Briefing: 13th Apr, 2026
We read the news, so you don't have to
Hello and welcome back to the Monday Knight Briefing - where we share five things worth knowing this week. Let’s dive in.
1. Meta wants ads to run themselves
Meta’s long-term goal is pretty clear. Zuckerberg has said he wants a future where brands just enter a business goal, add a credit card, and let AI do the rest.
To be fair, they’ve already made a lot of progress. Audience targeting is largely automated now, and most advertisers are happy to let the algorithm handle it.
That shift led to the idea that “creative is the new targeting”. Largely true, and a bit of a comfort blanket for agencies that just lost a big chunk of their influence. But now Zuck is coming after that too, with AI creative tools being pushed into accounts at every turn (and an ongoing game of whack-a-mole trying to turn them off).
If they can get advertisers comfortable handing over creative as well, then that end goal starts to look more realistic.
But there are still some big questions. How comfortable are brands giving up creative control? Do we end up with lots of similar-looking AI ads? And where does responsibility sit if something goes wrong?
Using AI to support ad creation is one thing. Letting it run everything end-to-end with no oversight still feels a long way off.
At least that’s what I’m telling myself to sleep better at night.
2. Reddit leans further into shopping
And if Meta does eventually free up a bit of our time by running everything for us, Reddit is making a decent case for where to spend it.
They’ve just announced a bunch of new shopping features, including improved product ads, more visual “collection” formats, and a tighter link between community conversations and actual purchases. The idea is to turn all those product recommendation threads into something more directly shoppable.
What’s interesting is the contrast with everything else going on. While the big platforms push further into AI, Reddit’s strength is still human conversation. They say shopping discussions are up 40% year-on-year, which suggests people are still actively seeking real opinions rather than AI-generated ones.
Still early days, but it’s another signal that discovery and purchase are being pulled closer together. And if you’ve ever added “reddit” to the end of a Google search, you’ll know why.
3. Digital ad spend
It’s not all doom and gloom. The UK’s digital ad market grew 10% in 2025, reaching £40.5bn and significantly outpacing overall UK economic growth of just 1.4%.
Search also continues to dominate, accounting for 44% of total spend, and still growing at a healthy 6% year-on-year.
So, despite all the noise around AI disruption and declining clicks, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there and lots of budget for us marketers to get our hands on.
4. Meta launches Muse Spark
Meta has launched Muse Spark, its latest AI model, which now ranks 4th on the intelligence index, putting it alongside platforms like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT.
This isn’t just powering the Meta AI assistant. It’s being used across the whole ecosystem, including ads, recommendations and discovery.
For advertisers, that has a couple of implications. High-quality, multimodal assets (video and images) become even more important, as the model is effectively “seeing” and recommending content to users. At the same time, manual audience building continues to lose value as Meta’s AI takes on more of the targeting through its own contextual reasoning.
Still early, but it’s another step toward a world where success on Meta is less about campaign setup and more about feeding the system the right inputs.
5. OpenAI quietly launched an ad manager
In another step toward becoming an integrated player in the ad market, OpenAI has launched its self-serve ad tool, which is said to be a super basic platform to manually set up your campaigns and keywords, and get limited reporting back. Access is apparently rolling out quick and minimum spend requirements have reportedly reduced to $50k from as high as $250k in recent weeks, suggesting their keenness to get more advertisers on the platform quickly.
And that’s a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning in and checking out our weekly roundup. Hit reply if you want to chat!