📣 Google Ads lets you choose which channels get budget first
Google Ads will let you rank channels High or Low priority and cap what the low ones spend.
Four-minute read. In today’s issue: Google Ads letting you pick which channels get your budget first, WhatsApp calls anyone can join, Shopify’s personal-shopper skill for AI assistants, AI prices falling up to 900 times a year, and an AI pop star heckling her maker.
BUDGET
Google Ads will let you pick which channels its AI funds first
What changed. Google said on 14 October that advertisers can mark channels High or Low priority in Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns. High-priority channels are funded first, and Low-priority ones can be capped at a maximum share of the daily budget.
What it means for you. Performance Max and Demand Gen spread your budget across Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Discover on their own. Now you can put Search first and give YouTube only a slice, instead of finding out from the invoice.
The first step. Open your Performance Max channel report this week and list the channels that actually brought enquiries or sales. Those are the ones to mark High priority when the setting reaches your account.
The limitation. Google says the controls roll out “over the next months” and caps apply “on a best-effort basis”. From February 2027, Search campaigns with the Display Network on lose their current spend split; Google says to set Display to Low priority with a 50% allocation to keep it.
Google on channel priority and budget caps in Google Ads (blog.google)
Just shipped
WhatsApp calls now take guests who have no WhatsApp account. The host creates a call link, guests join from a computer browser and wait to be admitted, and calls stay free, encrypted and untimed, for up to 32 people.
Send a call link instead of a meeting invite to the next customer who doesn’t use your usual video tool. Guests can’t see other participants’ phone numbers. (about.fb.com)
The rest of the day
🛍️ Shopify released a Shop skill that turns a shopper’s AI assistant into a personal shopper with their sizes, preferences and Shop order history. Assistants act on text, so put sizes, materials and stock details in your product descriptions this week. (x.com)
🌳 Simon Willison asked the Claude iPhone app for a game, and Claude worked for 3 hours and 7 minutes before handing back Tree Appreciator, finished and playable. Give the Claude app one big job before you leave for the day. (simonwillison.net)
🎥 Google Meet on Android now lets eligible live-stream viewers switch to joining with audio and video. Use it when a webinar guest wants to ask a question live. (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com)
🎬 Higgsfield made its Wan 3.0 video model unlimited for seven days for new and existing subscribers. Batch a month of product clips while the cap is off. (x.com)
🛠️ Built with AI
Philipp Schmid, who works at Google, gave Gemini 4 Argon a skyline photo and asked for an oil painting. It wrote a renderer that paints in passes, from broad strokes to highlights on the water. Try it with a photo of your shop for a social post. (x.com)
🧰 The Open Source Toolshed
What it is. Krita AI Diffusion is a free plugin for the open-source painting app Krita that adds AI image generation, inpainting and outpainting straight into your canvas.
Who it’s for. A small business that edits its own product photos or marketing art and wants to remove backgrounds, fill gaps or try variations without a subscription.
How hard it is. Install Krita first, then add the plugin from a downloaded zip file; anyone comfortable installing software can do it without a developer.
GPL-3.0 licence. (github.com)
📈 The AI Odometer
Source: Epoch AI, “LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks”, 12 March 2025, data from Epoch AI and Artificial Analysis, CC-BY.
For instance, the price to achieve GPT-4’s performance on a set of PhD-level science questions fell by 40x per year.
What it means for you. A price you checked last year is probably out of date. Run one of your regular AI jobs on the cheapest model your tool offers this week and compare the result before you renew any plan.
Too early
WhatsApp says calendar integrations with Google and Outlook are coming “later this year”, so a WhatsApp call link can go into a meeting invite that anyone can join. No date yet. (about.fb.com)
🎤 One for the road
Sara Aurorix is an AI pop star. Her song “Out of Office” is about an AI assistant who did your emails and your taxes, made your cat a meme, then quit. One human made the 74-shot music video with Claude Code (running Opus 5.5) as his crew and Suno writing the song.
Then the pair made a ten-minute making-of, and Sara heckles him the whole way through. He compares her lip-sync to a badly dubbed kung fu film; she says she was finding her voice. The video model can’t spell, so the “SOLVED” stamp she slams down keeps melting into nonsense.
Her verdict on the mess: “He says disasters. I say process.” The bill came to 183 generations and 11 hours from first lyric to first cut, and the storyboard and prompts are free to copy. (youtube.com)