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Welcome back to another edition of The Marketer’s Playbook! In today’s edition we will take a look at:

• All 57 Superbowl Ads Reviewed

• Apple Closes a Data Access Backdoor by Opening the Frontdoor

• How to Scale Your Meta Ads Effectively.

& More. But first, a word from today’s sponsor 👇

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EDITOR’S CORNER

Hello everyone, and welcome back!

It’s been a pretty slow week from a news perspective, and there’s no major updates from my end, so I’ll give you some time back today by getting right into it. Have a great week!

Happy learning,
Cory Dobbin

THE ROUND UP

Rounding up the most important marketing news of the week

All 57 Superbowl Ads Reviewed

Brandon Ewing, known online as Atrioc, is an American Twitch live streamer, YouTuber and speedrunner, recently reviewed and rated all 57 of the 2025 Superbowl ads. Check out his video below, timestamped at the start of the review section.

• Additionally, USA Today conducted their own study of the top ads and came up with this list:
  
  Budweiser – "First Delivery"

• Lay's – "The Little Farmer"

• Michelob Ultra – "The ULTRA Hustle"

• Stella Artois – "David and Dave"

• NFL – "Somebody"

Not sure whether I agree or not, but either way, I wanted to put this in at the top of the Round Up for a bit of fun to start your week!

Meta's Hidden Performance Killer: Creative Stage Distribution

Jess Bachman from Fireteam agency dropped a crucial insight about Meta ad accounts that's reshaping how we think about creative strategy. After auditing thousands of stalled accounts, his team identified 'Stage Misallocation' - not engagement metrics - as the primary growth blocker. While most brands nail their demographic targeting, they're missing the critical balance of creative across the five awareness stages (Unaware through Most Aware). The reality is that bigger ad accounts need to push harder into upper awareness stages, even though it's more challenging to resonate with these audiences. If your problem-aware creative isn't getting spend, it's not the stage that's wrong - it's the creative quality. As Bachman points out, while AI democratizes basic creative capabilities, the real differentiator for account growth is mastering this strategic creative distribution.

Meta Ad Manager Gets Major Time-Saver with New Chrome Extension

A new Chrome extension for Meta Ads Manager just launched that's catching the attention of media buyers. Created by Simon Kreienbaum, the free tool tackles some of the platform's most tedious tasks in a single click - from disabling all Advantage+ creative optimizations to instantly gathering post IDs and ad details. For those of us who've spent countless hours clicking through individual ads or manually copying data into spreadsheets, this kind of automation tool represents the next wave of ad ops efficiency.

Apple Pulls Privacy Feature in UK Following Government Backdoor Demands

In a significant blow to data privacy in the UK, Apple has announced the withdrawal of its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from the region following a government-mandated encryption backdoor. While Apple maintains its stance against creating backdoors, this means UK users will lose end-to-end encryption protections for critical services including iCloud Backup, Photos, and Notes, though default encrypted services like iMessage and health data remain unaffected. The timing is particularly concerning given recent events like the Salt Typhoon attack on US telecoms, which prompted even FBI and CISA experts to advocate for encrypted services.

NEWS BITES

Everything else you need to know

• CREATIVE STRATEGIST AGENT: Jimmy Slagle breaks down his exact steps for creating an AI agent to handle creative strategy for his team.

• AI VIDEO COMES TO SHORTS: YouTube adds Veo 2 functionality to Dream Screen, allowing creators to produce AI videos for their Shorts content.

• PAID SUBREDDITS: Reddit’s CEO says they are working on introducing premium subscriptions for private content.

• SHOP OFF AMAZON: Amazon to introduce new feature that lists products not available on Amazon, with links to brands’ websites.

• BUZZFEED’S SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM: BuzzFeed announces its entry to the social media world with BuzzFeed Island. Unclear whether this is worth paying attention to or not yet.

• TIKTOK DETERMINES THE BILLBOARD: A new study reveals that 84% of the Billboard Top 200 tracks went viral on TikTok first.

• TIKTOK’S MOST LOVED PRODUCTS: TikTok is adding a new badge to the most popular Shop products to give them extra recognition.

• AI IS HURTING OUR BRAINS: Researchers at Microsoft found that the more someone uses AI, the less capability they have for critical, creative thinking.

Lastly, what are we doing here guys? Is this really where we’re at? It feels like every business is squeezing us for every cent they can get. This certainly can’t last forever…

THANK YOU FOR READING

We will see you again next week!