A weekly-ish roundup of what’s changing in digital advertising, curated for UK charity advertisers. Estimated read time: 5 minutes.
In this week’s feed
- ⚠️ A new Google tool helps you get ahead of the August bidding change
- Meta wants AI to build your entire ad, from creative to targeting
- Would an AI-generated appeal image cost you donations?
- The Fundraising Regulator published its soft opt-in guide
- Sky, ITV and Channel 4 just opened premium TV ads to small charities
- This week’s tip + Quick notes
⚠️ A new Google tool helps you get ahead of the August bidding change
Google confirmed last edition that from 17 August, it will start automatically pulling back campaigns that have been spending beyond their bidding targets. From 6 July, Google is rolling out a Bid Target Adjustment Tool to help you prepare. If your account has any Target CPA or Target ROAS campaigns that have been “limited by budget” at any point in the past 12 months, you should get a notification inside Google Ads pointing you to it.
Worth knowing who this actually affects: standard Ad Grants accounts are restricted to Maximize Conversions or manual CPC bidding, so if your Google Ads presence is Grants-only, this tool won’t appear and you can skip the rest of this story. It matters if you also run paid, budgeted Google Ads using Target CPA (bidding to a target cost-per-donation) or Target ROAS (a shop, raffle or merchandise campaign bid to a return-on-spend target).
What to do:
- Watch for the in-account notification from 6 July, if you’re running the bid strategies above.
- Review the suggested targets against what you’d actually accept for cost-per-conversion.
- If you do nothing, targets stay as they are, but expect a possible dip in delivery from 17 August.
(Source: Google Ads Help · Search Engine Land)
Meta wants AI to build your entire ad, from creative to targeting
At Cannes Lions in June, Meta unveiled a new AI creative suite for advertisers, headlined by a feature called Brand Memory. It learns from your existing ad library, past creative, tone and visual identity, and uses that to generate new ad variations automatically that are meant to sound and look like you. It’s paired with an end-to-end AI creative workspace combining generation, testing and translation, plus a new Creator Marketing Hub.
Both are still in limited testing, broader rollout expected “in the coming months.” For a small charity team without in-house design capacity, this could eventually mean faster creative turnaround, useful, but see the trust research below before leaning on AI-generated creative for donor-facing appeals.
What to do:
- No action needed yet, this isn’t live in most accounts.
- If you get early access, review outputs the same way you’d review any AI-generated donor-facing content. Don’t publish by default.
(Source: Meta, Cannes Lions 2026 · Adweek)
Would an AI-generated appeal image cost you donations?
A study doing the rounds in the Nudge behavioural science newsletter this week is worth sitting with. Researchers Yang and Tian ran nine experiments showing people the same product and telling half the group it was designed by a human, half that it was AI-designed. Same product, different label. The AI-labelled group were 29% less willing to buy it. The newsletter paired that with a Reddit pile-on of a pizza shop caught using an AI food photo, one commenter said it was “enough for me to never order from them.”
We put the obvious charity question to the newsletter’s author directly: does the same apply to donation-conversion ads? His reply: he’d recently seen a church using AI-generated images to promote a service, and thought it would put off the very people it was trying to reach.
In a neat bit of timing, Meta ads specialist Jon Loomer flagged mid-June that Meta has quietly added an AI disclosure checkbox to Ads Manager, letting you optionally flag when creative was AI-assisted. Given the research above, using it proactively may be the safer bet.
What to do:
- If you use AI-generated imagery in appeal ads, especially images meant to represent beneficiaries or real people, treat it as a genuine trust risk, not just a design shortcut.
- Test real photography against AI-generated creative in the same campaign before rolling AI images out at scale.
- Consider using Meta’s new AI disclosure checkbox where you do use AI-assisted creative.
(Source: Nudge Newsletter, Phill Agnew · Yang & Tian, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2025 · Jon Loomer Digital)
The Fundraising Regulator published its soft opt-in guide
On 29 June, the Fundraising Regulator published its guide to the charitable purposes “soft opt-in,” the provision in force since February that lets you email or text people who’ve previously expressed interest or support, without fresh explicit consent, provided you give a clear, easy opt-out.
The guide is aimed at fundraising teams and walks through worked examples of when soft opt-in does and doesn’t apply. This isn’t primarily about paid ads, but it matters for anyone building custom or lookalike audiences from your email list or CRM, since an improperly-consented list can undermine both compliance and platform matching.
What to do:
- Read the worked examples before relying on soft opt-in for a new campaign.
- If you upload supporter lists to build ad audiences, check your list is covered by consent or a valid soft opt-in, not just historic practice.
(Source: Fundraising Regulator)
Sky, ITV and Channel 4 just opened premium TV ads to small charities
On 23 June, Comcast’s Universal Ads platform launched in the UK in partnership with Sky, ITV and Channel 4, letting advertisers create, buy and measure TV campaigns across all three broadcasters’ ad sales houses from a single self-service interface. It was built specifically to make premium TV advertising accessible to small and medium-sized organisations that could never justify the cost or complexity of a traditional TV buy.
There’s already a working precedent for charities specifically: Sky’s existing AdSmart addressable TV product has been used by at least one UK charity, Scotland’s Charity Air Ambulance ran its first-ever TV ad through Sky’s SME support scheme. Universal Ads extends that same self-service approach across three broadcasters at once.
This is genuinely new territory for most small/mid-size charities, who’ve typically ruled TV out entirely. Worth a look if you have a high-profile campaign moment, a big anniversary appeal or a major response campaign, where broad reach and trust-building matter more than tight targeting.
What to do:
- If you’re curious, Universal Ads and Sky AdSmart are both worth a scoping conversation, ask about minimum budgets and self-service options for charities specifically.
- Don’t treat this as a replacement for targeted digital, it’s a reach and brand-trust play, not a direct-response one.
(Source: ITV Press Centre · Advanced Television)
This week’s Google Ads tip
Automation hasn’t shrunk the job of managing a Google Ads account, it’s shifted it. The tip: audit your conversion tracking every time you open an account, before drawing conclusions about performance, since every automated bidding decision flows from what it’s been told to optimise toward. And don’t take on-platform conversion numbers at face value, cross-check against what actually happened (real donations, real sign-ups) wherever you can.
Quick notes
- Meta has added appointment booking from Instant Forms, and ChatGPT ads now support conversion optimisation. Worth a look if you run lead or sign-up campaigns for events or challenge fundraisers. (Source: Meta, OpenAI)
- Nudge’s newsletter this week covered the “fresh start effect”: people are more motivated to commit to a new behaviour right after a symbolic date than an ordinary day. Worth testing your next campaign launch or regular-giving ask around one. (Source: Nudge Newsletter, citing Dai, Milkman & Riis, Management Science, 2014)
- The UK’s largest virtual Digital Fundraising Conference runs on 9 July 2026. (Source: Fundraising Everywhere) – I’ll be attending and reporting back here!
In the Feed is kmac digital’s weekly roundup of digital advertising news for UK charity advertisers. Have questions about how any of this affects your campaigns? Get in touch.