Will you be using X for your holiday promotions this year? Elon and Co. have been busy touting the platform’s improving ad offerings, now powered by its Grok AI tool, which enables advertisers to rely on Grok to find the right audience for their promotions, and optimize performance in the app.

And if your audience is active there, it could be worth considering, and this week, X has launched a new holiday marketing hub to help guide your X ads approach this coming season.

Unilever’s pledge to commit half of ad spend to social is just one piece of a larger evolution for a category trying to shed its stodginess and win over Gen Z. More CPG marketers are betting on social- and influencer-first strategies to modernize. Experts say the category needs to be open to creative risk and different ways of working with agencies to succeed.

Social media has been around for ages in marketing terms, but its current era feels like it started in the pandemic haze of 2020 with a TikTok video of a man sipping Ocean Spray while gliding along on a skateboard and listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” The blissful clip, later expanded into a TV campaign by the cranberry juice maker, led Ocean Spray to fly off of store shelves — and helped place “Dreams” back on the Billboard charts — while serving as an early indicator of TikTok’s distinct power in sparking viral product sensations.

Ahead of the busy holiday shopping season, Google is souping up its retail ads with new loyalty features. The new features include a way for retail brands to offer personalized pricing and shipping perks to members of their brand loyalty programs on both free and paid shopping listings on Google, while also helping brands target lapsed customers.

That includes rolling out a “loyalty mode” within Google Ads’s retention goal feature, which creates bidding strategies designed to target loyal customers. If a brand sees higher lifetime values (LTV) from its existing loyalty program members than from new ones, it may choose to set lower target ROAS for higher LTV customers, Jyotika Prasad, the company’s senior director of retail ads, explained.

Clip source: Digital Advertising in the Cookieless World | Twilio Segment

Digital Advertising in the Cookieless World

The rules of digital advertising are being rewritten. Both browsers and government regulators have been prioritizing user privacy, which we’ve seen in recent initiatives like Chrome phasing out of third-party cookies, and Apple’s iOS updates.

To adapt to this new digital advertising landscape, entire strategies need to be reworked. Our new e-book takes an in-depth look at the future of digital advertising, the necessity of first-party data, and the pivotal role of a CDP.

18 months. 12 RMNs. Thousands of sponsored product placements. Retail media is maturing fast—and sponsored products are at the heart of it. In our most expansive report yet, we deep-dive on the past 18 months of retailer and advertiser data (Q3 2023–Q1 2025) across 12 of the top retail media networks to understand how ad inventory, placement strategies, and brand investment are evolving in real time.

How should you approach Meta advertising to get consistent, predictable results? How do things work now? I’ve assembled 19 rules to highlight where and how you should focus your energy now. This post is a consolidation of the 19 most important rules to both understand how Meta advertising works and get better results.

Here are the rules (click the link to jump to each section):

Keep it Simple

When you need to expand your business presence on the internet, you have two choices: organic growth or paid advertising. Organic growth means people find you naturally through social media content and when your website appears in search results. With paid ads, you place your message right where potential customers will see it.

The difference is that, rather than spending several months hoping your content will appear naturally on Google or gain attention on social media, paid advertising lets people see your business right away. Your company’s name and message could appear at the very beginning of search results or within social media feeds by tomorrow.

Looking for scalable, high-impact growth beyond the traditional search and social channels? Discover how pre-search incrementality is driving better results than traditional channels.

This guide breaks down how browser advertising offers a powerful alternate way to reach high-intent users before they even begin to search. Built for marketing leaders and decision-makers, it outlines why browser channels are gaining traction and how to activate it for incremental results at scale.