Last Updated on 31 July 2026
A weekly-ish roundup of what’s changing in digital advertising, curated for UK charity advertisers. Estimated read time: 4 minutes.
In this week’s feed
Charity digital budgets are shrinking just as AI and digital demand grows
Meta can now rewrite the headline text on your ad images, here’s what to check first|
This week’s tip: give new campaigns room to prove themselves (Google Ads)
Turning off AI ad features isn’t a one-time switch, on either platform
New EU AI Act rules on AI-generated content start 2 August
Innovation to watch: Google’s AI Max has no opt-out, and it’s coming for Ad Grants
Quick notes
Charity digital budgets are shrinking just as AI and digital demand grows
We covered the headline numbers from the Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 a couple of weeks back (AI adoption nearly doubling among charities). This week, Zoe Amar has written about the other side of that same report, and it’s worth flagging separately: the money isn’t following the demand.
- 63% of charities, large and small, say squeezed organisational finances are holding back their digital progress this year.
- Only 17% secured funding for digital costs from trusts and foundations, down from 30% last year.
- At the same time, charities are asking for more support than ever: 59% say growing staff and volunteer digital skills is an organisational priority, and 60% specifically want training on AI.
Zoe Amar’s point is a fair one: during the pandemic there was a co-ordinated ecosystem of digital funding and support for charities. That’s largely gone, even as the scale of change charities are being asked to keep up with has grown.
What to do:
- If you apply to trusts and foundations, check whether existing grants can flex to cover digital or paid media costs. It’s not always advertised, so it’s worth asking directly.
- If you’re making an internal case for more budget or headcount around digital and paid media, this is a useful sector-wide stat to have to hand. It shows the funding gap is systemic, not a reflection of your team’s case-making.
(Source: Third Sector, Zoe Amar · Charity Digital Skills Report 2026)
Meta can now rewrite the headline text on your ad images, here’s what to check first
Meta’s Advantage+ Creative tool can now generate new versions of your ad images that keep your original design, colours and layout exactly as they are, but swap in a different AI-written headline. We have been testing it this week and the results are a genuine step up from the clumsy AI copy of a year ago.
For charity advertisers, this is worth a second look rather than a shrug. Appeal creative usually says something specific about need, impact or a promise to a donor, wording that’s often been through internal sign-off for accuracy or tone. Meta will generate its own headline variants and can run them without asking again, and testing shows it doesn’t always respect the “Restricted Words” list you can set for your account, occasionally including a term you’ve specifically asked it to avoid.
What to do:
- Set up Branding in Ads Manager if you haven’t already (logo, brand colours, tone of voice and a restricted words list). It’s not perfect, but it gives Meta’s AI a much clearer steer.
- Review AI-generated headline variants before they go live, especially on appeals mentioning specific figures, guarantees or impact claims.
- If a restricted word slips through anyway, that’s a known limitation right now rather than something you’ve set up wrong.
Two more things worth flagging: turning it off isn’t a one-time job (more on that below), and if this reaches EU audiences, new disclosure rules land on 2 August (also below).
(Source: kmac digital)
This week’s tip
This week’s tip around Google Ads: when you add something new into an already-established campaign, a new appeal, a new landing page, a new offer, it starts from zero – resets learnings much like Meta. Google’s bidding leans heavily on conversion history, and an established campaign already has plenty of it, so anything new tends to get starved of budget while it’s judged against seasoned performers. The fix is to give new additions their own small, separate budget for the first 30 to 90 days, so they get a fair chance to build a track record before being folded into the main campaign, or ruled out based on real data rather than a slow start.
Turning off AI ad features isn’t a one-time switch, on either platform
Both Meta and Google have controls that let you dial back AI-generated and AI-optimised content in your ads, but neither vendor makes “off” stay off.
On Meta, Advantage+ Creative enhancements (text generation, image expansion, visual touch-ups) can be turned off per ad or set as an account-wide default. But numerous advertisers and agencies report Meta silently re-enabling these settings after platform updates or when editing another campaign. It’s a widely reported pattern, not an isolated bug, and the practical fix people land on is a recurring manual check rather than trusting a setting to hold.
On Google, you can turn off “Automatically Created Assets” at campaign level (Campaigns > Settings > Edit > Change automatically created assets settings > Off), but Google has also been known to re-enable this without telling advertisers, and any assets already generated before you switched it off stay in your account until you manually remove them. There’s a bigger, structural version of this same problem coming for Ad Grants accounts specifically, covered in its own section below.
What to do:
- Don’t treat any “off” setting on either platform as permanent. Build a recurring check (monthly at minimum, weekly if you’re managing meaningful spend) into your reporting routine to confirm AI enhancements haven’t quietly switched back on.
- On Meta, check Business Settings > Advertising Settings for your account-wide defaults after any major platform update, that’s when re-enabling is most commonly reported.
- On Google, remember that turning off automatically created assets doesn’t retroactively remove ones already generated, you’ll need to review and delete those manually.
(Source: Google Ads Help · multiple advertiser reports)
New EU AI Act rules on AI-generated content start 2 August, two days after this goes out
From 2 August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires that any AI-generated or AI-manipulated image, audio, video or text shown to people in the EU makes it immediately obvious to the viewer that it isn’t purely human-made, with stricter rules for anything that could pass as a real person or event.
This applies with no minimum spend threshold and no advertising exemption, so it isn’t just a large-campaign concern. Responsibility sits with you as the advertiser, not Meta, Google or whichever platform generated the content, so it can’t be assumed to be someone else’s problem. Fines run up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover, though there’s no track record yet of enforcement against small charities.
There’s a real grey area here. Meta’s own ad policy already requires an “AI-generated” label when AI creates or substantially changes visual or audio content, but Meta’s current guidance suggests routine headline or text optimisation, exactly what this week’s Advantage+ Creative story above covers, isn’t automatically flagged. The EU rule explicitly includes AI-generated or altered text, so there’s a gap between what Meta flags for you and what EU law may actually require.
What to do:
- If any Meta, Google or other paid campaigns reach EU audiences and use AI-generated or AI-edited images, video, voiceover or text, including Advantage+ Creative’s headline rewrites, check whether it needs a disclosure from 2 August.
- This is brand new law with no established practice yet. If your charity runs meaningful EU spend, flag it to whoever handles compliance or legal risk rather than treating it as a marketing call.
(Source: European Commission, EU AI Act Article 50 · Herbert Smith Freehills)
Innovation to watch: Google’s AI Max has no opt-out, and it’s coming for Ad Grants search campaigns
Google’s AI Max for Search, a broader AI layer covering search term matching and asset optimisation, reached general availability in April 2026. Unlike most Google Ads features, there is no opt-out. You can only choose to migrate onto it voluntarily, on your own timeline, rather than have it applied to you automatically later.
Google announced in June that automatic migration of Dynamic Search Ads into AI Max has been pushed back to February 2027. But automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match settings are still scheduled to auto-migrate into AI Max from September 2026, on the original timetable, DSA got a reprieve, these didn’t.
For Ad Grants accounts specifically, this is worth taking seriously. Ad Grants has traditionally required tighter keyword control than standard paid accounts, and AI Max moves search term matching further from that model, closer to broad, AI-driven interpretation of intent. It’s enough of a live concern that nonprofit-sector trainers are already running dedicated webinars on what AI Max means for the Grant specifically.
What to do:
- If you manage an Ad Grants account, look at migrating to AI Max voluntarily, on your own terms, before the September auto-migration applies broad match and automated asset changes to you by default.
- Review how AI Max’s search term matching interacts with Ad Grants policy requirements around keyword specificity and landing page relevance before you migrate, not after.
- If you’re not sure whether your account is in scope for the September auto-migration, this is worth raising directly with your Google Ads rep or via the Google for Nonprofits community forum.
(Source: Google Ads Help · Google Ads API documentation)
Quick notes
- ⚠️ If your charity sells anything through a Shopify shop connected to Google Shopping or Performance Max, check Merchant Centre before 18 August. Google is permanently switching off the old Content API on that date. If your feed still runs on it, product data will simply stop updating, which can mean stale prices, sold-out items still showing as available, or ads getting disapproved. Go to Data Sources in Merchant Centre: if the Source column says “Content API” and you haven’t migrated, get it sorted before the deadline. (Source: Google Merchant Center)
- Google is rolling out a Bid Target Adjustment Tool for Performance Max, letting advertisers compare their CPA or ROAS targets against what’s actually being delivered. This applies to standard paid accounts using Target CPA or Target ROAS. Most Ad Grants accounts run on Maximise Conversions or manual CPC, so if that’s you, this one doesn’t apply. (Source: Google)
- Google Ads now requires a second admin to approve sensitive account changes. Since 27 July, removing a user’s access, changing agency contacts, or altering who has admin rights on a Google Ads account needs sign-off from a second administrator, part of Google’s new Multi-Party Approval feature. It only applies to accounts with more than three admins for now, but if your charity or agency set-up has several people with access, it’s worth knowing before an urgent change gets stuck waiting on approval. (Source: Google Ads Help · PPC Land)
- Meta has redesigned its Audiences section around labels, grouping custom audiences into categories like Customers, Engaged Audiences and Lookalikes, with labels such as High Value, At Risk, Disengaged and Cart Abandoners. Paired with value rules, this makes it easier to bid differently for lapsed donors versus your most engaged supporters, without building a separate audience for each. Worth a look if you haven’t reviewed your Meta audience set-up in a while. (Source: Jon Loomer Digital)
- Several US nonprofit donor-management platforms shipped AI donor-prediction features this year. Bloomerang’s Giving Platform now includes AI-powered predictive donor scores and next-best-action recommendations via a partnership with Dataro (live from 1 July), and similar AI prospect-research and constituent-intelligence tools have launched from RaiseTell, Kindsight and Momentive Software. None of this is used meaningfully in the UK market yet, and it’s donor CRM territory rather than paid advertising, but it’s a clear signal of where AI-driven donor prediction is heading in fundraising tech generally. (Source: PR Newswire · Dataro)
- OpenAI‘s charitable arm gave away $50 million to US nonprofits using AI. The OpenAI Foundation’s People-First AI Fund offered unrestricted grants of up to $500,000 to US-based 501(c)(3) organisations, no AI experience required. Applications closed 15 July. While UK charities aren’t eligible at the moment, it would be great to see some of the funds to flow outside of the US. (Source: OpenAI Foundation)
In the Feed is kmac digital’s weekly-ish roundup of digital advertising news for UK charity advertisers. Have questions about how any of this affects your campaigns? Get in touch.
In the Feed is kmac digital’s weekly-ish roundup of digital advertising news for UK charity advertisers. Have questions about how any of this affects your campaigns? Get in touch.