Meta unveils new ad and discovery features at IAB NewFronts

This week, the advertising industry gathered at Shoptalk and IAB Newfronts to explore what’s next in commerce and media. While these events focus on different parts of the customer journey, they emphasize a shared industry challenge for marketers: capturing attention and turning it into meaningful action is harder than ever. Data shows attention spans have shrunk 69% in twenty years, yet the human brain now registers an ad in under half a second.¹ This means the brands that show up in the right moment, with the right message, have more opportunity than ever.

At Meta, we’re building an AI-powered ecosystem of tools that give businesses new ways to create personalized experiences for people and drive growth. Earlier this week at Shoptalk, we introduced new ways to guide people from discovery to purchase. Today at IAB Newfronts, we’re building on that foundation with new ways to connect through storytelling that feels personal, sparks action, and puts your brand at the center of culture.

IAB Newfronts – Key Takeaways

• Be at the Center of Culture: Brands want to be part of major cultural moments, but today’s speed of culture can make it difficult to show up in real time. We’re expanding Reels trending ads with new content lineups that surround events like Fashion Week, F1, Black Friday, NFL games and more, helping brands align with the cultural moments driving conversation on Facebook and Instagram.
• Partner with the Voices of Culture: Finding the right creator voice to tell your brand’s story can be time-consuming – and hard to scale. Improved tools and insights in Instagram’s creator marketplace, along with a redesigned Partnership Ads Hub, make it easier to evaluate partnerships, manage creator content across Facebook and Instagram, and turn top organic posts into paid campaigns that drive results.
• Fuel performance with diverse video creative: Campaigns with diverse creative assets correlate with better results, but producing enough video creative variations to show up across audiences, formats, and languages can be a growing lift. That’s why we’re exploring advanced generative AI video and translation features, including video voiceover and UGC-style videos with avatars, to help brands scale video production and give our AI more to work with to maximize results.
• Turn your products into stories: Turning an expansive product catalog into compelling video ads shouldn’t be resource intensive. To help advertisers streamline this process, we’re testing new tools that automatically create immersive product videos from an advertiser’s catalog at scale.

Be at the Center of Culture

Capturing attention today requires showing up in the moments that matter to your customers. But staying on top of trends and showing up authentically, in real time, can be hard to get right. By the time a team spots a trend, briefs creative, and gets approval – the moment may have passed.

But people aren’t waiting. They’re already talking about it on Reels. From 2016 throwbacks to Jon Hamm memes, Reels has become the place where culture breaks first. On Facebook, Q4 US video time spent continued to grow double-digits year-over-year,² and on Instagram, 85% of content reshared in messages is now Reels.³

We’re making it easier for brands to join these high-attention moments and win share of audience when it matters most.

Introducing New Content and Category Lineups for Reels Trending Ads

We’re expanding Reels trending ads inventory to include new, limited content lineups for key cultural moments like Fashion Week, F1, Black Friday, NFL games and more.Additionally, we are adding new trending content categories, including TV & Movies, Travel, Business, Finance & Investments, giving more opportunities for advertisers to place their brand alongside the most culturally relevant Reels when people are most engaged. In a Meta analysis of 59 studies, Reels trending ads delivered an incremental 6.6 percentage point Ad Recall lift on top of concurrent media, compared to control groups with no Reels trending ads exposure.

“Instagram’s Reels trending ads helps us show up in the moments moviegoers are already leaning into—alongside the trends and creators shaping culture in real time. Our RTA campaigns deliver meaningful, incremental reach and strong video engagement, while also lifting the outcomes that matter most to our business, from awareness and intent to ticket purchases.” – Brittany Humes, VP Media, Focus Features

We’re also beginning a limited alpha for a new reserve buying option designed for the moments that matter most, helping advertisers win share of audience during a short window of up to 24 hours. Built to capture the surge in engagement across our apps during tentpole events, like cultural moments, seasonal peaks, and product launches, this high-visibility solution helps brands show up big when attention is highest.

Partner with the Voices of Culture

Creators bring a powerful blend of creativity and credibility that is foundational to how people engage across our apps. But finding the right creator to tell your brand’s story can be a complex process – from evaluating fit, to negotiating partnerships, and measuring results across platforms.

Over the years, we’ve invested in more ways to make Meta the home for creators and businesses to connect, create, and build community together. Now, Meta leads the category in enabling creator connections, with 27% of shoppers saying Meta’s products provide the best experience connecting with creators, compared to 12% who say YouTube or TikTok respectively.⁴ And in 2025, Facebook paid content creators nearly $3 billion from our creator monetization programs, representing a 35% increase over the previous year and the highest annual total ever.⁵

Today, we’re making it easier for businesses to discover, evaluate, and activate the right creators and content – turning partnerships into campaign results.

Expanded Creator Marketplace Features

With more than 1.5 million discoverable creators,⁶ Instagram’s creator marketplace is the best place for businesses to discover and evaluate creators for partnership ads campaigns. Earlier this year, we rolled out the creator marketplace to all advertisers globally.⁷

Now, we’re introducing enhanced target audience filtering, which is an integration with custom audiences in Ads Manager that makes it easier than ever for businesses to quickly identify creators who are a good match for their goals and likely to perform well in their partnership ads campaigns. Adding partnership ads to business as usual campaigns delivers, on average, 19% lower CPAs 13% higher click through rates and 71% higher median brand lift.⁸

“Partnership ads have become one of the most effective ways for us to deploy authentic video creative and reach new customers. Creator marketplace allows us to quickly find creators who genuinely resonate with our brand, and their content drives strong engagement and conversions. It has fundamentally changed how we source and deploy video assets on the platform.” – Matt Fey, Marketing Director, Portland Leather Goods

Facebook Drives Performance

Facebook Collabs are now available in the Partnership Ads Hub and will soon be added to recommended creator content types. This gives advertisers more opportunities to expand the diversity of their partnership ads creative and tap into Facebook’s expansive creator community. Placing standalone upper funnel (video views, post engagement, brand awareness) partnership ads on both Facebook and Instagram leads to18% more conversions and on average 5% lower cost per conversion compared to serving partnership ads on Instagram only, on average.⁹

Redesigned Partnership Ads Hub

We’re introducing a redesigned Partnership Ads Hub in Ads Manager, making it easier for businesses to discover existing creator content recommended for their partnership ad campaigns. Beginning next month, businesses will have more ways to filter, search, and organize content within the hub. We will also start providing more options for recommended creator content, providing businesses with more content to discover and creators with which to work.

Fuel Performance with Diverse Creative

People are spending more time with video than ever – in the US, Q4 Reels watch time grew more than 30% year-over-year in Q4.¹⁰ And campaigns with diverse creative, including Reels, perform better by giving our ad system more to test, learn from, and personalize across audiences.¹¹ But producing enough variations across formats, languages, and audiences can be a growing strain on creative teams.

To help brands and agencies supercharge their approach to a diverse creative set without proportionally more effort, we are expanding our suite of Advantage+ creative generative AI video and translation capabilities:

UGC-Style Videos with Avatars

We’re beginning to explore the ability to create UGC-style videos with avatars and voiceovers, alongside the studio-style generation we introduced last year. Our aim with this feature is to make it easier to produce video ads with engaging storytelling across a variety of campaign needs, from scaling content for localized markets to representing unique products, while offering flexibility for brands of all sizes and objectives.

Video and Image Voiceover

We’re testing new ways advertisers can enhance their existing or generated videos and images with the ability to add AI generated voiceover for additional context that makes it easier to quickly digest an ad.

Speak your customers’ language, effortlessly

Generative AI voiceover translation capabilities are now available for more advertisers, and we’re introducing translations for text in image overlays.¹² A new streamlined flow in Ads Manager allows advertisers to translate all elements of their creative in a single step, making it easier for businesses to connect with people in their preferred language.

These enhancements build on the initial success of the Advantage+ creative video generation tool, which allows advertisers to generate studio style videos from single image assets. In beta testing, advertisers using the AI-powered video generation tool for the majority of their campaign ads saw a 10% increase in CTR and 8% increase in CVR, on average.¹³

“As video continues to play a central role on Meta platforms and in marketing, Meta’s Video Generation feature is enabling teams to generate dynamic, engaging videos from existing images, helping them maximize the impact of their existing asset and drive performance” – Robert Milligan – Director, Media Services, New Engen, Inc

Maximizing Catalog Product Video and Reels Ads Performance

Video is increasingly the dominant language across our platform. But, turning an expansive product catalog into compelling video ads for every asset can be difficult to scale. For catalog advertisers, we’re building tools that automatically transform product catalogs into immersive video ads, helping drive higher conversions through dynamic video stories, with less manual work.

Catalog Product Video at Scale:

We’re testing a new way to automatically generate engaging videos for each product in a catalog, instead of relying on static images or manual video creation. Advertisers can turn existing video assets into flexible templates in Commerce Manager, allowing our system to generate product videos at scale using the advertiser’s template. This tool makes it easier to highlight product offerings in a dynamic, visually appealing way while maintaining advertiser control over the video creative. Ad sets with catalog product video see 20% more conversions per dollar, on average.¹⁴

Flexible Catalog Product Video Designs for Instagram Reels

We’re also testing new catalog product video designs on Instagram Reels that adapt based on the available creative assets. This means Meta’s ads system will select the best video layout for each product, creating a more immersive shopping experience for people browsing Reels, while helping improve advertiser performance. In testing, campaigns with catalog product video that delivered to the Reels placement had 33% higher incremental conversions than campaigns that didn’t.

We believe the future of advertising lies in formats that are as engaging and interactive as the organic content people love. The brands that will see success are the ones that move at the speed of culture, showing up in the right moments, with the most relevant creative, through the voices people trust. With 3.5 billion people spending more time than ever with creators and video across our apps, Meta’s AI-powered tools give brands new ways to meet them where they are, turning every stage of the funnel into a flywheel for growth.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/from-commerce-to-culture-at-newfronts