All the latest tech updates and product releases that affiliates and marketers should know about.
In our latest tech briefing, Affiliate Leaders rounds up the top product releases from the last month, and why this matters to marketers.
This month we analyse Meta’s new image and video tool, Muse; Awin’s new partnership with ScalePost in evolving its approach to discovery; Taboola launches an ad platform for AI answer Eengines; and Google introduces platform properties, a new Search Console property type.
Meta’s new Muse
Meta has launched Muse. This comes as Muse Image, and a preview of Muse Video – both developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs.
It is essentially an agentic tool, which Meta says will interact with users in a more accessible way.
Muse can be used to write and execute coding to produce plots, QR codes, and even improve the accuracy of generated images and create animated GIFs, websites with embedded images, and interactive visual games.
The new tools are part of the most advanced image generation model from Meta to date, and continues the trend of tech platforms pushing to develop Agentic AI features as the new technology pushes to the forefront.
Muse will search the internet for images to ground the content with real-time information and visual references.
Leaders take
It’s no surprise that Meta is developing new AI tools and image generation features. The marketing industry is consistently ranked as one of the highest adopters of AI and new tools are widely used.
That being said, consumers are sick of seeing AI in advertising, content, and other areas. For example, the new Adidas Backyard Legends ad is a fantastically crafted piece of nostalgia that hits all the right notes, except it very clearly uses AI-generated images of football stars and their haircuts.
Marketers must be very careful about their tools and the message it sends to their audiences. Carefully crafted images and campaigns have a much more deliberate and purposeful feel, while AI can look cheap.
Google introduces platform properties
Google has released platform properties, a new Search Console property type to help creators and website owners understand how their social and video posts perform within Google search and discover.
Creators can now track the search terms that lead users to their Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.
This includes performance reports, insights, and achievements to help track growth, traffic, and impressions.
Leaders take
Knowledge is power for content creators, and more insight into how their content is performing and showing up in search results will help empower them to build their content with their audiences in mind.
The increased information is likely to help more quickly identify trends, themes, and pieces of content that will perform well within their target audience.
Awin boosts search and discovery with new tools
Affiliate marketing platform Awin is building new tools for AI visibility and smart search to help brands optimise business performance.
In partnership with ScalePost, the tools gives marketers a more accurate view of how AI is influencing brand discovery and moves beyond existing approaches that rely on modelled or synthetic user data.
Acting as an additional measurement layer, ScalePost uses first-party data to measure real AI citations, giving marketers more clarity into which content is playing a role in driving their brand visibility in AI platforms.
Adam Ross, chief executive at Awin, said: “When AI-driven discovery and trusted publisher influence are measured alongside clicks, the economics start to shift.
“The problem was never a shortage of data. It’s that most of what the market offers is modelled from sampled prompts, so it tells you what an AI might say, not what it actually cited and surfaced.”
Leaders take
Consumer shopping has become fragmented across publisher content, social media, and AI-focused experiences like chatbots. Two-thirds of Google searches now end without a click yet marketers must still illustrate the return on investment in their content – while often unable to properly inspect the influences on customer decisions.
With Awin’s new tools, advertisers will be able to take advantage of the new data points, which will include where the publisher content contributes to visibility, to help marketers better understand performance metrics and make more informed decisions.
Currently, digital adspend is overwhelmingly concentrated within Google, Meta, and Amazon – but the discovery journey is evolving quickly and often includes LLMs and chatbots. Armed with these new features, marketers will be in a much stronger position to develop their campaigns.
Taboola launches new ad platform
Taboola has launched a new ad platform to help advertisers scale performance by opening up the monetisation engine behind DeeperDive. With this, companies are able to take user queries and translate them into revenue opportunities
DeeperDive serves as a generative AI answer engine, which is embedded within many of the world’s top publishers to turn editorial content into an interactive conversation for AI users.
This will allow generative AI-focused platforms to capitalise on audience queries to drive revenue – enabled by the deeper understanding of user behaviour through Taboola.
Leaders take
Large language models (LLMs) are an increasing part of knowledge discovery – but many AI users won’t pay for each model or chatbots they use.
Therefore advertisers need to build infrastructure to monetise the ecosystem, strengthen their reach, and this ad platform by Taboola offers just that. It provides an infrastructure they can tap into and expand their reach.
