Field Notes

Short, infrequent, useful.

Not content marketing. These exist because they are the only thing worth attaching to a follow-up email, and because the fastest way to prove somebody knows this material is to have them write down something you can check.

Note 01 · Compliance

Five ways a New Jersey store breaks 26A in a Marketplace listing without meaning to

Facebook Marketplace and the social feeds are where this happens, because they are the placements nobody routes through the agency. The listing is posted by whoever has the phone, and the rules do not care who posted it.

Covers: the doc fee sitting outside the price (26A.5); credit terms in the caption rather than adjacent to the vehicle (26A.8); footnotes under ten point; VIN digits without the “VIN” prefix; and the unit that sold on Tuesday and is still advertised on Friday.
Status: [DRAFT — NOT YET PUBLISHED]

Note 02 · Co-op

Six reasons a co-op claim gets denied, five of which are procedural

The denials that sting are the ones where the work qualified perfectly and the paperwork did not. Wrong legal entity name. No explicit service period. Deliverables described as “digital marketing” instead of itemised. Creative screenshots undated. No platform spend export. Submitted past the window.

Five of those six are fixed once, permanently, by changing how the invoice is written. The sixth is that you were not eligible, and the only cure for that one is finding out before you spend rather than after.
Status: [DRAFT — NOT YET PUBLISHED]

Note 03 · Regulation

The CARS Rule is gone. Here is what that did and did not change.

Vacated by the Fifth Circuit in January 2025 on procedure, not appealed, and formally withdrawn from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026. A good number of stores are still being sold compliance with it.

What it changed: a federal disclosure regime you were preparing for does not exist. What it did not change: N.J.A.C. 13:45A-26A, which never went anywhere, is enforced by the Division of Consumer Affairs, and is the rule your advertising is actually measured against.
Status: [DRAFT — NOT YET PUBLISHED]

Note 04 · Platform

Why your Meta performance fell off a cliff and nobody told you it was a policy

Creative promoting credit, financing or lease programs belongs in Meta’s Financial Products and Services category — which replaced the old Credit category for US advertisers in January 2025. Inside it: no ZIP targeting, no location exclusions, age locked to 18–65+, all genders, no platform lookalikes, no Advantage targeting. And the part everyone gets backwards: you declare it, Meta does not classify it for you, so an undeclared finance campaign has the targeting you set and a policy problem instead.

It is not your agency’s fault and it is not the market softening. It is a policy, it has been in force for years, and first-party audiences from your own CRM are the way through it — which is a real reason to point budget at the owner base rather than a preference.
Status: [DRAFT — NOT YET PUBLISHED]

Nothing is published yet. These four are outlined and sourced, not written. Publishing an empty blog with a “coming soon” is worse than having no blog, so this page ships with the nav item removed until at least two are live — see the note in the build file.

In the meantime

The Ad File is the version of this written about your store.

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