Hi and welcome back to another edition of The Keyword.

A clear pattern across the announcements from Cannes Lion was the major ad platforms expanding to own connection between brands and creators.

LinkedIn, Meta and Google shipped a new product with that goal in mind. The IAB now counts creator marketing as a core media channel, forecast to hit $44 billion in the US this year.

—Kole
_{editing The Keyword // building Wilow (Meta Creative Analytics)}

Within two weeks, LinkedIn, Meta, and YouTube each launched products that let brands find creators and turn their posts into paid ads.

Until now this needed different tools, but a brand can now find a creator, look through their posts, and turn one into a paid ad without leaving the platform.

Each platform is approaching this differently:

All designed to push forward the ability for brands to run more creator-content as ads.

You have more tools than ever. So why does it feel like critical context is still
missing? HubSpot's 2026 Essential Apps for Marketers collection brings together 14 apps across creative, ads, events, and more — so the context you need travels with every campaign, decision, and handoff.

Google is giving publishers a Gemini-powered agent that answers questions about their own Ad Manager data, cutting the manual reporting and troubleshooting that ad-operations teams handle today. The beta starts this month, and Google plans REST APIs and an MCP server later in the year that would open Ad Manager to third-party agents.

Live shopping streams are becoming a promotable ad format for businesses on Instagram and Facebook, opening a new way to reach buyers beyond existing followers. Meta is pairing the rollout with virtual card checkout, wider affiliate tools, and product data that lets its AI build a shopping ad for each viewer.

Meta's new Forum app turns Facebook group discussions into an AI-queried answer source, adding another community surface marketers will need to watch as product discovery shifts from search toward AI recommendation. The standalone app carries over users' existing Facebook groups and adds an Ask tab that compiles answers from across communities, plus an AI assistant that helps admins moderate.

Advertisers can now plug external AI agents directly into Snapchat's ad platform and lean on Snap's own assistants to set up, optimize, and staff campaigns with creators. The update centers on a new Model Context Protocol server, alongside Snap Creator Network, a campaign assistant, and creative tools that generate Snap-native video and layouts.

OpenAI is preparing to open self-serve ChatGPT advertising to U.K. marketers, removing the sales-rep step and giving performance teams direct access to a new AI ad channel. The U.K. would become the fifth self-serve market, and reporting indicates cost-per-click buying is arriving alongside the existing impression-based model.

Yahoo DSP now lets advertisers plug third-party AI agents into their media buying, giving performance teams the option to use specialized outside tools instead of one platform's native automation. The Agent Network covers audience targeting, campaign activation, creative, and measurement, and runs on open MCP connections and APIs.

Pinterest is putting an AI assistant inside Ads Manager and opening its ad platform to outside AI copilots, giving advertisers new ways to spot trends and manage campaigns without leaving the tools they already use. The update also adds new Performance+ creative capabilities and an experimental shopping app, Ask Pinterest.

Reddit is opening a commerce placement that puts competing brands' products side by side inside the conversations where shoppers already compare options, a shift for a platform long treated as upper-funnel. The alpha format, Shopping Listing Ads, matches products to a conversation's context and presents them in a carousel built on Reddit's Community Intelligence engine.

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