Google, Meta and PayPal reshape ads

Meta widened access to its Meta AI business assistant, and PayPal introduced PayPal Ads ID, a new identifier built from verified PayPal and Venmo accounts. (about.fb.com) (newsroom.paypal-corp.com) Meta said the assistant is now in beta for advertisers and agencies of all sizes across major markets in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, with local language support. The tool sits inside Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite and Meta’s business help surfaces. (about.fb.com) (gadgets360.com) Meta said businesses in the beta resolved common account issues at a 20% higher rate with the assistant. It also said advertisers saw a 12% drop in ad cost per result after applying the assistant’s opportunity score recommendations. (about.fb.com) (storyboard18.com) PayPal said its new Ads ID gives ad tech partners a deterministic identifier, meaning one tied to authenticated accounts rather than modeled guesses. The company said the signal comes from verified PayPal and Venmo accounts and is meant to improve relevance and performance. (newsroom.paypal-corp.com) (streetinsider.com) That language points to a basic problem in digital advertising: platforms have less access to third-party cookies and mobile ad identifiers than they did a few years ago. Companies are trying to replace those signals with first-party data they collect directly from logged-in users and buyers. (newsroom.paypal-corp.com) (about.fb.com) Meta has been signaling this push for months. In January, the company said it had started testing the business assistant in the fourth quarter of 2025 and planned to expand it as part of a broader effort to use artificial intelligence across ad setup, creative and optimization. (about.fb.com) PayPal has been building out the same stack from the measurement side. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2026, PayPal Ads introduced Transaction Graph Insights and a measurement partnership program built around cross-merchant shopping behavior and campaign attribution. (newsroom.paypal-corp.com) Google is also pushing its ad systems further into generative artificial intelligence, though the clearest recent public product move came through Google Marketing Platform rather than a new DeepMind ad launch. In March, Google said it was bringing its latest Gemini models into Display & Video 360 so its marketplace could proactively curate media packages before campaigns go live. (blog.google) Across all three companies, the pattern is the same: more campaign decisions are being handed to assistants and models, and more targeting is being tied to logged-in, purchase-linked data. That leaves advertisers with faster automation, and users with more questions about how much personalization they want attached to their accounts. (about.fb.com) (newsroom.paypal-corp.com)