Meta Is Now Charging You Rent To Advertise In Europe. WTF?
On July 1 Meta started slapping a location fee on every ad delivered into six European markets, added as a separate line on your invoice rather than taken out of your budget. W hy T he F ees? Well, because they can. The UK pays 2 percent, France, Italy and Spain 3, Austria and Türkiye a full 5. It's Meta handing you the digital services tax it spent years quietly absorbing, like the flatmate who suddenly remembers you never chipped in for the WiFi. The catch is it's invisible in Ads Manager. The fee only surfaces in billing, charged on where your impressions land rather than where you sit, so a Zurich account serving London still pays the UK cut. Rework your budget math now, because your real CPMs in these markets just climbed 2 to 5 percent overnight, and nobody told your ROAS targets. Read More // DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Read the source →Google Wants A Full Non-Skippable Minute Of Your Living Room
Google Ads is testing non-skippable in-stream video that runs up to 60 seconds on connected TV, part of its Premier reach reservation lineup. You now get three lengths, 15 seconds on any screen, and 30 or 60 seconds reserved for the big TV in the corner. Google's pitch is more room for storytelling. The rest of us recognise the 90s ad break making a quiet comeback, now with targeting. A full minute you cannot skip is both a gift and a trap. It works if you genuinely have a story worth 60 seconds and the production to carry it, and it's a fast way to burn budget and goodwill if you don't. Save the long format for real brand moments, keep a tight 15 for everything else, and respect that your viewer's remote thumb has muscle memory. Read More // DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Read the source →AI Shopping Agents Just Turned Google Ads Into A Shortlist Of Five
Optmyzr's Frederick Vallaeys argues in Search Engine Journal that agentic commerce is quietly rewiring paid search. Impressions are down 11 percent year over year, and 43 percent of shoppers now discover brands through AI. The game is shifting from winning the auction to making the shortlist, because the agent doing the buying hands its human only five options, and it could not care less about your clever psychological pricing. What wins now is boring and structural. Unblock the shopping bots you're probably still firewalling, clean up your product feed so the data is genuinely trustworthy, and adopt the new commerce protocols before a competitor gets quoted instead of you. Confidence in your data is becoming as decisive as your bid. The robots read the label, and turn a blind eye to the vibe. Read More //
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Apple Shipped An MCP Server, And Yes, You Read That Right
Apple's WebKit team gave Safari a Model Context Protocol server, letting AI agents reach straight into the browser to inspect network requests, DOM data and Core Web Vitals. In plain terms, your AI assistant can now work out why your site limps on Safari without you writing the perfect prompt describing the pain. This from Apple, the company that historically treated third-party access like a public health risk. It matters because Safari still owns a quarter to a third of traffic in key markets, and Safari gremlins are the ones nobody catches until a client does. Wire the MCP server into your workflow alongside Search Console and your usual audit tools, and let the agent hunt the compatibility and speed bugs that quietly bleed conversions. Free QA, basically. Read More // TECH & INNOVATION
Read the source →SEO Isn't Dead, It Just Enrolled In Generative Engine Optimization
Earned Media's Nick Brogden argues in Entrepreneur that SEO has died and resurrected yet again, because the job simply changed shape. Traffic is sliding for good sites doing everything by the old book, since people now get their answer from an AI summary and never click through. His fix is Generative Engine Optimization, which is a dressed-up way of saying become the source the machines trust enough to quote. The mistakes he flags are the tempting ones, drowning your site in AI-written filler, assuming summaries mean you can stop publishing, and locking your best research behind a form. Do the opposite and publish original, expert-led work worth citing, because being remembered as the credible name still pays even when the click never happens. Don't go chasing clicks, pursue credibility. And if you don't know where to start, send up the signal. comtogether turns real expertise into the c
Read the source →Europe's Ad Market Hit €131 Billion While Everyone Insisted Times Were Tough
IAB Europe's new AdEx Benchmark puts the European digital ad market at 131.1 billion euros for 2025, up 10.5 percent, which is a lot of growth for a year everyone spent describing as difficult. Retail media jumped 16.7 percent to 13.3 billion and finally crossed 10 percent of total digital spend. Video did the showy bit, passing half of all display investment for the first time. The signal for planners is where the money is quietly migrating. Retail media and video are no longer the experimental line items, they're where the growth actually lives, and social video was the fastest riser of the lot. If your 2026 media plan still treats them as nice-to-haves, it's reading from a map that's two years out of date. Follow the euros. Read More // DATA & ANALYTICS
Read the source →Brussels Wants Your AI-Generated Ads To Identify Themselves
From August 2 the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency rules kick in, and they reach anyone using AI to talk to or persuade the public. Deepfakes and AI-generated content on matters of public interest have to be disclosed, chatbots have to admit they're bots, and generative systems need machine-readable markings so synthetic content can be spotted. Europe is doing to AI exactly what it did to cookies, regulating first and letting everyone else catch up. For marketers leaning on AI creative, this is a label requirement with real teeth behind it. Take stock of where AI touches your public-facing output, sort out your disclosures and watermarking, and don't treat the August date as soft just because existing systems get until December to mark old content. Better to label now than explain later. Read More // That's July, and it refused to be the quiet month. Meta turned European delivery into
Read the source →Until next time, may your CTRs be high, your bounce rates be low.