The shift toward AI is not just about producing ads faster, it’s about giving creative capability to everyone, writes Amazon’s Nikhil Nanivadekar. AI tools can turn a difficult and expensive process into a streamlined, exciting new creative possibility, according to Amazon’s Nikhil Nanivadekar, principal engineer, consumer ad experiences at Amazon. Opinions are the author’s own.

Advertising has always celebrated creativity, but for many brands, it came with real constraints. Big ideas required big budgets, specialized teams and long production cycles. Speed was a luxury, and experimentation carried risk. For too many businesses, the gap between a great idea and a great ad felt impossibly wide.

TikTok is expanding the way advertisers can appear the moment users open the app, turning the platform’s launch page into a dedicated branded placement that advertisers can buy programmatically. The move, announced in recent industry briefings and visible in pilot campaigns this month, adds to existing ad formats such as TopView and Brand Takeover and aims to make the opening screen a predictable space for high-impact mobile ads. For marketers, the update promises greater brand visibility at scale; for users, it raises fresh questions about feed experience and early-session user engagement. The change arrives as platforms rework monetization levers across short-form video, and it immediately reshapes options for major advertisers — from global apparel groups to DTC brands — seeking guaranteed impressions in the first seconds of app use.

Learn how leading brands and agencies are evolving their full-funnel strategies, embracing AI, and rethinking their tech stacks to stay competitive. The 2026 programmatic benchmarks confirm a market in lift-off. Data shows that 75% of marketers expect budgets to rise in 2026, and 84% report stronger year-over-year performance.

Yet beneath this optimism lies a widening maturity gap between those simply keeping pace and those pulling ahead.

Acquiring new customers versus retaining existing ones is a common goal of advertisers. Google Ads offers account and bid settings to help. It starts with a feature called “New Customer Acquisition” in customer lifecycle optimization, located in the account-level goals section.

Advertisers can set an incremental conversion value for new customers. For example, if converting a repeat customer is worth $20, an incremental value could be $10, elevating new customers to $30.

Learn how leading brands and agencies are evolving their full-funnel strategies, embracing AI, and rethinking their tech stacks to stay competitive. The 2026 programmatic benchmarks confirm a market in lift-off. Data shows that 75% of marketers expect budgets to rise in 2026, and 84% report stronger year-over-year performance.

Yet beneath this optimism lies a widening maturity gap between those simply keeping pace and those pulling ahead. Our research shows that top performers consistently excel in five areas: unifying fragmented workflows, consolidating their tech stacks, adopting AI where it delivers immediate impact, investing earlier in emerging channels, and redefining performance around attention and creative quality.

Your segmentation research is packed with valuable insights. But too often, your market research ends up sitting in a report instead of driving real impact. In our Audience Activation guide, we’ll show how you can apply your research insights to media purchases to help optimize ad spend, reach the right consumers, and cut wasted impressions.

Discover how Audience Activation can:

Improve advertising reach by ensuring the right people see the right message

The data’s in: based on insights from 450 marketers, Smartly’s 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report reveals how AI is powering creative, media, and measurement to deliver real efficiency and impact for next year’s campaigns.

See how leading teams connect channels, cut waste, and use predictive AI to optimize before launch, and how you can apply the same playbook to power smarter, faster campaigns.

The busiest shopping weekend of the year has come and gone. Triple Whale tracked $2.9 billion in revenue to bring you the full story of BFCM 2025. In this report, we detail exactly how brands’ data-backed decisions played out.

What’s inside :

• Ad performance metric trends for major platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, Amazon, TikTok, and AppLovin

• Trends in ad spend across 15 industries, and how different industries invested in ad platforms to drive sales