Digital Platform Updates: What Happens When the Platforms Take the Wheel?

Andrea Cardenas
6 days ago
6 min read

Every platform announcement gets framed as an upgrade. Most are just a transfer of control.

At PAC Digital, we track these changes with a different question in mind: not what did the platform add, but which decisions did we just lose the ability to make — and does that trade actually help your ticket sales?

Four changes are landing between now and January 2027. Meta and Google are moving in the same direction at the same time, and the direction is the same in both cases: more automation, more creative volume, fewer manual levers.

The Bottom Line

The AI is genuinely getting better at finding buyers. It is not getting better at protecting your brand, your licensor agreements, or your ability to read a report and know what to make more of next time.

That's the job now. Adopt the automation where it earns its keep, hold the line where it doesn't.

Four Changes, Not One

Meta Andromeda — up to 10 assets per ad, live now
Google Ads and Gemini — ad placements in AI Mode, live now
Dynamic Search Ads → AI Max — migration September 2026
Google Display Ads → Demand Gen — migration January 2027

Two are already here. Two are on a clock. All four change how your campaigns get built.

META ANDROMEDA: FEWER AD SETS, MORE CREATIVE

Quick Definition: Andromeda isn't a new product. It's the culmination of hundreds of small changes Meta has made over several years, unified around two priorities: broad audience targeting with heavy AI reliance for conversion driving, and increased creative diversity. In plain terms — Meta wants less ad groups and more ads.

The Consolidation Play

Meta is pushing advertisers to upload up to 10 graphics and/or videos inside a single ad, a structure that closely mirrors Performance Max on the Google side. The pitch is more conversions, driven by AI testing creative combinations at a volume no human team could manage by hand.

What You'll See in Reporting — and What You Won't

What the data shows: Individual asset performance is visible inside Ads Manager. On a recent lead gen ad, one square graphic drove 23 results while three others drove 8 apiece and two produced nothing at all — same ad, same spend, wildly different contribution.
The catch: That asset-level detail does not flow into your dashboard. Your dashboard reports the ad's aggregate performance. Your PAC Digital team surfaces what's happening underneath it.

How We're Structuring It

We'll embrace consolidation as far as it aligns with your needs — not as far as Meta would like to push it. Our initial recommendation is to group like-content within one ad:

Graphics
TV Spots
Organic Videos
Organic Photos
Carousels

📌 Marketer Takeaway: Mixed-format ads destroy your read. If one ad holds a TV spot, three statics, and an organic clip, "that ad performed" tells you nothing about what to produce next month. Grouping by format keeps the results translatable into creative direction.

Where We Draw the Line on AI Creative

Meta is aggressively promoting AI creative enhancements and AI-generated graphics and video. Your PAC Digital team reduces AI creative enhancements and prohibits the use of AI graphic and video generation on your campaigns.

We ran Meta's own output to see what we'd be signing off on. Fed a Phantom of the Opera campaign, Meta generated 17 variations of the key art — masks multiplied, roses added, phantom figures invented, one variation replacing the artwork entirely with a person holding a phone. For a titled tour, the artwork is the brand, and no promoter or licensor is going to accept a mask that isn't theirs.

That said, this is your call. If you want to layer AI-generated content into a specific campaign, let us know and we'll test it deliberately with your guardrails set up front.

Two Housekeeping Changes

🔴 Ad preview links are being rolled back and are mostly unavailable. We'll send screenshots for approvals instead.

🔴 Slideshow ads are no longer available.

GOOGLE ADS AND GEMINI: CAN WE SERVE ADS THERE YET?

This is the question we're getting most, so here's the state of play.

Google is not currently allowing ads inside the primary Gemini experience. But don't read that as a closed door — AI Mode and AI-Powered Search Mode are already accessible for ad placements, and that's where a growing share of high-intent search behavior is going.

Performance Max campaigns are currently the only way to place an ad in those two Google verticals. If AI-driven search results matter to your on-sales, PMax is the vehicle.

Separately, PAC Digital actively uses Google Ads' integrated Gemini tools to improve ad strength and drive more results on your campaigns — applied to optimization, not to generating your brand creative.

📌 Looking Ahead: Google is currently testing Gemini's ability to evaluate and synthesize product information and serve it alongside an advertiser's creative. Ads as a suggested answer. We'll keep you informed as capabilities unlock.

DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS WILL TRANSITION TO AI MAX

Migration: September 2026

Quick Definition: AI Max combines advertiser input — your existing ads and website content — with richer signals to find untapped queries you weren't capturing, while keeping ads relevant to what you actually sell. It's out of beta as of this migration.

Unlike most automation handoffs, this one comes with more control, not less: AI Max ships with advanced controls for brand, location, and text guidelines, letting you steer the AI with real precision. Google reports AI Max for Search campaigns average 7% more conversions.

We've already run the comparison live at The Fabulous Fox in St. Louis:

What the data shows: A full point of conversion rate on the same account, same inventory.

The strategic play: The creative unit is doing more work. Where DSA served a dynamically generated headline over a block of text, the AI Max unit pulled in venue imagery and surfaced show-specific links beneath the ad — Attack On Titan, MJ The Musical, STOMP. For a venue running a rotating calendar, that's more of your slate carried in a single impression.

📌 Marketer Takeaway: This is the migration to lean into. Get your brand controls, location controls, and text guidelines defined before September so the AI inherits your rules rather than its own defaults.

GOOGLE DISPLAY ADS ARE MOVING TO DEMAND GEN

Migration: January 2027

The Google Display Network isn't going away — it's moving inside Demand Gen. On balance, GDA gains more than it loses.

What GDN Picks Up

Inventory: + Discover, + Google Maps (on top of GDN, YouTube, Gmail)
Creative: + Carousel ads, + generative image tools, + a wider variety of video ad formats
Audience: + Lookalike segments
Bidding: + tCPC, + flighted campaign total budgets — genuinely useful for fixed on-sale windows and defined runs
UI: + Redesigned interface with ads preview, + channel-level reporting

What GDN Loses

No more GIF formats for banner ads. HTML5 is still allowed.
No more bidding on impressions. Low CPM is gone as a priority. Max Clicks becomes your best option, but it will be more expensive from a CPM perspective.

The Trade

Demand Gen is inherently more conversion-focused than legacy Display, so expect a conversion lift — with a CPM lift riding alongside it, because placements that drive revenue get prioritized in the auction.

That trade cuts differently depending on the job. For a conversion campaign, it's a win. For awareness work where cheap reach was the strategy, the math changes and we should revisit how that goal gets met.

📌 One thing to be clear on: We can still target Display-only placements and creative. And if you'd like to run both Video and Display together, you can.

BEFORE THE MIGRATION DATES HIT…

Four changes, one direction. There's real performance upside here — the Fabulous Fox numbers aren't an outlier. But the levers that protected brand consistency and clean measurement are being pulled inward, and the accounts that handle this well will be the ones that decided their guardrails in advance rather than after the migration.

🔍 RUN THIS CHECK ON YOUR OWN ACCOUNT

Four things worth doing before September:

Audit your creative pipeline. Meta's structure rewards volume. If you're producing one or two hero graphics per on-sale, there's room to expand — grouped by format, not mixed.
Convert your GIF banners to HTML5. If GIFs are in your current library, they stop working in January 2027. Handle it early.
Document your AI creative position. Decide now what your licensors, promoters, and rights holders will accept — before a campaign is waiting on the answer.
Re-plan your awareness budget. If low-CPM Display was carrying reach for you, that lever is gone. Let's define the replacement.