August 2026 — PPC & Marketing news.
What changed, as it happens.
Tracked daily from primary sources. The items below are what we're watching for clients right now.
The EU's AI labeling rules bind today, and the ad platforms have not shipped the buttons
Article 50 of the EU AI Act became legally applicable on 2 August 2026, and it splits into two sets of duties. Providers, the companies that build generative systems, must apply machine-readable marking through digitally signed metadata plus an imperceptible watermark for audio, images, and video, watermark free-form text longer than 200 tokens, and offer a free detection tool to deployers, end users, authorities, researchers, and media. Deployers, a category the guidance describes as covering agencies, brands, and publishers, must visibly label deepfakes and AI-generated published text using the EU's icons or equivalent wording reading "AI GENERATED" or "AI MODIFIED". Those labels have to sit at first exposure and stay visible before any overlay covers them, appearing at the start of a video and again after ad breaks, or above or near a headline or in a colophon for text. Penalties reach EUR 15 million or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is higher. Two further deadlines follow: generative systems already on the market must reach marking conformity by 2 December 2026, and a detection interoperability solution is due by 2 February 2027. Meta signed the EU's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content on 28 July, five days before the obligations bound, having declined the separate General-Purpose AI Code in July 2025 over what it called legal uncertainties. Google signed on 24 July while warning that added regulatory complexity in an unsettled technical field could work against European competitiveness.Source: PPC Land →
Our take: The half that binds an advertiser is the deployer half: visible labels on deepfakes and on AI-generated text you publish, in the EU's icons or equivalent wording. The gap is tooling. Meta's announcement describes principles and forums, and no labeling setting has appeared in Ads Manager to point at, which leaves the obligation sitting with whoever publishes the ad rather than the platform that generated it.
Read our full take →
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