Meta believes short-form videos are the future.
At its NewFronts presentation Thursday, the tech giant revealed a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered tools for ad buyers, helping brands connect with creators to reach wider audiences.
Powered by machine learning, Meta now recommends creators to brands on its searchable Instagram Creator Marketplace.
Brands can search for creators by filtering creator and audience attributes, send campaign briefs to creators of their choice and make themselves discoverable across many creators, gaining time efficiency and reducing the cost of Partnership Ads.
Meta also introduced video catalogs featuring multi-destination product ads on Reels, enabling users to swipe through multiple products in a single video. Additionally, advertisers can use Reminder Ads on Reels by adding external links to new products or sales, prompting viewers to convert their interest into a purchase.
Meta’s Reels product stands to benefit as rival TikTok’s future grows uncertain in the U.S. And the company already has a strong hold on the market, as 3.5 billion Reels are reshared across Meta every day, according to Alvin Bowles, vice president, global business group, Meta.
Brands like McDonald’s—which reached 200 million people through its Meta platforms in 2023—have tapped into Reels to create fan experiences, such as the Grimace Shake campaign last December and the WcDonald anime campaign earlier this year.
“We introduced a subgenre of anime via Reels to dive deep to excite fans each week,” said Jennifer Healan, vp, U.S. marketing, brand, content and culture, McDonald’s.
Simultaneously, BMW was able to reach a wider audience via its partnership with creator Phil Cohen, who boasts nearly 1 million followers on Instagram. This collaboration promoted BMW’s X5 and X6 launches, as well as the Mini launch, effectively driving traffic to its website and further down the sales funnel.
Meta also announced that its generative AI Image Expansion capabilities, which adjust creative assets to fit different aspect ratios, were extended to its Advantage+ tool for optimizing more natural images across Reels on Facebook and Instagram. Revenue from its Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns more than doubled since last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s first-quarter-2024 earnings call.
And the company is testing a new tool using AI to predict which organic branded content will perform best if used in paid campaigns as a Partnership Ad.
