video inventory restrictions policy and removed both requirements: the placement rule and the pinning rule. This affects content sites, blogs and media outlets that run video with AdSense ads. Sticky players often annoyed readers on phones and covered part of the text, so now page layouts can be built more freely. Before redesigning pages, compare the player's revenue before and after: the rule is gone, but Google said nothing about payouts.

JPEG XL is a newer image format that compresses files better than old JPEG, and some sites have already switched to it. Discover is the recommendation feed in the Google app, and many media outlets and blogs get traffic from it. If a site serves images only in JPEG XL, they may not make it into Google Images or Discover. The fix is simple: keep a fallback version of every image in JPEG, PNG or WebP. The same day Search Engine Roundtable noticed another Google test: AI Overviews, the AI answers above regular results, started showing snippets with AI written summaries. A snippet is the page description under the link, usually taken from the page text or the meta description. If the test expands, the description of a site in search results will be written not by the site owner but by a neural network.

Almost half of shoppers feel negative about AI in listings, and only 1% of respondents rate this kind of content positively. That's roughly 50 unhappy shoppers for every 1 happy one. For sellers it's a signal against mass replacing real product photos with generated ones: saving on a photographer can cost you trust in the listing. The data lines up with this week's Meta story, where the AI was adding images to ads on its own. The sensible move for a seller: test AI photos and AI copy on part of the catalog and compare conversion against listings with real photos before redoing the whole range.

NBCU, the media company NBCUniversal with the streaming service Peacock, grew its ad revenue 15% thanks to Peacock and the World Cup, according to MediaPost. Omnicom, one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world, saw its stock rise after quarterly results and winning Coca-Cola's media account. At the same time, as AdIndex reports, revenue in Omnicom's advertising business has been falling for 3 quarters in a row. The picture: big budgets go where there's a large live audience, into streaming and major sporting events, while traditional agencies grow more slowly. For small businesses it's a reminder that big brands are bidding for attention around major events, and the prices there reflect that.

Roblox is a gaming platform where users build games themselves and earn from in game purchases. The figure comes from a report by the consultancy Access Partnership. The study records strong growth in users and in creators eligible for payouts when comparing 2020 and 2025, although estimates of the contribution to India's GDP and the number of jobs supported went down. For brands looking at gaming platforms as an ad channel, this is a telling example: a local creator on a global platform earns more than half of the money abroad. The audience of a Roblox game isn't tied to the creator's country, and ads inside such games are worth planning for an international audience.