Moburst’s Monthly Marketing Roundup #29

Tristan Dampies
31 March 2026

March was one of those months where nearly every major player made a move. Google, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, and the IAB all rolled out updates that touch different parts of the marketing stack, but collectively point in the same direction: the space between brands and their customers is becoming more automated, more competitive, and increasingly shaped by AI.

Search is evolving into a more transactional experience, creative production is becoming faster and more automated, and the systems powering media buying, discovery, and measurement are shifting beneath marketers in real time.

Whether you’re running paid media, managing app visibility, refining your content strategy, or building creative for performance campaigns, something changed this month that is likely to affect how you work. Some of these updates are early signals, while others already have practical implications for budgets, workflows, and performance.

We broke down the updates that matter most.

ChatGPT Ads Have Gone Programmatic

Until now, advertising in ChatGPT has been a closed experiment limited to a handful of brands with direct relationships with OpenAI. That changed on March 2, when Criteo announced it had become the first ad-tech platform to plug into ChatGPT’s ad inventory through programmatic channels, opening the door for approximately 17,000 advertisers. The pricing reflects where OpenAI sees itself: roughly $60 CPM with a $200,000 minimum commitment, positioning ChatGPT alongside premium channels like connected TV and live sports rather than standard digital display. Ads currently run in ChatGPT’s Free and Go tiers in the U.S., and reporting remains limited to impressions and clicks.

What makes this different from traditional paid search is the targeting. ChatGPT ads aren’t matched to a single keyword; they’re targeted based on the full context of a multi-turn conversation, which is a fundamentally richer intent signal. Early data from Criteo backs this up: LLM-referred users convert at approximately 1.5x the rate of other referral channels.

Your Next Move

If you have the budget, explore early access through Criteo or monitor OpenAI’s expanding partner list. Early movers benefit from lower competition and cheaper learning curves.
Begin mapping how your existing keyword strategy translates to conversational queries. The way people ask ChatGPT for recommendations differs significantly from how they type into Google.
Build a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategy alongside your SEO efforts. Being cited organically in ChatGPT’s response while also appearing in the sponsored block could become the AI-era equivalent of owning both the top organic and paid results on Google.

Apple Expands App Store Search Ads Globally

If you run Apple Ads, your campaigns changed this month whether you did anything or not. Apple has rolled out multiple sponsored placements throughout App Store search results, replacing the single-ad-at-the-top model. The rollout began March 3 in the UK and Japan, with all markets receiving the update by month’s end. The catch: Apple automatically enrolled existing campaigns into the new placements, which means your budget is now being distributed across more positions than it was designed for.

As reported earlier, Apple has doubled the number of custom product pages from 35 to 70, and combined with keyword-level targeting introduced last year, ASO has shifted from passive optimization to active audience management. More ad slots plus more creative surfaces mean the quality of your screenshots, preview videos, and promotional text now matters more than your bid alone.

How to Respond

Audit your Apple Ads campaigns. Check whether your budgets are pacing correctly with the expanded placements and adjust bids if necessary.
Take advantage of the new CPP limit. Build custom product pages for your highest-value keyword segments and assign keywords directly to each page.
Invest in creative variations. With more ad slots available, the quality of your screenshots, preview videos, and promotional text becomes a stronger differentiator than your bid alone.

IAB Tech Lab Launches the AAMP Agent Registry

On March 1, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab launched its Agent Registry as part of AAMP (Agentic Advertising Management Protocols), the industry’s first shared rulebook for how AI agents buy, sell, and manage advertising.

The registry provides identity verification for any AI agent in the ad ecosystem, so buyers and sellers know who (or what) they’re transacting with. By March 11, it had already expanded to include Amazon, Optable, Dstillery, and others.

The urgency is real: Two-thirds of advertisers now say they’re prioritizing agentic AI for campaign execution. Without shared standards, every deployment creates its own interoperability problems. AAMP is the first serious attempt to prevent the kind of technical fragmentation that plagued early programmatic from repeating itself in the agentic era.

What’s at Stake

For marketers, this signals that agentic AI in advertising is moving from experimentation toward real operational standards. As adoption grows, shared frameworks like AAMP will be essential for trust, compatibility, and smoother execution across platforms. Brands and agencies that start learning the ecosystem now will be better prepared to evaluate tools, avoid fragmentation, and scale faster. In practice, this is an early sign that autonomous media buying is becoming a serious part of the future ad tech landscape.

Action Items:

For agencies and in-house teams, the platforms you use (DSPs, SSPs, CMS tools) will increasingly need AAMP compliance. Start monitoring whether your ad tech stack announces support.
If your organization is evaluating agentic AI for media buying, ensure your team understands the AAMP architecture. The monthly Agentic AI Boot Camps at IAB Ad Lab are a good entry point.
Consider small-scale agentic pilot programs in late 2026. The teams that learn how these systems work now will have a structural advantage when autonomous buying becomes standard.

Google AI Mode Hits 75 Million Daily Users and Adds Checkout

Google’s AI Mode now has 75 million daily active users, expanded to 53 new languages this month, and AI Overviews coverage grew 58% year-over-year. That’s a significant and growing share of queries being answered without a click to your website. But the bigger story for e-commerce is UCP-powered checkout: users can now purchase products from retailers like Etsy and Wayfair directly inside AI Mode and the Gemini app, compressing the entire search-to-checkout funnel into a single conversation. Shopify, Target, and Walmart are coming soon.

The implications extend beyond AI Mode. Google SVP Nick Fox confirmed in a WIRED interview that ad format learnings would “likely carry over” to Gemini, which now has 750 million monthly active users. He also said Google is “not ruling out” ads in Gemini directly, signaling an even larger paid surface on the horizon.

What This Means

For e-commerce brands, this marks a major shift in how discovery and conversion happen inside Google’s ecosystem. Search is no longer just sending users to your site; it is increasingly answering questions and enabling purchases directly within the experience. That makes product data, visibility in AI-generated answers, and attribution readiness far more important than before.

Where to Start

Prioritize structured data markup across all product and inventory pages. If an AI agent queries whether something is in stock, you need to be able to answer accurately and in real time.
Build or refine your AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) strategy. This is no longer optional for brands that depend on search-driven traffic and commerce.
For e-commerce teams, start modeling what a checkout event inside AI Mode looks like in your attribution framework. The funnel is being compressed, and your measurement needs to reflect that.

Google Ads Integrates VEO 3 and Adds AI Voice-Overs to PMax

Google is integrating VEO 3, its latest video generation model, into Asset Studio for free with unlimited credits. And it’s adding AI-generated voice-overs to Performance Max video ads, automatically layering narration from your headlines onto silent videos. And as of March 20, AI-generated voice-overs are now active by default across Performance Max video ads unless disabled before then; automatically layering narration generated from your headlines and descriptions onto videos that didn’t already have audio. Because the feature was opt-out rather than opt-in, any advertiser who didn’t disable it before the deadline now has AI-generated narration running on their ads.

Free AI video generation is genuinely useful for brands that have struggled with production budgets, and AI voice-overs can improve performance for campaigns that were previously running silent video assets. But if you missed the opt-out window, it’s worth reviewing what’s now live.

Why It Matters

AI-generated creative is becoming a built-in part of Google Ads, not just an optional extra.
Brands can now produce and test more video variations faster, with far less production effort.
At the same time, ad copy matters more because headlines and descriptions may now double as spoken scripts.

What You Can Do

If you didn’t opt out before March 20, review your PMax video ads now. Check which AI-generated narration is running and decide whether to keep it or manually override it.
Explore VEO 3 in Asset Studio for campaign creative testing. Free video generation is a real opportunity to test more variations at a lower cost.
Make sure your headlines and descriptions are strong enough to stand on their own as narration. Going forward, every line of ad copy is potentially a script.

Meta Overhauls Video Playback on Instagram and Facebook

Meta integrated Google’s Jetpack Media3 PreloadManager into both Instagram and Facebook, rebuilding how video loads across both platforms. The old system could preload only a few videos at a time and couldn’t keep up with fast scrolling. The new architecture parallelizes preloading and manages multiple videos through a single player instance: on Instagram Reels, it keeps adjacent videos ready in memory; on Facebook Newsfeed, it preloads the video that is about to come into view. The result is what Meta calls “true instant playback.” Facebook saw faster starts, reduced stalls, and higher watch time. Instagram saw the same.

What This Means for Video Ads

Faster playback means fewer users scroll past your video during loading delays, which should translate into higher completion rates. Higher platform-wide watch time means more total video ad inventory. And because Meta built a device-aware stress detection system that adjusts preloading based on real-time CPU and I/O signals, these gains extend across the full global device ecosystem, not just users on flagship phones.

How to Capitalize

Revisit your short-form video creative for both Reels and Facebook. If your first second doesn’t hook, users will swipe with zero friction.
Re-evaluate your video ad performance benchmarks. View-through and completion rates should increase platform-wide, so your historical baselines may no longer be accurate comparisons.
If you’ve been underinvesting in Reels creative relative to static or carousel ads, this is a strong signal to reconsider. The platform is clearly optimizing for a video-first experience, and its infrastructure now aligns with that intent.

The Takeaway

The brands that pull ahead in 2026 will be the ones that adapt early, not just creatively, but operationally. Infrastructure, measurement, content, and commerce systems all need to evolve alongside the platforms themselves, because discovery, decision-making, and conversion no longer happen in the same way they did even a year ago.

What used to be a more linear journey is becoming increasingly compressed, automated, and AI-mediated. Search can now lead directly to checkout, creative can be generated and deployed at scale, and ad platforms are expanding how and where brands show up. That means marketers need to think beyond campaign execution alone and start preparing for the structural changes underneath it.

Stay tuned for our next roundup. For more marketing insights, visit the Moburst blog or explore our full range of digital marketing services.