Marketing edition
The ACM puts price algorithms on the table, 64 percent of consumers find them unfair, and Google Ads gets a Dutch-language AI Brief.
ACM wants you to explain how your price is set: 64 percent now find it unfair
The regulator has put computer-driven prices on the agenda. That affects your campaigns, your offers, and trust in your brand.
The Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) published a market study on 28 September 2026 about computer-driven consumer prices. The flight ticket market was the case study, but the message is broader. ACM chairman Martijn Snoep says that AI and more data mean companies will use computer-driven and personalised prices more often, also outside aviation. The regulator calls for more transparency and a public debate. A round table is planned for early 2027. You can respond to the draft report until 9 November 2026. At the same time, Motivaction published a behavioural study among more than a thousand people who book flight tickets. It shows that 64 percent find the use of price algorithms unfair. Almost half wrongly believe that earlier searches affect the price, and a quarter think the device you use to look matters. These are not facts, but they are the expectations your customer brings to your price. For marketing, this is not a pricing issue but a trust issue. You can do everything right and still seem unfair, simply because no one understands why the amount this morning differs from last night. This week, find out if your organisation lets prices vary automatically, and write down in two sentences how that works. A price algorithm is a rule that adjusts the price to what the system sees: how busy it is, stock levels, time, demand. This is called dynamic pricing. Price personalisation goes a step further and looks at data from the individual customer. Consumers judge these two very differently: there is more understanding for dynamic prices than for prices based on your own customer data. That difference is your handle for communication. If you explain that the price rises because the plane is filling up, people understand that. If it stays unclear whether your data plays a role, the customer will fill in the gap themselves, often wrongly. A reassuring line in the small print backs fires if the claim isn't true. The ACM does not say dynamic prices are banned, but it does say the 'black box' must open up. If you communicate that customer data plays no role, that must actually be true in the system that calculates the price. So ask the people who manage that system exactly what is in the calculation rule, before you write about it. There is also a competitive angle: whoever is first to clearly explain how their price works sets the standard. And whoever says nothing until 9 November lets others decide what the rules will look like.
Background for subscribersThis edition is about explaining and proving. The ACM wants you to be open about how your prices are set, greenwashing rules demand proof for sustainability claims, and AI systems (from agents to chatbots to search engines) need clear, checkable facts instead of vague text or nice design. The common thread throughout: what you don't explain, someone else will fill in, and that often turns out badly for your brand.
Google Ads: AI Brief now also in Dutch, plus an overview of what was actually shown
Google is expanding AI Max with two things that directly affect your work. The closed beta of AI Brief is coming to seven more languages, including Dutch. With AI Brief, you use prompts to give context about your brand and your campaign. There is also a new dashboard that brings search terms, shown creative assets, and landing pages together in one overview. That fills a gap: until now, with automated Search campaigns, you could barely see which version of your text or image was actually shown to people. Ask your Google contact if you can get access to the closed beta of AI Brief in Dutch. AI Max lets the system put together search terms and creative variants itself. So you no longer approve every ad text word for word. AI Brief gives back some of that control: instead of separate keywords, you give a description of your brand, your tone, and your offer. That the beta now speaks Dutch really makes a difference, because describing a brand voice in a foreign language often produces flat results. More control on paper is not yet brand control in practice: a brief is an instruction, not a guarantee, the system can still deviate from it. That's why the new reporting overview is the more important part of this update, because it lets you check afterwards what was really shown. Actually plan that check in, otherwise a variant in a tone you would never have approved might run for months.
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