Alison AI

Out with the old. 👀
A whole new way to see what your creative is really doing arrives this October.
Stay tuned.

Your Meta budget didn't shrink this year. Your buying power did.

Meta's own filings show the average price per ad rose 12% year over year in both Q1 and Q2 of 2026. Run the math on a flat budget and you're buying roughly 10.7% fewer impressions than you were a year ago.
Nobody announced this. There was no policy update, no migration email. Just a quieter, more crowded auction every quarter.
Here is the uncomfortable part: you cannot out-bid inflation. When everyone pays 12% more for the same auction, everyone's media efficiency drops together.

The only variable that breaks the tie is how hard each impression works.
That is a creative problem, not a media problem:
→ Which hook holds attention past the first half second?
→ Which visual elements actually drive CTR for your audience?
→ Which variants are fatiguing right now, quietly burning spend?

Teams that answer these questions with data enter every auction with an edge the 12% cannot touch. Teams that answer with gut feel just took a 12% pay cut.

So, where is your team making up the difference: bigger budgets or better creative?

Your Travel Tuesday creative might already be dead by Black Friday.
Travel Tuesday now drives about 3.5x the bookings of an average day. But most travel brands launch their holiday creative on November 1st, and by the time December 1st arrives, those ads are fatigued, CTR is sliding and CPMs have climbed around 33.5% since October.

In our latest video-podcast episode, we break down how to make sure your creative survives the battle:
📅 Why October is your cheapest testing window, and why the weakest half of your concepts should be cut by mid-October
🔄 How a 48-hour refresh can recover up to 87% of peak CTR
🎯 What actually converts on December 1st: named destinations, specific prices and real deadlines beat generic wanderlust every time
If you run paid media for a travel brand, this one's your playbook for the biggest booking day of the year.

🎧 Watch or listen here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0yzzhy0

🏆 Finalist. Twice.

A few weeks ago we told you Alison AI was shortlisted at the 2026 A.I. Awards.
Today we get to say something even better: we made it to the finals, in two categories:
-AI Startup of the Year
-Best Use of AI in Creative Industries, Media and Advertising

Getting this far means a panel of judges looked at hundreds of AI companies and decided creative intelligence belongs at the top table. We could not agree more.

To our team: this is your obsession with the details, paying off. To our customers: thank you for trusting us with the question every marketer asks - why does this creative work?

See the full list of finalists here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0yvRy80

Winners are announced soon. Until then, we will be doing what we always do: turning creative data into performance.

Every creative you launch is already carrying a score.
Most teams just cannot see it until the spend report comes in.

That is what Preflight Plus Performance changes. Before anything goes live, every asset gets a composite score: 70% predicted performance, 30% creative best practice. Per platform, per placement, per format.
A 9.2 on one channel can be a 4.1 on another. Same asset. Different rules of physics.

The radar stops spinning before takeoff, not after.
See it run on your own creatives: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0ym4vv0

This month, the platforms quietly took the wheel.

Google started auto-migrating legacy Search campaigns to AI Max on September 1.
Microsoft switched its own AI Max on by default.
Meta's Advantage+ keeps absorbing targeting decisions that used to be yours.

Analysts now expect Meta to overtake Google Search as the largest ad platform by the end of 2026, largely on the strength of automation most advertisers never opted into.

Here is what that means in practice:
You no longer control targeting. The algorithm does.
You no longer control bidding. The algorithm does.
You no longer control placements. The algorithm does.
There is exactly one input left that is 100% yours: the creative.

When every advertiser hands the same automation the same budget, the ad itself becomes the entire strategy. The brands winning Q4 will not be the ones with the best media plan. They will be the ones who know, element by element, why their creative works.
That is not a hunch. It is data. And it is the only competitive edge the platforms have not automated away.

How is your team preparing creative for a world where it is the last lever you own?

You spent six weeks on the strategy. The decision took 2.5 seconds.

Eye-tracking research from eye-square found that after 2.5 seconds, more than 60% of ads are no longer being looked at. That is the window. Everything before it, the brief, the targeting, the bid strategy, the QBR, exists to buy you access to those two and a half seconds.
And in that window, nothing about your funnel matters. What matters is what is in the frame. The opening composition, the pacing, the contrast, the face or absence of one, whether the first beat gives the eye a reason to stay.

Which is the part most teams treat as taste.

We treat it as data. Not because taste is worthless, but because taste does not scale and it does not tell you why the last one worked.