Meta is introducing a number of new ad formats in an effort to steal more advertisers’ digital video marketing money from rivals and to reach online shoppers in time for the holiday shopping season.
New ad formats
At a press conference held on Monday at Meta’s New York City office at 30 Hudson Yards, several executives from the company’s Global Business Group unveiled a number of new ad products for Facebook and Instagram while highlighting opportunities in the platforms’ vertical video product Reels, Instagram’s explore pages, and users’ individual profiles. The stock is currently available in the United States.
The move theoretically should help drive down Meta’s ad pricing and make it easier for advertisers to accept how Apple’s anti-tracking rules have affected Facebook and Instagram ads’ performance. It opens up inventory on almost every page of the Instagram and Facebook applications. At the press conference, Meta executives kept the cost of the ads for this new inventory a secret.
What are the new ad formats?
The new ad formats are divided into a few categories:
In-profile ads on Instagram: Users that read through a creator’s personal profile feed will see advertisements that are pertinent to that particular profile. There will only be adult-only public profiles in the mix. The advertising that appears on creators’ profiles will initially be beyond their control.
Ads on the Instagram Explore page: The main grid of images and videos on the Explore tab, also called the Discover page, will now contain advertisements. The same auction that all other ads are acquired through is used to place these ads.
Multi-advertiser ad carousels on Instagram:
A carousel of related adverts for brands and items with comparable content will be displayed below the one the user just viewed if they interact with an ad by clicking the link or making a purchase. The goal of this is to seize the attention of those who are allegedly in the “shopping mindset.” To eliminate duplicate advertising in the carousel, Meta presently does not offer any controls for advertisers to block or permit displaying alongside particular firms, instead depending on its machine learning. Additionally, there is no separate reporting for this format so that advertisers can see the ads that were paired with their own.
Post-loop ads in Facebook Reels: Instead of starting the movie over after a user has finished watching a Reel the first time, a four-second advertisement will play.
Ad carousels at bottom of Facebook Reels: While viewing a Reel, a carousel of advertisements from a single advertiser will appear underneath the creator’s name and caption. The carousel of buttons will allow users to click through it to learn more about the company or item from the video.
Integrating AR into in-feed ads and Stories: Meta is now allowing marketers to employ augmented reality in their advertisements, such as allowing users to pull up a 3D rendering of a product in their home using their phone’s camera. Meta is doing this by taking a long-forgotten leaf out of Snap’s playbook.
Meta is increasing its ad spending following its failure in social commerce.
For the majority of brands, fourth-quarter campaigns are focused on increasing conversions. However, Meta is investing in additional channels to attract customers after retreating from its bottom-of-the-funnel, conversion-focused social commerce activities on Instagram and Facebook earlier this year.
Media buyers’ gripe with Reels
Media buyers claim that scalability is the main factor driving them to choose Meta’s platforms when allocating their customers’ vertical video budgets, which puts Reels in an uphill struggle when it comes to focusing on views from particular demographics.
“Targeting algorithm effectiveness [on Reels] is still up for debate. When it comes to algorithms that drive visibility, TikTok appears to be ahead. At that moment, audience scalability through the Meta footprint becomes the primary draw to Reels, said Seth Hargrave, CEO of the media buying firm Media Two Interactive. “The demographic base of Meta skews older, and its reach is obviously much broader than that of TikTok.”
With the new inventory, Meta executives appear to be focusing more on ad performance than just on the audience. Given the historical setting, some people are dubious.
If Reels’ goal as an ad unit is to improve performance, Heins asserted, “we haven’t seen Reels deliver on that”.
Expanding the revenue opportunities for creative
Nada Stirratt, Meta’s vice president of global business in The Americas, argued that the inventory will provide creators more chances to profit from their Reels during the event. For films featuring ads in both the post-loop and carousel formats, Meta will split the revenue with Facebook Reels creators at a rate of 45% to Meta and 55% to creators. For Instagram Reels, these formats have not yet been made available. According to a spokeswoman, Meta will test different rev-share models for in-profile advertisements during the beta launch, but there is no established breakdown at this moment.
In Facebook Reels, content producers can utilize the block list feature in Meta to stop specific ad types from showing up in their content as post-loop commercials or in the carousel of advertisements at the bottom of a video. However, creator controls are not yet accessible for advertisements on profile feeds, and users are informed about ads in the same way as they are on the home page.
The number of control creators will have over which advertisements are featured on their profiles has been updated to reflect this post.
