Meta has announced some new ad updates at Advertising Week, including AI video animation tools, expanded creator collaboration options, additional Collections promotion features, and more.
First off, Meta’s adding in new AI creative options, with “Image Animation”, which, as it sounds, will enable you to animate your still image assets.
As you can see in this example, Meta’s Image Animation process will enable you to add moving elements to your static images, based on text prompts.
As explained by Meta:
“For the first time, you can generate video creative from your single static image without any existing video assets on Instagram Reels. Early advertisers’ feedback has been positive, as Image Animation helps them overcome limited resources and provide a longer shelf life on ad creative.”
It could be a good way to create more engaging promotions. I mean, some of the AI generations we’ve seen are pretty questionable, and pretty creepy, but with experimentation and refinement, it could be an easy way to incorporate more video into your strategy.
Meta‘s also expanding its testing of AI-based “Video Expansion”, which enables advertisers to extend their video assets into different formats, via systematic prediction.
Meta’s been working with variations of this for over a year, and now, more brands will be able to access full video creation capacity within its expansion options.
Meta’s also adding more to its Collections ads, with brands now able to integrate creator content into their Collections promotions.
“This new format allows advertisers to upload a creator image or video as a “hero” asset for collections ads in Ads Manager. The collections ad will then have a partnership ads dual header helping further engage audiences by tapping into the authenticity of creator content.”
As you can see in this example, the updated Collections ads will feature both the brand and creator handles, with product images powered by your businesses’ Advantage+ Catalog.
That’ll help to showcase your products to each influencers’ audience, and could help maximize interest, using both the reach and engagement of your creator partner, and the matching of Meta’s AI system.
Meta’s also testing the ability to add a creator testimonial to a partnership ad, while it’s also consolidating partnership ads tools into a single page within Ads Manager, called “Partnership Ads Hub”.
The integrated overview will help you manage your partner promotions, and ensure that you’re across the details of each.
On another front, Meta’s also noted that its coming video tab, announced as part of its app refresh last week, will also facilitate more opportunity for advertisers to reach users.
“With this change on Facebook, advertisers will continue to benefit from our AI-enabled investments in ad delivery and ranking models, which helps us better show the most relevant ads to each person. With a diversity of ad formats enabled through this experience including standalone video & carousel ads, in-stream ads and overlay ads, you can focus on telling your brand’s story and we’ll help get it to the person most interested in your ad to drive the business outcomes you care about.”
So it’s TikTok-like placement within its separate video tab, which could improve relevance and reach. Though that does also depend on users actually switching across to this new tab, which we don’t know will happen just yet, but if Meta can get more people consuming more video content in a never-ending stream of clips, then this could facilitate expanded exposure opportunities.
So it’s mostly about video for Meta at advertising week, and with video taking up 60% of all user time spent on Facebook and Instagram, that makes a lot of sense. And with AI tools now making it easier than ever to create animated content, even if you can’t film it yourself, there’s more opportunity to tap into this for your own promotions.
It won’t be perfect every time, but you may be able to produce strong results with Meta’s various video updates.
