Latest / AI DTC WTF / The AI Updates Every Media Buyer Needs Right Now: Meta, Shopify, Youtube Shorts

Transcript

The AI Updates Every Media Buyer Needs Right Now: Meta, Shopify, Youtube Shorts · AI DTC WTF

0:00
(upbeat music)
0:03
If you work in D2C and you use AI
0:05
and you're wondering what the F is going on every week,
0:08
this is your podcast, the AI D2C WTF podcast,
0:12
your home for tactical tips, strategies and ideas
0:15
that you can implement right now in your AI workflows
0:18
to make your brand or agency more money.
0:22
Welcome to another episode of AI D2C WTF.
0:26
I am Andrew Foxwell with my friend Thomas Mowen
0:30
and we are today talking about all of the updates
0:33
that have happened in relation to AI
0:37
on Meta and Shopify and YouTube,
0:40
specifically on YouTube Shorts.
0:41
We're gonna talk about those things,
0:43
talk about what they are.
0:44
A lot of these honestly I didn't even know,
0:47
so I had to go through and just scouring the news,
0:49
one of the things that we're doing now
0:50
and I was like, they said what, Ed Can?
0:53
Or they announced what in London?
0:57
There's so much of this stuff that happens all the time
0:59
and so that's what we're gonna go into today
1:01
and you'll be able to leave this episode updated
1:04
and fully aware of what's happening and how it's going.
1:09
Thomas, before we get into that, how are you doing?
1:12
Are you back using Fable now that we have it back?
1:15
We were recording this episode on July 2nd
1:18
and so we just got Fable back which we're stoked about.
1:20
So how's that been going?
1:21
It came back yesterday and it was a blast.
1:25
It came back late Norwegian time
1:28
so I kind of overspent my bedtime way, way, way last night.
1:33
I had a lot of fun and I've actually planned out
1:38
what I was going to put it through when it came back
1:41
so I've gotten a lot of good value out of it
1:44
so I'm really happy about that.
1:47
And one of my biggest takeaways is to get Fable
1:51
to do kind of the planning and the reviewing at the end
1:54
and then getting Opus 4.8 or Codex GPT 5.5
1:59
to do the actual work to save on tokens
2:01
because Fable is a greedy beast, it's super expensive.
2:06
So that was one of the things that kind of picked up
2:08
really early on X that has made me do a lot of things now
2:13
for the last 24 hours.
2:15
Nice.
2:18
It's great.
2:19
Yeah, absolutely.
2:20
And talking about CAN, I've been paying more attention
2:24
to kind of CAN and the marketing space the last week
2:29
because I'm kind of in vacation mode,
2:31
so I'm listening to some podcasts.
2:32
And for me, what has been really, really interesting
2:36
is to see kind of how dominating meta really is
2:40
in the marketing space and that everyone is kind of talking
2:44
about how dominant Instagram is and the Instagram use
2:47
and how they're still abusing the influencers
2:51
to kind of get all those engagements and ad views,
2:55
but it's still kind of the most effective best platform
3:00
to be on.
3:00
And also, at least kind of what I'm hearing is that TikTok
3:05
is now kind of just falling more and more behind
3:09
after kind of the US version of it
3:11
in terms of how effective it is and the growth
3:14
and kind of how people are talking about it.
3:16
So it's a big change in how people are talking
3:19
about platforms in CAN now versus last year, for example.
3:23
Yeah, I mean, I think it's totally true.
3:25
A lot of people are trying to figure out
3:26
they know that Instagram has the most qualified eyeballs
3:29
worldwide, so that's what they're always trying
3:31
to get in front of.
3:31
Yeah, I actually had a friend and a member
3:34
of Foxwell Founders Day here at our house,
3:37
and he's an AI-enabled guy,
3:41
and he had built a product last year or the last couple
3:44
of years that he had to pull because it had a lot of bugs
3:47
and he just had Fable review the code basis
3:51
and found 11 bugs that Opus 4.8 had not found,
3:56
and he was able to fix them,
3:58
and now the product's almost perfect.
4:00
So it's unbelievable.
4:02
It did it in 30 minutes or whatever, right?
4:04
And this is an incredibly complex product,
4:07
but anyway, kind of amazing.
4:08
So, well, let's get into it in talking about Meta.
4:11
There's been two main events.
4:12
There's been the, obviously, with CAN we talked about,
4:15
and then there's been this event in London
4:17
where they brought together a lot of European advertisers,
4:20
and a lot of those folks, obviously, run ads
4:22
for people in the United States.
4:24
So a lot of qualified people,
4:26
and they talked about a bunch of different stuff there.
4:27
So one of the first things they talked about is...
4:33
(upbeat music)
4:35
We all hear a ton about AI.
4:37
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4:40
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4:42
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4:48
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4:50
It's from Motion, and therefore, you know it's awesome
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4:58
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5:00
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There was recently a marketer that Reza talks about
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5:34
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5:37
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So she uploaded all the context for the team.
5:41
They ran it into Runneth, and Runneth said,
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5:48
and I think the fact that we all live in silos
5:50
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5:52
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5:53
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5:55
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6:07
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6:09
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6:11
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6:14
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6:15
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6:52
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6:55
(upbeat music)
6:58
A lot of qualified people,
6:59
and they talked about a bunch of different stuff there.
7:01
So one of the first things they talked about
7:03
is they are doing a ton with catalogs
7:06
and they've talked about catalogs a lot.
7:08
They did this at the Meta Performance Summit.
7:10
One of the things that they have now
7:11
is you can upload product images
7:14
and it will make a video ad from that.
7:17
Now we've had this kind of feature for a while,
7:20
but they're claiming that it's going to be super easy
7:24
to animate anything that you have.
7:27
They talked about these in combination.
7:29
One is catalog, and then they talked about
7:31
in-campaign AI editing, which sounds super scary,
7:35
but essentially it's cropping,
7:36
it's animating statics automatically,
7:38
swapping backgrounds, generating text variations,
7:41
making stills of video, don't have to re-upload them.
7:45
So if you have your catalog or you have any other ads
7:49
and both these things are enabled,
7:50
they're basically doing whatever they want to it
7:52
to make it seem fine.
7:53
And this has obviously scary implications,
7:56
but they doubled down on this saying,
8:00
look, there's 4 million advertisers
8:02
who use our Gen AI tools now
8:05
up from 1 million six months ago.
8:08
And that's probably large in part to the fact
8:10
that they're making the turn it off buttons harder to find.
8:13
But yeah.
8:14
I think definitely the turn off buttons are harder to find,
8:17
but I also find it much better than even six months ago.
8:22
It started being really, really crappy
8:25
and we kind of spent a lot of time
8:28
just trying to turn everything off
8:29
because clients were freaking out.
8:31
But now it is getting better and better.
8:35
I still feel like it's a bit behind
8:37
in terms of what kind of the forefront models are doing.
8:43
But it's interesting to see from one to 4 million
8:46
in six months, that's impressive.
8:48
There's a lot to say here,
8:50
but basically they're gonna continue to push this stuff.
8:52
So they talked about that.
8:53
They also, for those of us that have been advertisers
8:55
for a long time, talked about the opportunity score
8:58
and they've basically rebuilt this, redone it.
9:01
So now it's quote unquote much more useful
9:06
from what they said.
9:08
So free account audit graded on creative variety
9:11
and it has basically it goes zero to a hundred
9:14
and below 60 is underperforming.
9:17
So I think you're gonna wanna get familiar with this
9:21
because that is gonna have implications in the auction
9:23
and they've redone this and said,
9:25
this is something that we're making aware,
9:28
making you aware of.
9:29
And so that's a big one.
9:31
And a lot of things that lead into the opportunity score
9:34
are the brand aware creative gen or your brand memory.
9:40
So under the tools tab in select accounts rolling out
9:44
as we speak, there's this brand memory you can upload
9:47
which learns the tone from your existing ad library.
9:50
It learns your looks, the kind of the fonts you wanna use.
9:53
So heard from a lot of folks,
9:55
of course like, oh, this is off brand for us.
9:57
And don't get me wrong, I still think Matt
9:59
is gonna fuck this up and like, crop it wrong.
10:01
But they're saying like, hey, we care about your brand.
10:04
And so here it is.
10:06
And they're putting that in there.
10:07
And this is the more on brand
10:10
and the more that you're potentially utilizing this
10:12
that can have implications in the opportunity score.
10:15
For me, this is the most important,
10:17
this is the most exciting thing I think
10:19
because that is kind of the number one complaint
10:23
we hear from our advertisers is that this is not our brand,
10:26
this is not on brand.
10:28
And yes, I think probably it's gonna suck for a while
10:31
because meta, but the general idea is very, very good.
10:36
And I think it's also overdue.
10:38
They should have done this a long time ago
10:39
and definitely something I'm really excited to see.
10:45
Also things they've been working on
10:47
is enhanced text generation and creative approval flow,
10:52
meaning better auto headlines and captions
10:55
and all that kind of things, which has been way off,
10:59
especially in the Norwegian market
11:01
and in the Nordic markets,
11:02
I don't think it's been good at all.
11:05
But it looks like they really, really overhaul this now
11:07
and we could expect it to be a lot better.
11:10
Yeah, the creative workflow stuff
11:12
is always a pain, everybody's dealing with this.
11:14
This has a built-in client sign off
11:16
inside of Ads Manager now.
11:18
So there's a lot of creative workflow tools
11:20
that people utilize and this has it within there.
11:22
Of course, you have to get these people
11:23
into the events manager and into Ads Manager
11:28
under your events, which is a pain in and of itself.
11:31
But if they're in there,
11:32
hypothetically you'd be able to send it to them
11:34
for approval and they'd be able to approve
11:37
basically any new creative or different captions
11:41
that it's come up with, which is interesting.
11:44
One thing that we still don't see rolled out globally
11:47
but is out there and is rolling out in a lot more places
11:51
is the AI disclosure.
11:53
So automatic AI disclosure, you have to have that.
11:56
If it's been created with AI,
11:58
and Meta may automatically apply this
11:59
if it's done something with AI on your creative.
12:02
So you need to make sure that you have a disclosure
12:06
on your ad or you're being able to select from Meta,
12:09
this ad was created with AI
12:10
and they'll put the disclosure on there for you.
12:13
So that's one that they talked about a lot
12:16
and one that I think we should be really intimately
12:19
familiar with.
12:20
Absolutely.
12:21
Also Meta Ads AI connector,
12:24
so the MCP things are getting better and better.
12:28
And then I have 29 tools for reporting,
12:31
campaign builds, catalogs, copy pixel stuff,
12:35
and a lot more in audits and benchmarking.
12:39
A lot of our customers have actually started
12:42
using this themselves,
12:44
which for us of course is a little bit kind of stressful
12:47
when the clients start poking around
12:50
and doing audits and stuff,
12:51
but it's actually helped them to just ask better questions
12:55
and kind of get validation for some of the thoughts
12:58
we're doing.
12:59
So it's a great tool for agencies and for advertisers,
13:02
but also I think for the lay people,
13:05
the less technical people to be able to kind of query
13:09
and understand where things are going
13:12
and why things are happening,
13:13
I think is also very positive.
13:15
Yeah, I think totally these things are going to continue
13:17
to be rolled out,
13:18
the more interconnectedness of all of the tools
13:19
are going to continue to be rolled out.
13:21
And the Meta MCP actually is quite good
13:25
and allows you to dig deeper.
13:26
So if you haven't played around with that,
13:28
they're going to continue to build more of these tools
13:30
to make it easier,
13:31
especially around like things like copy pixel diagnostics too.
13:35
So you're going to be able to say,
13:36
"Hey, I think you see any issues here."
13:37
So having conversations with it,
13:39
instead of being able to click around
13:41
is going to continue to become more common.
13:43
And I think you want to be familiar.
13:45
The big one that I keep getting people asking me about,
13:48
cause they talked about it a ton,
13:49
but we just don't have them in the United States
13:52
the same way that other countries have it
13:55
is the Meta Business Agents.
13:56
They talked about this a ton at CAN.
13:58
They talked about this a lot in London.
14:00
And basically it's a AI agent in your DMs or comments
14:05
that answers questions,
14:07
recommends products from a catalog,
14:09
closes sales and connects directly to Shopify.
14:12
So it's basically a real sales channel now.
14:16
Do you guys have any people use this?
14:18
Or have you heard about this?
14:19
Cause this is new to us,
14:20
but I've heard from some people in Singapore,
14:22
some founder members that this has been incredible for them.
14:26
So I'm curious of your take if you know about this.
14:28
No, when I read kind of our show notes,
14:32
I was like, this is interesting.
14:33
They haven't ever heard about this.
14:34
And I kind of asked around for a few other agents
14:37
and friends in the Nordies and they're like,
14:38
no, but that sounds amazing.
14:40
So we also are kind of in the dark here.
14:42
So, so no, I, but I think it makes perfect sense
14:46
to have this and I'm excited to kind of get my hands on it
14:51
and start experimenting with it a little.
14:53
Yeah, I think if you haven't seen this, give it a shot.
14:55
It's supposedly in people's accounts rolling out
14:57
and turning in there.
14:59
So especially if you're a lead gen agency as well,
15:01
this is an interesting one to try,
15:03
but it will come right from your catalog.
15:05
And I think they're going to become more important over time.
15:08
So I think getting familiar with this is a really big one.
15:10
Let's go into Shopify and talk about what's happened,
15:13
what the announcements that Shopify has had.
15:16
They've had a ton of different stuff.
15:18
So, you know, basically Shopify came out and said,
15:22
AI searches powered by its catalog
15:25
convert at two times scraped data.
15:28
And so the same clean catalog also feeds your meta
15:32
and your YouTube feed.
15:33
Catalogs are having a moment in 2026
15:38
and Shopify is no different.
15:40
A big one that they talked about,
15:41
we'll talk more about the catalogs in just a second,
15:43
but they talked about catalog plus agentic storefronts.
15:48
So you turn this on in settings
15:50
and then sales channels to syndicate structured product data
15:55
into all of these AI models.
15:58
So what this is is apparently there's a catalog setting
16:02
within meta and within Shopify with all these places
16:05
that if you customize it under the same language,
16:10
I have to look at what they call this,
16:11
it's like CPU or something,
16:13
then it will be read properly by all the AI models.
16:18
That's interesting.
16:19
So this is a new thing that apparently
16:21
was not done with this before.
16:23
And this is what they have happening now.
16:25
And so making sure that you go into your settings
16:29
and sales channels and check this
16:31
and make sure that it's customized
16:33
is going to be useful for you
16:35
in reference to discoverability for SEO, AEO, GEO,
16:39
that kind of thing with structured product data.
16:42
So especially as we're talking about like,
16:44
okay, catalogs are a thing and they're big,
16:48
you're on Shopify and then you're also doing it
16:49
on these meta agents.
16:51
Like you can see how this is becoming a big thing.
16:53
So that's one that I thought was super interesting.
16:56
Absolutely.
16:57
And kind of a side note,
16:58
but a lot of our Norwegian e-commerce clients
17:02
are seeing kind of increasingly more and more
17:06
agentic traffic, meaning from HTTP
17:09
and also the Google AI mode thing,
17:12
people are, it's really starting to show up now
17:15
and something people are paying more attention to now
17:17
than just two months ago.
17:20
So it's really interesting.
17:22
This is sidekick AI integration that Shopify has.
17:26
They made multiple upgrades to it,
17:30
but we, all of the stores I've been working on
17:34
haven't actually got access to this.
17:36
I don't know if it's just the US thing of it,
17:38
but have you kind of played around with it
17:40
or heard anyone who's kind of using it
17:42
and got some value out of it?
17:44
So I think what they've done
17:45
with the sidekick upgrade stuff is it's kind of like the,
17:49
it's the AI that you're able to talk to within Shopify.
17:52
So it can obviously just do a ton
17:53
and I've seen people utilize this for like multi-step pieces
17:58
within their funnel.
17:59
So somebody said, if I only have 100,
18:03
the example that I saw was like,
18:04
if I only have 100K for inventory, what do I cut?
18:08
And it gives you an answer.
18:09
It also can do things like multi-step tasks
18:12
and with a store wide context.
18:14
So going across things like,
18:16
hey, I have this issue on my web performance,
18:19
are my payments coming through properly?
18:21
And it can check those things.
18:23
It can also write out multi-step things where,
18:26
hey, can we get, if this happens, can this happen?
18:29
And it connects them together.
18:31
So it's a genteck sort of operating within Shopify,
18:35
which is something that we've had a little bit,
18:37
but it hasn't been as sophisticated as it is today.
18:40
So something probably to continue to be aware of
18:45
and test, I think,
18:46
but they've been talking about this a lot
18:48
and it's definitely gonna continue to get bigger.
18:52
I wouldn't be surprised if over time
18:55
you're able to connect all this into one place
18:57
with another MCP and say,
18:59
hey, Shopify, go do this, go do that.
19:01
But right now it's a walled garden as far as I know.
19:03
So kind of an interesting one.
19:05
And I thought it was cool.
19:07
I think there's a lot that Shopify talks about,
19:12
but the big one is check out how we're structuring your data
19:18
and it will help you show up in more places
19:21
and it will be cleaner.
19:22
So it's like, that's really a hygiene
19:28
and revenue related item that actually does drive results.
19:32
So just making sure that you're kind of
19:34
messing around with that.
19:35
They also made a few, I don't know if you saw
19:37
the analytics upgrades that Shopify had,
19:41
but they have some more analytics upgrades
19:43
they talked about and some specific stuff
19:45
around Shopify audiences, which they still talk about,
19:48
but I haven't seen those work in a while.
19:50
So I'm not sure if that's super powerful,
19:52
at least in the United States,
19:53
but good to know that they're out there
19:55
and testing a lot of different stuff.
19:57
Absolutely.
19:58
And I think the biggest kind of direct takeaway here
20:01
is what they're doing with the catalog.
20:03
I think that that's gonna have a massive impact
20:06
and making sure that you kind of check out
20:09
if you have this agentic storefront thing,
20:12
that's the main takeaway in all the Shopify stuff
20:16
in my opinion.
20:18
Totally agree.
20:20
So let's talk about the final one, which is YouTube,
20:23
which is, in my opinion, it's, you know,
20:26
YouTube shorts specifically are still quite under priced
20:29
for the incrementality that it drives in relation,
20:32
especially in relation to AI.
20:33
They had a lot of interesting stuff
20:35
they talked about in new things.
20:37
So here's what's new that you can use today.
20:40
There's demand gen plus the product feed.
20:43
So noticing a theme of this episode,
20:46
we should call it like why your catalog should be dialed in.
20:50
So it connects your dynamic product ads, of course,
20:53
with the live price and the Google merchant center.
20:56
And they're talking about how it makes, you know,
20:59
better conversions, higher number of conversions,
21:02
which is great.
21:02
So it also then enables you to do shopable feeds in shorts.
21:07
So, you know, you have a short out there
21:10
that you're putting on YouTube
21:11
and people can actually have visible products
21:14
below them in that video or on other videos.
21:18
So that's a massive one that is technically utilizing
21:23
like AI from your catalog being clean.
21:25
And you can tag up to 60 products per short now.
21:29
So an in-app checkout is also rolling into this.
21:34
So again, this is huge.
21:38
I think shorts are massive for usage.
21:40
And so-
21:41
Yeah, I think people are kind of forgetting
21:43
that shorts have all this checkout in-app data
21:48
just like Meta has, right?
21:49
And it's not enough people are paying attention to it,
21:53
experimenting with it.
21:54
Google says that shorts shopping is converting three
21:57
to five things better than the traditional pre-rolls.
22:00
So it's a very much up for grabs for advertisers
22:05
to focus on, definitely.
22:08
Yeah, I think a lot here,
22:10
there's a lot of other things that they talked about
22:12
in reference to ad serving and things like that.
22:15
But I think if you can take winning ads on Meta
22:18
and repurpose them into shorts
22:19
and have your catalog dialed in and put that on there,
22:22
like I do think that's something that is utilizing
22:25
one thing of making sure your catalog's dialed in,
22:28
utilizing AI a lot more,
22:30
and then you're able to get a lot more coming from it.
22:33
So I think there's a through line on a lot of this, right?
22:38
Which is AI is kind of handling the production
22:42
plumbing and the platforms are pulling discovery
22:44
and checkout onto what they're doing.
22:47
I mean, I think a lot of it is like not trying
22:50
to leave the platform, staying on there.
22:52
Meta's the same way, trying to make it as quick as possible.
22:56
And a lot of this is gonna be AI driven and AI enabled
22:59
as you continue to go through.
23:00
So this is making sure your catalog makes sense.
23:03
This is making sure that you're aware of
23:05
and are knowledgeable about what are the changes
23:08
that are happening on Shopify in relation to AI.
23:12
And making sure that you are aware of the way
23:17
that people are agentically shopping right now
23:19
and what things you can do to bring your products
23:23
as easily as you can to the forefront.
23:25
Yeah, I think, let's focus on pushing buttons.
23:30
AI is going to push more and more buttons for us,
23:32
but keeping your data clean, like your catalog, your copy,
23:37
making sure you have the correct creative volume
23:39
and then kind of knowing and understanding
23:42
which levels and levers to pull.
23:44
I think that's kind of the recipe now going forward
23:48
for any advertisers.
23:52
Yeah, well, thank you guys for listening to this episode.
23:54
Hopefully our little quick updates that we had
23:56
are useful for you.
23:58
We look forward to hearing your feedback.
24:00
And if there have any questions,
24:01
feel free to email me at andrewfoxwelldigital.com.
24:05
But until next time, stay rad.
24:07
Stay rad.
24:07
(upbeat music)