More. More Never Changes.

It's happened again. This time, Adobe scrambles to reassure marketers it's not going to steal their work in the service of AI training. But can its track record be trusted?

Adobe Clarifies Terms of Use That Angered Many

Yesterday, the creative marketing community was up in arms after Adobe locked some of its users out of the company’s software until that user agreed to terms that appeared to hand over all rights for AI training.

Some said they couldn’t even get support, or cancel their subscription, or uninstall their apps until they agreed to the terms.

At first, Adobe came out with a statement which was basically “Yo, what’s the problem? We’ve had these terms in there forever,” which of course didn’t do them any favours.

Adobe’s (late) explanation

Late yesterday, wiser heads in Adobe’s p.r. department apparently prevailed and they published a blog post offering more details.

Essentially, they said their updated terms were meant to offer some examples of how existing policy would play out, and that some of their need to review the data you upload to their cloud was about monitoring for child abuse imagery.

Most importantly, Adobe says regardless of how it may have sounded, it doesn’t use customer content to train its AI, which it calls Firefly:

The company said it would be tweaking those the Terms of Use acceptance screens customers see when opening applications to make them a little less scary.

A disappointing track record

This certainly isn’t the first time Adobe’s sold out some of its goodwill. It was only a couple of years ago when the company turned colours in its customers’ documents to black if they didn’t purchase an additional Pantone colour licence.

This might be a good time to remind you that there are plenty of outstanding Adobe substitutes out there which don’t charge you a monthly fee to use: the Affinity suite is an excellent replacement. I bought Pixelmator Pro for $25 about six years ago — it does pretty much everything Photoshop does, including reading and writing Photoshop files. Both products are low cost and pay-once lifetime models.

LinkedIn Removes Group Targeting in Europe

LinkedIn has geo-restricted one of the most effective ad targeting tools it has — it will no longer let marketers target European users based on which LinkedIn Groups they’re in.

This comes after a complaint filed with privacy regulators on the continent.

Instagram: Short CTAs are Fine. Just Don’t “Game”

Instagram is clarifying its stance on single word calls-to-action (CTAs) and longer Reels, after concerns flew among marketers about having their content shadowbanned.

Last week, the platform advised against using single word CTAs, saying those could be seen by their systems as “engagement bait” and lead to reduced post reach.

Now, though, Instagram says that open-ended questions and CTAs are still fine and won’t be penalized.

It said the goal is to prevent users from “hacking” the system by trying to pile on clicks.

Chatbots are still fine…

It also clarified that third-party automation tools like ManyChat, which use single word responses to drive engagement, were not the intended target of that advice.

…but long Reels aren’t.

One recent piece of advice it didn’t walk back was to avoid posting Reels longer than 90 seconds.

It confirmed that Reels over that length still aren’t eligible for recommendations, but if someone already follows your account, your content could still very well get to them. In other words — it’s a shadowban from people who don’t follow your account, but not for those who do.

Meta Messaging Gets Some Upgrades

Meta announced some updates to its messaging tools at an event yesterday.

Conversions API for business messaging

First, and this is a big one — they’re expanding the Conversions API to now support messaging events:

AI replies

Second, they’re testing a new AI support tool on WhatsApp, which can respond to simple questions asked in the app.

The chat will indicate that it was written by AI.

These aren’t out in the real world much yet, so we don’t have any way of knowing how good these are in practice. So far, most attempts we’ve seen at auto-replying AI bots have been pretty anemic at best. In some cases, it’s spouted replies that brand managers have winced at.

The paid blue checkmark expands

Third: They’re also letting brands in more countries buy a blue checkmark — the new countries are Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia.

If you have a green verified badge from WhatsApp, that will be changing to blue to match it everywhere else.

The company recently added higher priced tiers to its Verified program — including one that costs USD$1,000 a month if you want both your Facebook and Instagram accounts to have the checkmark.

And a few others:

A new paid message option to let you send personalized marketing messages to customers’ WhatsApp inboxes

A new message template library in the WhatsApp Business platform

Costco Enters Retail Media Space with Targeted Ads

After watching Walmart, CVS, and other big retailers rent out its customer purchase data for ad targeting, Costco says it wants in too now. And with nearly 75 million members, it could quickly become one of the big players.

Especially when you remember that — unlike Walmart or CVS — in order to make any purchase at Costco, customers need to have a member-specific card which logs what they buy.

LinkedIn Surpasses X as Top Platform for PR Pros

LinkedIn has blown past X (formerly Twitter) as the most valuable social media platform for public relations professionals, according to Muck Rack's latest State of PR report. This marks a substantial decline in X's usability since Elon Musk took over in 2022.

The report, based on a survey of about 1,100 PR professionals, found that 61% of respondents view LinkedIn as the most useful platform, surpassing X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok combined.

X had been previously the second most used platform for pitching reporters, but now only 10% of PR professionals use it for outreach, ranking below phone calls and text messages.

In Brief

Shopify has acquired Threads.com — no, not Meta’s app, but the UK-based Slack competitor that everyone Googled by accident when Meta announced their app. Threads admitted Meta’s move on the name helped push them toward selling; it’s not clear what Shopify plans to do with it. more

Formal complaints in 11 European countries now over Meta’s plans to scrape the personal data from Facebook users to train its artificial-intelligence models and share it with third parties. Meta says users have a couple of weeks to manually opt-out, and didn’t reply to media questions about how people can have their data removed if they didn’t hear about the opt-out option in time. more

“Communities” have been rolled out on Meta’s Messenger app — this lets users join groups based on shared interests. The move is seen as a response to the growing popularity of community-focused platforms. more

Google says it will turn off the old user interface for Google Ads on August 30th. It says the new version is better, and marketers have had plenty of time to get used to it. more

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