Definition
Advertising Studio was a digital advertising tool within Salesforce Marketing Cloud that let marketers create, manage, and optimize advertising campaigns across platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using CRM data to build targeted audiences. It was retired on August 15, 2026, and Salesforce recommends Data Cloud Ad Audiences as the replacement for audience-based advertising use cases.
Real-World Example
The marketing team at Wanderlust Travel uses Advertising Studio to upload their CRM audience segment of customers who browsed European vacation packages but did not book. They push this audience to Facebook and Google Ads to serve personalized retargeting ads. They also suppress customers who already booked, saving ad spend and avoiding annoying existing clients.
Why Advertising Studio Matters
Advertising Studio was part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and provided a bridge between CRM data and advertising platforms. Marketers could build audiences in Marketing Cloud using segmentation and data extensions, then push those audiences to Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for targeted advertising, lookalike audiences, or suppression lists.
Salesforce officially retired Advertising Studio on August 15, 2026. The replacement for most audience-based advertising use cases is Data Cloud Ad Audiences, which activates unified profiles from Data Cloud directly to ad platforms. Teams migrating from Advertising Studio typically rebuild their audience definitions in Data Cloud segments and reconnect their ad platform destinations from there.
How Organizations Use Advertising Studio
- •Wanderlust Travel — Used Advertising Studio until mid-2026 to push audiences of customers who abandoned booking flows to Facebook and Google for retargeting. Post-retirement, they migrated the same use case to Data Cloud Ad Audiences using a Data Cloud segment backed by their unified customer profile.
- •Oceanic Corp — Relied on Advertising Studio suppression lists to stop advertising to customers who had already purchased. After retirement, they rebuilt the suppression logic as a Data Cloud segment that excludes anyone with a recent purchase event from their unified profile.
- •Vandelay Industries — Ran lookalike audience campaigns through Advertising Studio to find new prospects similar to their best existing customers. The Data Cloud Ad Audiences migration required them to redefine 'best customers' as a Data Cloud segment first, which turned out to be a useful modeling exercise in its own right.