Mark Zuckerberg has laid out a vision for the future of Meta’s core business: One day, advertising on the company’s platforms will be as simple as inputting a credit card number and a business goal. AI will take care of the rest.

The company has reportedly said that day could come as soon as the end of 2026, according to a Wall Street Journal report last year. But media buyers and marketers we spoke with say it’s likely much further off, and reviews of the latest AI tools are mixed.

Meta has been moving aggressively toward AI-powered automation and personalization in recent months. Its new Andromeda ad retrieval system has overhauled the way ads are matched to users. Some advertisers said they’ve begun to notice Manus—the AI agent Meta acquired in December—surfacing in Ads Manager as well. Meta has also continued to add to its Advantage+ AI tool suite, which spans functions like creative, targeting, and budget optimization.

For marketers, the proliferation of AI features has meant ceding more control to Meta’s “black-box” systems when it comes to targeting, budgeting, and even the creative process, though some brands draw the line on that.

“Meta has been trying to automate media buying through simplifying the process, keeping audiences broad, giving advertisers less control and levers to restrict our targeting, and recommending less ad sets per campaign,” Aaron Edwards, founder and CEO of marketing agency The Charles Group, told Morning Brew. “All of this is enabled through smarter algorithms that Meta says favor larger data sets to let the algorithm have more play.”

Often, marketers are opted into these new AI features and updates whether they want them or not. “We’re constantly having to go through and play Whac-A-Mole to figure out what’s the new thing they didn’t tell us about that they’ve turned on, so that we can more precisely test it and know what we’re getting ourselves into,” Hayley Owen, SVP and group media director at Deutsch, told us.

Meta spokesperson Alisha Swinteck said that as of this March, Meta has introduced features to ensure that advertisers who opt out of Advantage+ creative will have that preference saved for future campaigns rather than returned to a default opt-in.

Continue reading here.—PK

Retail media is in a liminal space.

WPP’s 2025 forecast has retail media accounting for almost a fifth of total ad revenue by 2030, and the channel has outgrown retail, with financial and travel businesses getting into the space under the broader umbrella of commerce media. Still, the exponential growth seen in recent years may be hard to maintain.

At the same time, retail media networks have expanded offerings far beyond digital display ads, and making a clear pitch to advertisers and ad buyers is top of mind. That’s a big reason Albertsons Media Collective, the retail media offering for the grocery chain, showed up at the IAB NewFronts this year as a first-time presenter.

“We were there mostly to show all that we have to offer and the breadth and scale of our offering,” Liz Roche, VP of media and measurement at Albertsons Media Collective, told Marketing Brew; the chain has 49.8 million loyalty shoppers. “Retail media isn’t just sequestered to the bottom of the funnel. We really do have a full-funnel brand-building channel, so to speak, and a lot of that is enabled by our scale.”

Albertsons wasn’t alone in pitching retail media at NewFronts; Walmart also had a presentation at NewFronts that detailed its combined offering with Vizio, the connected-TV company it acquired in 2024. (The Walmart-Vizio deal was something of a bellwether for retail media and a clear sign of the category’s potential to scoop up brand dollars.) As retail media networks jockey for ad dollars, using arenas like NewFronts or creating something new, like Amazon’s unBoxed or Home Depot’s InFront, making the case for a particular network could become all the more important, which may lead to more of an even bigger presence across major industry events.

Read more here.—KM

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Fintan Gillespie is global director, ad partnerships at Snap Inc. He previously worked at Google.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? A recent favorite has been launching our integration with WooCommerce. It’s a big step forward in making Snapchat’s ad tools more accessible to a wider range of SMB e-commerce businesses. By giving WooCommerce merchants a seamless way to create, manage, and optimize Snapchat campaigns directly from their storefronts, we’re helping them show up where their customers are already spending time. It builds on the success of our established Shopify integration, and speaks to what we’re all about: lowering the barrier to entry for high-impact, creative advertising that actually drives results.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I love when multiple partners get involved to make a campaign come to life. One example that really caught my eye this year was when Steve Madden worked with one of our agency partners, January Digital, to reach new customers on Snapchat. Through that campaign development, they worked with another one of our social agency partners, Whalar, on an entire creator strategy.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: You can definitely guess it because it’s on there, but it’s worth mentioning: I was a travel journalist right out of uni. I traveled across the world from Australia to Ireland, raising funds for a men’s health charity. I wrote a weekly article throughout the trip, documenting this journey. I’ve always been an incredibly curious person, and telling stories through people and places really fed that at that time in my life. I’m happy to say that the curiosity hasn’t waned.

Continue reading here.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Publicis is acquiring sports marketing and culture agency 160over90 from WME Group.
• American Express became the official payments partner of the NFL under a multiyear deal.
• Sunglass Hut will serve as the official sunglasses partner of the New York Liberty starting this WNBA season (including collaborations with the team’s mascot, Ellie the Elephant).
• Meta put its work with Mercor on pause after the data contracting firm experienced a data breach, per Wired.