Meta Consolidates Targeting, AI Takes The Wheel

Plus: Marketers press Meta’s Superintelligence for control and clarity

Author

Avinash Duggempudi
August 20, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

ClickZ Digital Ad Platform News

Here's what's happening this week in the world of digital advertising platforms:
- Meta sunsets granular targeting as AI expands
- Superintelligence Labs meets rising transparency demands
- AI video tools speed creative iteration across platforms
- Nexon deepfakes ignite TikTok brand safety concerns
- TikTok’s Creative Challenge under fire over approvals

💸 The $200B Miscalculation Marketers Can’t Afford

On stage at eTail Boston, Fospha’s Chief Product Officer, Dom Devlin, warned that retail’s reliance on last-click metrics is outdated, and it’s costing brands $200 billion in under-credited sales.

The missed connection is clear: shoppers often discover on TikTok, Meta, or Snap, but complete their purchase on Amazon, Walmart, or Target. Traditional attribution frameworks rarely connect those dots. As a result, channels that spark demand are stripped of credit, while budgets overweight the “closers” - whether or not they truly created the sale.

Dom called this the bottom-of-funnel trap: over-investing in channels that finish the purchase while underfunding those that generate demand. The fallout is higher acquisition costs and shrinking pipelines of future customers.

Fospha’s Halo platform was built to break that cycle. By integrating marketplace and DTC sales into one unified ROAS, it captures the full impact of discovery spend across the funnel. For brands like Nécessaire and Give Me Cosmetics, that visibility has unlocked the confidence to double down on demand generation while protecting profitability.

📥Download Fospha’s Halo Report to see how leaders are funding growth where it really starts.

📌WEEKLY MUST-KNOWS

Meta is merging detailed targeting options and will stop delivery for ad sets using retired options on Jan 15, 2026, pushing advertisers toward AI-led Advantage systems. Meta cites AI-driven lifts in conversions (Instagram +5%, Facebook +3%) and a 22.6% median CPA improvement when exclusions were removed as proof points. Performance teams should plan audience migration, review exclusion logic, and rebalance creative testing for broader targeting.

AI video ad generators now turn URLs and assets into platform-formatted, short-form ads with scripts, VO, captions and variants in minutes. This shifts creative ops toward rapid multivariate testing across TikTok, Reels and Shorts while lowering production overhead. Teams should codify brand guardrails and QA for watermarking and disclosure when using free tiers.

AI STRATEGY
Here’s What Marketers Want From Meta’s Superintelligence Labs
Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs unifies FAIR, foundational models and product teams, and marketers want transparency, control, privacy-safe audience inference, predictive creative guidance, and upper-funnel tools. With $64–$72 billion 2025 capex, buyers expect lower CAC or higher CVR, not just research milestones. Expect pressure on Meta to prove explainability and measurement parity before fully automating the ad supply chain.

🧐 What Does Brand Building Really Mean in eCommerce?

We discussed where most brands get it wrong when it comes to brand building, with bad measurement and poor organizational structure amongst the biggest contributing factors - and how Fospha is aiming to solve the biggest questions around brand measurement with Glow.

⚡QUICK READS

'The First Descendant' Caught Using AI-Generated Influencers: Mashable reports Nexon’s TikTok ads used AI fakes and a deepfake of a real streamer, signaling rising brand safety and consent risks on short-form platforms.(More)

WhatsApp’s New Upgrades Could Completely Change How You Use Your iPhone: Forbes reports that WhatsApp’s latest iPhone updates introduce major functionality shifts that could redefine daily app use. For mobile and app marketers, these changes present fresh opportunities to engage users through richer messaging, improved integration, and enhanced user journeys.(More)

TikTok Tightens Live Shopping Rules with New Warnings: Music Ally reports that TikTok has updated its live-streaming guidelines. For social commerce marketers, this highlights the platform’s increasing focus on safeguarding users while still pushing live shopping as a growth channel.(More)

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