This week: Microsoft Advertising welcomed Navah Hopkins as its new Ads Liaison, Google released AI Max for Search campaigns with 14% higher conversion rates, Meta unveiled deeper personalization tools for advertisers, YouTube received brand safety accreditation for its ad placement processes, and RollerAds expanded its push notification offerings with impressive publisher results.
Microsoft Advertising appointed industry veteran Navah Hopkins as its new Ads Liaison, creating a direct link between advertisers and product teams. Hopkins stepped down from her role as brand evangelist at Optmyzr to take on this newly created position.
Advertisers now have a dedicated public-facing representative to escalate concerns and provide feedback directly to Microsoft's product team. This human touch reinforces Microsoft's people-first approach to AI advancement while giving B2B advertisers a stronger voice in platform development.
Google released AI Max, a new Google Ads campaign type that promises 14% more conversions at similar costs compared to traditional Search campaigns, with some advertisers seeing up to 27% improvements. The format expands targeting through broad match, keywordless technology, automated text customization, and final URL expansion.
This represents a significant shift for search advertisers who must now decide between control and performance. While AI Max offers incremental volume discovery and automated optimization, it requires giving up granular control over keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. The hybrid strategy—using regular Search for high-converting terms and AI Max for expansion—will likely become the dominant approach as the feature rolls out broadly in Q3.
Meta unveiled next-level AI ad tools that can independently create and target campaigns for advertisers. The new capabilities leverage deeper user data to deliver more relevant messaging with minimal advertiser input.
Enterprise advertisers spending in the wall garden now have access to more sophisticated personalization while potentially reducing campaign management workload. This represents another step toward autonomous marketing systems where human strategists focus more on creative direction and business outcomes rather than tactical execution.
YouTube received formal accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) for its various ad placement processes, following an assessment of the platform's brand safety measures and content review systems.
For large advertisers concerned about brand safety, this third-party verification provides additional confidence when allocating significant budgets to YouTube. The accreditation validates YouTube's content filtering technology and gives advertisers stronger assurances that their ads won't appear alongside problematic content.
RollerAds highlighted how publishers can monetize Google Discover traffic through push notifications, revealing how one publisher grew from $0 to $60,000 monthly using their platform. The network processes over 7 billion daily impressions and 10 million clicks while serving 50,000+ advertisers and 19,000+ publishers.
With Google Discover expanding to desktop (increasing potential ad reach by approximately 40%), performance advertisers have a significant opportunity to leverage this engagement channel. RollerAds' hybrid format blends ads with valuable updates, potentially offering strong conversions while maintaining user experience—especially valuable as advertisers search for higher-quality traffic sources.