MKT News.

Today is the expected completion date for Google's March 2026 Core Update (launched March 27), back-to-back with the Spam Update that finished March 24. That means the ranking volatility of the last two weeks should finally settle, and organic traffic data from this weekend onward is the first clean read you'll get. Don't make content or SEO changes yet — give it at least 3-5 days of stable data before concluding anything. If a client site dropped, check whether it was in a cluster affected by the Spam Update (spammy link profile) vs. the Core Update (content quality/E-E-A-T) — the fix is different. The December 2025 Core Update wiped ~15% of top-10 pages, so stakes remain elevated.

Meta is retiring Nielsen DMA targeting fields and moving to Comscore Markets for US geographic targeting. The hard deadline is June 22, 2026: campaigns still using the deprecated DMA fields after that date risk being paused automatically. This affects saved audiences, campaign templates, automated rules, and any third-party tool (Smartly, Madgicx, Revealbot) that writes campaigns via the Marketing API. Most agencies haven't touched this yet because the deadline feels far — but the audit itself takes a couple hours for a multi-client book. Do it this week: grep your saved audiences and automation configs for DMA references, map them to Comscore equivalents, and update templates before someone's Q2 budget stalls.

Canva announced a dual acquisition this week: Simtheory (AI agent collaboration platform) and Ortto (customer data + marketing automation). The strategic read: Canva is moving from "where you design the creative" to "where you design, schedule, automate, and measure the campaign." For agencies and consultancies, this matters because Canva is now a legitimate threat to standalone martech stacks at the SMB and mid-market end — expect more clients to ask whether they can collapse HubSpot + Canva + separate scheduling tools into one subscription. It also tightens the competitive pressure on Adobe Express and the creator-tool end of Meta's Advantage+ suite. Not an immediate action, but worth knowing when clients bring it up.

Google quietly launched a new Advertising and Measurement Developers Hub this week, consolidating Google Ads API, GTM, GA4, Measurement Protocol, Data Manager API, and server-side tagging documentation into a single destination. This is a housekeeping launch, not a feature launch — but if you've been losing time hunting across five different developer sites every time you integrate conversion uploads or server-side tagging, bookmark it now. For teams onboarding new engineers into conversion plumbing, it's the first place to point them. Small quality-of-life improvement, but these add up.

Meta's attribution overhaul (announced in March) is now actively rolling out for campaigns optimizing toward website or in-store conversions. The key changes: click-through attribution now counts only genuine link clicks — not likes, shares, or saves. Everything else falls under a new "engage-through attribution" category (replacing the old engaged-view model) with a one-day conversion window. Video engaged-view thresholds also dropped from 10 seconds to 5 seconds, reflecting faster Reels-era conversion behavior. The practical impact: your click-through numbers in Ads Manager will drop (that's cleanup, not performance decline), while engage-through numbers will appear as a new line item. Update your client reporting templates now so the metric shift doesn't trigger false alarms. If you use third-party attribution tools, the good news is Meta's definitions now align more closely with how Google Analytics and others count clicks.

Meta's March 25 Marketing API update quietly enabled a significant inventory expansion: Threads now supports App Ads globally, including APP_INSTALLS and app event optimization flows. With 400 million monthly active users and carousel + video formats now supported, Threads is no longer just an organic brand presence play. The API update also added reply moderation tooling, so advertisers can view, hide, and respond to top-level replies on Threads ads — addressing the brand safety concern that held back early adopters. If you're running Meta app install campaigns, add Threads as a placement and let the algorithm test it. The CPMs are still relatively low compared to Feed and Reels, which means early movers get cheap inventory before the floor rises.

Google increased the Performance Max video asset limit to 15 videos per asset group and now supports 9:16 portrait images natively. Combined with last week's Veo integration (3 images → 10-second video), this means you can fill PMax asset groups with significantly more video variations without hitting caps. The portrait image support matters for mobile-heavy campaigns — PMax can now render vertical creative across YouTube Shorts, Discover, and Gmail without awkward cropping. If you've been holding back on video diversity in PMax because of asset limits, that constraint just loosened.

The March 2026 Core Update (launched March 27) is expected to wrap around April 10 — tomorrow. Combined with the Spam Update that completed in record time on March 24, any ranking shifts you've observed over the past two weeks have been impossible to attribute cleanly. The December 2025 Core Update wiped ~15% of top-10 pages, so stakes remain high. Final reminder: don't make reactive content or SEO changes until the rollout completes and you have at least a week of stable data to analyze. Check Search Console tomorrow afternoon for initial signals.

Marketing Brew's deep dive yesterday revealed the practical fallout of Meta's Andromeda ad retrieval system and Advantage+ automation push. The new system matches ads to broad audiences rather than narrow segments, which means advertisers need far more creative variations — one agency saw a client's 300-asset request balloon to 1,000 after accounting for personas and concepts. The problem: most big brands are refusing to let AI generate their creative due to legal and brand control concerns. As one SVP put it, they're constantly playing "Whac-A-Mole to figure out what's the new thing they didn't tell us about that they've turned on." Meta's goal of full automation by end-2026 looks unrealistic, but the creative volume requirement is real right now. If you're running Meta campaigns, start stress-testing your creative production pipeline — the volume demands are only going up.

The first Core Update of 2026 (launched March 27) is still in progress and expected to wrap around April 10. Combined with the Spam Update that completed in record time on March 24, any organic ranking shifts you're seeing this week are nearly impossible to attribute cleanly. The December 2025 Core Update wiped ~15% of top-10 pages entirely, so stakes remain high. Keep monitoring organic traffic on content-heavy client properties through end of week — don't make reactive changes until the rollout completes and the dust settles.

With three weeks until Google enforces its uniqueness check on Lookalike user lists in Demand Gen campaigns, this is your audit window. After April 30, duplicate lists created from the same seed (common when testing different expansion rates) will be rejected at the API level, breaking automated workflows. If you run Demand Gen through scripts or third-party tools, consolidate duplicate lookalike segments now rather than scrambling at the deadline.

Swivel and Olyzon partnered to build a fully agentic marketplace where AI agents discover, negotiate, and execute ad buys — including inventory that was never in the bid stream. They're communicating via AdCP, an open-source protocol built on top of MCP that lets agents across different companies talk to each other. Meanwhile, SSP Kargo launched Project Kera, a chat-based planning and buying interface for media buyers. This isn't theoretical anymore: Wpromote is actively testing agentic SSP tools in live campaigns. The implications are structural — if agents can bypass the traditional DSP-SSP pipeline, the fee structure of programmatic advertising gets renegotiated. Worth understanding now, even if your clients aren't touching it yet.

Google increased the request size limit for BatchJobService AddBatchJobOperations from 10.48 MB to 41.94 MB (individual mutate operations still capped at 10.48 MB). If you manage large accounts with heavy image assets or bulk campaign changes through the API, this means fewer chunked requests and faster execution. Not glamorous, but for agencies running automated workflows at scale, this removes a real friction point. Check your scripts — you may be able to simplify upload logic that was working around the old limit.

Two major agency holding companies announced audits of The Trade Desk's fee structures, and mid-market DSPs are aggressively pitching to capture any ad dollars that come loose. Yahoo launched a "DSP Push" with new AI-powered tools specifically targeting the mid-market advertisers that TTD and DV360 have dominated. The competitive landscape in programmatic is shifting: if your clients use The Trade Desk through an agency holdco, ask whether their fees are being reviewed. If they're mid-market and feeling priced out of premium DSPs, the alternatives just got more credible.

Google is rolling out infrastructure updates to Offline Conversion Import that improve attribution matching (reducing the "expired click" errors that plague long sales cycles) and add flexible import requests that make it easier to push conversions across multiple accounts. If you've been fighting OCI error rates on B2B or high-consideration accounts, this is directly relevant. Revisit your OCI setup — the error rates you accepted six months ago may no longer apply.

Google's shopping ads inside AI Mode have graduated from pilot to broad rollout. Sponsored product listings now appear in roughly 1 in 4 AI Mode conversations, labeled "Sponsored" below organic recommendations. Early data: 18% higher engagement than traditional search ads, but at a 35% CPC premium. Only Performance Max and AI Max for Search campaigns are eligible — standard Search campaigns don't qualify. If you haven't audited your Merchant Center feeds recently, do it now: AI Mode pulls heavily from structured product data, so feed quality directly determines whether you show up in this new surface.

OpenAI disclosed that its US ads pilot, launched February 9, crossed $100 million in annualized revenue by late March — just six weeks in. Over 600 advertisers are running. Ads appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses for free and Go-tier users, clearly labeled and excluded from under-18 users and sensitive topics. Less than 20% of eligible users see ads daily, meaning there's massive room to scale inventory. Testing is expanding to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The measurement story is still weak (as flagged March 30), but the demand signal is unmistakable. Worth monitoring — not yet worth a serious media plan allocation until attribution improves.

Meta rolled out a suite of AI creative tools: generate video ads from a single product image, create UGC-style ads using AI avatars, auto-translate voiceovers across languages, and auto-convert product catalogs into video format. Beta testers are reporting ~10% higher click-through rates on AI-generated video vs. static creative. For e-commerce advertisers drowning in creative production costs, this is a direct workflow improvement. Test it on lower-stakes product lines first to calibrate quality expectations.

LinkedIn updated its feed algorithm to use large language models that parse the actual topic and meaning of posts, not just keyword matching. This means the platform can now distinguish between a thoughtful post about "attribution" and one that just name-drops the word for reach. For organic content strategy and LinkedIn Ads targeting alike, this rewards genuine expertise over gaming. If you've been optimizing LinkedIn content around keyword density, shift to topic depth instead.