☕️ Meta is merging its two creator marketing hubs

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🛒 OpenAI says it's officially in the ad business

🤝 Meta is merging its two creator marketing hubs

💰 What B2B brands really pay LinkedIn influencers

🔍 B2B marketers are vanishing from AI Overviews

📺 Walmart is opening streaming TV ads to small businesses

💡 + 4 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 5 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 2 trending marketing tools

FROM OUR PARTNER

• OpenAI has formally entered the advertising business, turning on ChatGPT ads in Japan and South Korea while opening its self-service Ads Manager beta to advertisers in the United Kingdom for the first time this month.
• The self-service Ads Manager moves OpenAI away from managed, partner-brokered placements toward direct buying, and the company started this step in a single market to test whether its tooling, policies, and measurement hold before facing global demand.
• OpenAI also signed a multi-year display agreement with Getty Images that places licensed stock photography and editorial images directly inside ChatGPT search and discovery, adding rights-cleared, provenance-tagged visuals that reduce one category of brand-safety risk.

• Meta said at Cannes Lions 2026 that it will combine its two creator marketing surfaces into one place called Meta Creator Marketing Hub, launching later this year, and will add Facebook creators to Creator Marketplace.
• More than five million Instagram creators can now be found in Creator Marketplace, and adding Facebook creators will let businesses identify and connect with partners across both platforms from a single destination.
• Creators who opt in can pre-permit their content to run as Partnership Ads, which Meta's February data showed produced a 19% lower cost per acquisition and a 13% higher click-through rate than standard campaigns.

• New industry data shows that most B2B brands pay LinkedIn influencers between $200 and $2,000 per post, with thought leader campaigns targeting senior decision-makers reaching $2,000 to $15,000 and top voices commanding $50,000 or more.
• Pricing on LinkedIn tracks audience composition rather than reach, so a creator with 18,000 followers concentrated in VP and C-suite roles carries more value to a brand than a consumer creator with hundreds of thousands of followers.
• Format and add-ons raise the total cost, with carousels priced 20 to 35% above text posts, video carrying a 40 to 80% premium, and exclusivity clauses adding 25 to 50% to a creator's base rate.

• B2B brands rank for thousands of keywords in Google but show up in only about 3% of AI Overviews, according to Walker Sands' benchmark of 828 enterprise companies that examined more than 45 million search queries in March.
• While AI Overviews appear in roughly half of searches where enterprise B2B brands rank, the median company is cited in just 3% of those summaries, and 4.6% of companies aren't cited at all for any relevant keyword.
• Ranking breadth doesn't predict citation rates, with cybersecurity leading at a 4.2% median citation rate while professional services and logistics trail at 2.1%, and generative AI is projected to influence over 75% of B2B search queries within two years.

• Walmart has agreed to buy Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform, opening streaming TV ads to small and mid-sized businesses through its commerce media business, Walmart Connect.
• The deal combines Vibe.co's self-serve platform with Walmart's commerce audiences, closed-loop measurement and media ecosystem, including the Vizio streaming platform, to help more advertisers launch CTV campaigns and track their business impact.
• Vibe.co's platform offers self-serve campaign activation, direct supply partner integrations and performance-driven optimization, targeting SMB and mid-market advertisers, including Walmart's third-party marketplace sellers, with the transaction expected to close by the end of fiscal year 2027.