The AI Updates Every Media Buyer Needs Right Now: Meta, Shopify, Youtube Shorts
Andrew Foxwell and Thomas Moen run through the biggest AI updates hitting Meta, Shopify, and YouTube. On the Meta side, the platform is going all in on catalogs: product images can now be auto-converted into video ads, in-campaign AI editing will crop, animate, swap backgrounds, and generate text variations on your creative automatically, and Gen AI tool adoption has jumped from 1 million to 4 million advertisers in six months. Meta also rebuilt its opportunity score, rolled out a "brand memory" feature that learns your tone, look, and fonts from your ad library, added client creative sign-off inside Ads Manager, and is expanding automatic AI disclosures. The Meta Ads AI connector (MCP) now has 29 tools for reporting, campaign builds, catalogs, pixel diagnostics, audits, and benchmarking. Plus a whole bunch more that the guys get into.
Shopify announced that AI searches powered by its catalog convert at 2x scraped data, and introduced agentic storefronts, a setting that syndicates structured product data to AI models for better discoverability across SEO, AEO, and GEO. Sidekick got major upgrades including multi-step tasks with store-wide context. Norwegian clients are already seeing meaningful agentic traffic in their analytics.
On YouTube, Shorts remain underpriced for the incrementality they drive. Demand Gen now connects product feeds with live pricing from Google Merchant Center, shoppable feeds in Shorts let you tag up to 60 products per video with in-app checkout rolling out, and Google claims Shorts shopping converts 3 to 5x better than traditional pre-rolls.
The TL,DR: AI is handling production plumbing while platforms pull discovery and checkout inside their walls. The winning recipe is clean data (especially your catalog), the right creative volume, and knowing which levers to pull.
Key Takeaways
Is your product catalog quietly costing you conversions in the AI shopping era?
What happens when Meta starts cropping, animating, and rewriting your ads automatically?
Could Meta's rebuilt opportunity score already be affecting your auction performance?
Can Meta's new brand memory finally fix "off-brand" AI creative?
Are Meta Business Agents about to become a legitimate sales channel inside your DMs?
Why do Shopify catalog-powered AI searches convert at double the rate of scraped data?
Would you recognize agentic traffic in your analytics if it showed up today?
Are YouTube Shorts the most underpriced placement left in your media mix?
What would tagging 60 shoppable products per Short do to your revenue?
Should your winning Meta ads be running as YouTube Shorts right now?
Is your AI disclosure strategy ready before Meta applies one for you?
Chapters:
00:00:00 — Intro
00:01:09 — Fable is back: workflows, token-saving tips, and an 11-bug code review story
00:04:33 — Sponsor: Runneth by Motion
00:06:58 — Meta updates: catalogs, AI editing, opportunity score, brand memory
00:11:44 — AI disclosures and the Meta Ads AI connector (MCP)
00:13:45 — Meta Business Agents: AI selling in your DMs
00:15:10 — Shopify: agentic storefronts, Sidekick upgrades, analytics
00:20:20 — YouTube Shorts: Demand Gen, shoppable feeds, in-app checkout
00:23:25 — The go-forward recipe + wrap-up
This Episode is sponsored by Motion's very own Runneth. Runneth is the AI Tool that is quickly becoming the go to decision maker brands turn to when it comes to creative decisions within their ad accounts. From Creative stratigest to hook insporations and creative briefs, runneth can do it all. See the case studies and try runneth yourself https://runneth.motionapp.com/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell reach him here Andrew@FoxwellDigital.com
To connect with Will Sartorious DM him here https://x.com/will_sartorius
To Connect mith Thomas Moen DM him here https://x.com/thomasmoen
To learn more about Foxwell Founders and conversations like this one, go here: www.foxwellfounders.com
Full Transcript:
(00:00) (upbeat music) If you work in D2C and you use AI and you're wondering what the F is going on every week, this is your podcast, the AI D2C WTF podcast, your home for tactical tips, strategies and ideas that you can implement right now in your AI workflows to make your brand or agency more money. Welcome to another episode of AI D2C WTF.
(00:27) I am Andrew Foxwell with my friend Thomas Mowen and we are today talking about all of the updates that have happened in relation to AI on Meta and Shopify and YouTube, specifically on YouTube Shorts. We're gonna talk about those things, talk about what they are. A lot of these honestly I didn't even know, so I had to go through and just scouring the news, one of the things that we're doing now and I was like, they said what, Ed Can? Or they announced what in London? There's so much of this stuff that happens all the time
(01:00) and so that's what we're gonna go into today and you'll be able to leave this episode updated and fully aware of what's happening and how it's going. Thomas, before we get into that, how are you doing? Are you back using Fable now that we have it back? We were recording this episode on July 2nd and so we just got Fable back which we're stoked about.
(01:21) So how's that been going? It came back yesterday and it was a blast. It came back late Norwegian time so I kind of overspent my bedtime way, way, way last night. I had a lot of fun and I've actually planned out what I was going to put it through when it came back so I've gotten a lot of good value out of it so I'm really happy about that.
(01:48) And one of my biggest takeaways is to get Fable to do kind of the planning and the reviewing at the end and then getting Opus 4.8 or Codex GPT 5.5 to do the actual work to save on tokens because Fable is a greedy beast, it's super expensive. So that was one of the things that kind of picked up really early on X that has made me do a lot of things now for the last 24 hours.
(02:16) Nice. It's great. Yeah, absolutely. And talking about CAN, I've been paying more attention to kind of CAN and the marketing space the last week because I'm kind of in vacation mode, so I'm listening to some podcasts. And for me, what has been really, really interesting is to see kind of how dominating meta really is in the marketing space and that everyone is kind of talking about how dominant Instagram is and the Instagram use and how they're still abusing the influencers to kind of get all those engagements and ad views,
(02:56) but it's still kind of the most effective best platform to be on. And also, at least kind of what I'm hearing is that TikTok is now kind of just falling more and more behind after kind of the US version of it in terms of how effective it is and the growth and kind of how people are talking about it. So it's a big change in how people are talking about platforms in CAN now versus last year, for example.
(03:23) Yeah, I mean, I think it's totally true. A lot of people are trying to figure out they know that Instagram has the most qualified eyeballs worldwide, so that's what they're always trying to get in front of. Yeah, I actually had a friend and a member of Foxwell Founders Day here at our house, and he's an AI-enabled guy, and he had built a product last year or the last couple of years that he had to pull because it had a lot of bugs and he just had Fable review the code basis and found 11 bugs that Opus 4.8 had not found,
(03:57) and he was able to fix them, and now the product's almost perfect. So it's unbelievable. It did it in 30 minutes or whatever, right? And this is an incredibly complex product, but anyway, kind of amazing. So, well, let's get into it in talking about Meta. There's been two main events. There's been the, obviously, with CAN we talked about, and then there's been this event in London where they brought together a lot of European advertisers, and a lot of those folks, obviously, run ads for people in the United States.
(04:24) So a lot of qualified people, and they talked about a bunch of different stuff there. So one of the first things they talked about is... (upbeat music) We all hear a ton about AI. We all hear about what it can do and how amazing it all is, and I don't think that there's anything incorrect about that, but this episode is brought to you by an AI brain that is absolutely incredible for your marketing team called Runneth.
(04:51) It's from Motion, and therefore, you know it's awesome because it's from Motion, but really what Runneth does is connects every single function of your marketing department into one place. It can do so many different things. It can build you ads. It can verify that your brand looks proper. It can verify that what your top creatives were, and you can ask it.
(05:11) You can have it live in Slack, or you can have it live as a CLI, so you can interact with it any way you want to. The thing that's really insane to me about Motion is how absolutely intelligent it truly is and how it works cross-functionally across the team. There was recently a marketer that Reza talks about in the landing page on Runneth, which you should definitely check out, where basically she went on vacation, the CMO did, and said, "If Runneth says the ad is okay to run, "then it is okay to run.
(05:39) " So she uploaded all the context for the team. They ran it into Runneth, and Runneth said, "Yeah, that ad is totally on brand." It's absolutely crazy the number of things that this can do, and I think the fact that we all live in silos and the fact that we all live separately is really, really challenging and one of the hard parts about AI.
(05:55) So that's not what this does. This brings it all together with shared context, shared resources, and it also looks at thousands of ads every day, so it's always up to date on what actually is the best-performing ads that it's seeing across Motion, and so that's another whole thing that it does. It's really crazy because instead of one more dashboard, you get a teammate in your Slack that knows your performance data cold.
(06:17) As I said, you can ask it really anything and answers instantly, weekly recaps, top creatives, which creators your audience trusts. It learns your brand, your playbooks, and gets smarter every day. E-commerce and D2C teams are using it to turn weekly reporting from a two-day job into a two-minute conversation.
(06:34) Head to runneth.com and see it for yourself, and it also has a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you need a cheat code in e-commerce and D2C with your ads and your ad creative and your marketing team, check out runneth.com. 30-day money-back guarantee, it's absolutely incredible what this thing can do, and I encourage you to give it a shot.
(06:55) (upbeat music) A lot of qualified people, and they talked about a bunch of different stuff there. So one of the first things they talked about is they are doing a ton with catalogs and they've talked about catalogs a lot. They did this at the Meta Performance Summit. One of the things that they have now is you can upload product images and it will make a video ad from that.
(07:18) Now we've had this kind of feature for a while, but they're claiming that it's going to be super easy to animate anything that you have. They talked about these in combination. One is catalog, and then they talked about in-campaign AI editing, which sounds super scary, but essentially it's cropping, it's animating statics automatically, swapping backgrounds, generating text variations, making stills of video, don't have to re-upload them.
(07:45) So if you have your catalog or you have any other ads and both these things are enabled, they're basically doing whatever they want to it to make it seem fine. And this has obviously scary implications, but they doubled down on this saying, look, there's 4 million advertisers who use our Gen AI tools now up from 1 million six months ago.
(08:08) And that's probably large in part to the fact that they're making the turn it off buttons harder to find. But yeah. I think definitely the turn off buttons are harder to find, but I also find it much better than even six months ago. It started being really, really crappy and we kind of spent a lot of time just trying to turn everything off because clients were freaking out.
(08:32) But now it is getting better and better. I still feel like it's a bit behind in terms of what kind of the forefront models are doing. But it's interesting to see from one to 4 million in six months, that's impressive. There's a lot to say here, but basically they're gonna continue to push this stuff. So they talked about that.
(08:53) They also, for those of us that have been advertisers for a long time, talked about the opportunity score and they've basically rebuilt this, redone it. So now it's quote unquote much more useful from what they said. So free account audit graded on creative variety and it has basically it goes zero to a hundred and below 60 is underperforming.
(09:18) So I think you're gonna wanna get familiar with this because that is gonna have implications in the auction and they've redone this and said, this is something that we're making aware, making you aware of. And so that's a big one. And a lot of things that lead into the opportunity score are the brand aware creative gen or your brand memory.
(09:41) So under the tools tab in select accounts rolling out as we speak, there's this brand memory you can upload which learns the tone from your existing ad library. It learns your looks, the kind of the fonts you wanna use. So heard from a lot of folks, of course like, oh, this is off brand for us. And don't get me wrong, I still think Matt is gonna fuck this up and like, crop it wrong.
(10:02) But they're saying like, hey, we care about your brand. And so here it is. And they're putting that in there. And this is the more on brand and the more that you're potentially utilizing this that can have implications in the opportunity score. For me, this is the most important, this is the most exciting thing I think because that is kind of the number one complaint we hear from our advertisers is that this is not our brand, this is not on brand.
(10:28) And yes, I think probably it's gonna suck for a while because meta, but the general idea is very, very good. And I think it's also overdue. They should have done this a long time ago and definitely something I'm really excited to see. Also things they've been working on is enhanced text generation and creative approval flow, meaning better auto headlines and captions and all that kind of things, which has been way off, especially in the Norwegian market and in the Nordic markets, I don't think it's been good at all.
(11:05) But it looks like they really, really overhaul this now and we could expect it to be a lot better. Yeah, the creative workflow stuff is always a pain, everybody's dealing with this. This has a built-in client sign off inside of Ads Manager now. So there's a lot of creative workflow tools that people utilize and this has it within there.
(11:23) Of course, you have to get these people into the events manager and into Ads Manager under your events, which is a pain in and of itself. But if they're in there, hypothetically you'd be able to send it to them for approval and they'd be able to approve basically any new creative or different captions that it's come up with, which is interesting.
(11:44) One thing that we still don't see rolled out globally but is out there and is rolling out in a lot more places is the AI disclosure. So automatic AI disclosure, you have to have that. If it's been created with AI, and Meta may automatically apply this if it's done something with AI on your creative. So you need to make sure that you have a disclosure on your ad or you're being able to select from Meta, this ad was created with AI and they'll put the disclosure on there for you.
(12:13) So that's one that they talked about a lot and one that I think we should be really intimately familiar with. Absolutely. Also Meta Ads AI connector, so the MCP things are getting better and better. And then I have 29 tools for reporting, campaign builds, catalogs, copy pixel stuff, and a lot more in audits and benchmarking.
(12:40) A lot of our customers have actually started using this themselves, which for us of course is a little bit kind of stressful when the clients start poking around and doing audits and stuff, but it's actually helped them to just ask better questions and kind of get validation for some of the thoughts we're doing.
(12:59) So it's a great tool for agencies and for advertisers, but also I think for the lay people, the less technical people to be able to kind of query and understand where things are going and why things are happening, I think is also very positive. Yeah, I think totally these things are going to continue to be rolled out, the more interconnectedness of all of the tools are going to continue to be rolled out.
(13:21) And the Meta MCP actually is quite good and allows you to dig deeper. So if you haven't played around with that, they're going to continue to build more of these tools to make it easier, especially around like things like copy pixel diagnostics too. So you're going to be able to say, "Hey, I think you see any issues here.
(13:38) " So having conversations with it, instead of being able to click around is going to continue to become more common. And I think you want to be familiar. The big one that I keep getting people asking me about, cause they talked about it a ton, but we just don't have them in the United States the same way that other countries have it is the Meta Business Agents.
(13:57) They talked about this a ton at CAN. They talked about this a lot in London. And basically it's a AI agent in your DMs or comments that answers questions, recommends products from a catalog, closes sales and connects directly to Shopify. So it's basically a real sales channel now. Do you guys have any people use this? Or have you heard about this? Cause this is new to us, but I've heard from some people in Singapore, some founder members that this has been incredible for them.
(14:26) So I'm curious of your take if you know about this. No, when I read kind of our show notes, I was like, this is interesting. They haven't ever heard about this. And I kind of asked around for a few other agents and friends in the Nordies and they're like, no, but that sounds amazing. So we also are kind of in the dark here.
(14:43) So, so no, I, but I think it makes perfect sense to have this and I'm excited to kind of get my hands on it and start experimenting with it a little. Yeah, I think if you haven't seen this, give it a shot. It's supposedly in people's accounts rolling out and turning in there. So especially if you're a lead gen agency as well, this is an interesting one to try, but it will come right from your catalog.
(15:05) And I think they're going to become more important over time. So I think getting familiar with this is a really big one. Let's go into Shopify and talk about what's happened, what the announcements that Shopify has had. They've had a ton of different stuff. So, you know, basically Shopify came out and said, AI searches powered by its catalog convert at two times scraped data.
(15:28) And so the same clean catalog also feeds your meta and your YouTube feed. Catalogs are having a moment in 2026 and Shopify is no different. A big one that they talked about, we'll talk more about the catalogs in just a second, but they talked about catalog plus agentic storefronts. So you turn this on in settings and then sales channels to syndicate structured product data into all of these AI models.
(15:58) So what this is is apparently there's a catalog setting within meta and within Shopify with all these places that if you customize it under the same language, I have to look at what they call this, it's like CPU or something, then it will be read properly by all the AI models. That's interesting. So this is a new thing that apparently was not done with this before.
(16:23) And this is what they have happening now. And so making sure that you go into your settings and sales channels and check this and make sure that it's customized is going to be useful for you in reference to discoverability for SEO, AEO, GEO, that kind of thing with structured product data. So especially as we're talking about like, okay, catalogs are a thing and they're big, you're on Shopify and then you're also doing it on these meta agents.
(16:51) Like you can see how this is becoming a big thing. So that's one that I thought was super interesting. Absolutely. And kind of a side note, but a lot of our Norwegian e-commerce clients are seeing kind of increasingly more and more agentic traffic, meaning from HTTP and also the Google AI mode thing, people are, it's really starting to show up now and something people are paying more attention to now than just two months ago.
(17:20) So it's really interesting. This is sidekick AI integration that Shopify has. They made multiple upgrades to it, but we, all of the stores I've been working on haven't actually got access to this. I don't know if it's just the US thing of it, but have you kind of played around with it or heard anyone who's kind of using it and got some value out of it? So I think what they've done with the sidekick upgrade stuff is it's kind of like the, it's the AI that you're able to talk to within Shopify.
(17:52) So it can obviously just do a ton and I've seen people utilize this for like multi-step pieces within their funnel. So somebody said, if I only have 100, the example that I saw was like, if I only have 100K for inventory, what do I cut? And it gives you an answer. It also can do things like multi-step tasks and with a store wide context.
(18:15) So going across things like, hey, I have this issue on my web performance, are my payments coming through properly? And it can check those things. It can also write out multi-step things where, hey, can we get, if this happens, can this happen? And it connects them together. So it's a genteck sort of operating within Shopify, which is something that we've had a little bit, but it hasn't been as sophisticated as it is today.
(18:41) So something probably to continue to be aware of and test, I think, but they've been talking about this a lot and it's definitely gonna continue to get bigger. I wouldn't be surprised if over time you're able to connect all this into one place with another MCP and say, hey, Shopify, go do this, go do that. But right now it's a walled garden as far as I know.
(19:04) So kind of an interesting one. And I thought it was cool. I think there's a lot that Shopify talks about, but the big one is check out how we're structuring your data and it will help you show up in more places and it will be cleaner. So it's like, that's really a hygiene and revenue related item that actually does drive results.
(19:33) So just making sure that you're kind of messing around with that. They also made a few, I don't know if you saw the analytics upgrades that Shopify had, but they have some more analytics upgrades they talked about and some specific stuff around Shopify audiences, which they still talk about, but I haven't seen those work in a while.
(19:50) So I'm not sure if that's super powerful, at least in the United States, but good to know that they're out there and testing a lot of different stuff. Absolutely. And I think the biggest kind of direct takeaway here is what they're doing with the catalog. I think that that's gonna have a massive impact and making sure that you kind of check out if you have this agentic storefront thing, that's the main takeaway in all the Shopify stuff in my opinion.
(20:19) Totally agree. So let's talk about the final one, which is YouTube, which is, in my opinion, it's, you know, YouTube shorts specifically are still quite under priced for the incrementality that it drives in relation, especially in relation to AI. They had a lot of interesting stuff they talked about in new things.
(20:37) So here's what's new that you can use today. There's demand gen plus the product feed. So noticing a theme of this episode, we should call it like why your catalog should be dialed in. So it connects your dynamic product ads, of course, with the live price and the Google merchant center. And they're talking about how it makes, you know, better conversions, higher number of conversions, which is great.
(21:03) So it also then enables you to do shopable feeds in shorts. So, you know, you have a short out there that you're putting on YouTube and people can actually have visible products below them in that video or on other videos. So that's a massive one that is technically utilizing like AI from your catalog being clean.
(21:26) And you can tag up to 60 products per short now. So an in-app checkout is also rolling into this. So again, this is huge. I think shorts are massive for usage. And so- Yeah, I think people are kind of forgetting that shorts have all this checkout in-app data just like Meta has, right? And it's not enough people are paying attention to it, experimenting with it.
(21:54) Google says that shorts shopping is converting three to five things better than the traditional pre-rolls. So it's a very much up for grabs for advertisers to focus on, definitely. Yeah, I think a lot here, there's a lot of other things that they talked about in reference to ad serving and things like that.
(22:15) But I think if you can take winning ads on Meta and repurpose them into shorts and have your catalog dialed in and put that on there, like I do think that's something that is utilizing one thing of making sure your catalog's dialed in, utilizing AI a lot more, and then you're able to get a lot more coming from it.
(22:34) So I think there's a through line on a lot of this, right? Which is AI is kind of handling the production plumbing and the platforms are pulling discovery and checkout onto what they're doing. I mean, I think a lot of it is like not trying to leave the platform, staying on there. Meta's the same way, trying to make it as quick as possible.
(22:56) And a lot of this is gonna be AI driven and AI enabled as you continue to go through. So this is making sure your catalog makes sense. This is making sure that you're aware of and are knowledgeable about what are the changes that are happening on Shopify in relation to AI. And making sure that you are aware of the way that people are agentically shopping right now and what things you can do to bring your products as easily as you can to the forefront.
(23:26) Yeah, I think, let's focus on pushing buttons. AI is going to push more and more buttons for us, but keeping your data clean, like your catalog, your copy, making sure you have the correct creative volume and then kind of knowing and understanding which levels and levers to pull. I think that's kind of the recipe now going forward for any advertisers.
(23:52) Yeah, well, thank you guys for listening to this episode. Hopefully our little quick updates that we had are useful for you. We look forward to hearing your feedback. And if there have any questions, feel free to email me at andrewfoxwelldigital.com. But until next time, stay rad. Stay rad. (upbeat music)
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