Meta’s Q2 earnings call highlighted a clear trend: video is increasingly the way people want to engage and connect. As we shared on the call, Instagram video time spent was up more than 20%1 year-over-year globally and 20%2 year-over-year on Facebook in the US. AI is playing a significant role here, improving our ability to show people content that they’re going to find interesting and useful, which is increasing time spent on our platforms, in particular with video.
For advertisers, this means video is no longer just a content option, but a business imperative to drive performance. In this blog post, we’ll explore three insights across Meta platforms that marketers should tap into to drive incremental performance with video.
Video Generation 2.0: The Next Phase of AI-Powered Creative Diversification
The Insight: As AI and automation play a growing role in digital advertising, having a robust creative diversification strategy has become the best lever to finding the most relevant audiences. By uploading multiple creatives with different themes and messages, businesses can leverage Meta’s AI to test and optimize at a scale that isn’t possible manually. For smaller advertisers with fewer resources, tapping into generative AI to build more creative variety, including video content, can be a game changer. Nearly 2 million advertisers3 are now using our video generation features – with small and medium-sized businesses seeing strong adoption of image animation in particular. This speaks to how these tools help businesses who have fewer resources to develop creative, while larger advertisers will continue to work with agencies as valuable partners in helping apply these new tools to drive performance.
The Inspiration: During testing phases, major brands have unlocked transformative results using these tools. For example, Ben & Jerry’s, the iconic ice cream brand, ran an Advantage+ catalog ad campaign enhanced with Meta’s generative AI background image generation feature. This campaign focused on their non-dairy frozen dessert product line and was targeted to US adults. By leveraging this AI-driven creative diversification, Ben & Jerry’s achieved a 7% increase in link clicks and a 6.5% lower cost per link click compared to their usual creative assets. This success highlights the power of AI-enhanced video and creative tools ability to accelerate campaign results with minimal resource investment.
What Businesses Can Do Today: Opt into Advantage+ creative to take advantage of a range of creative tools that support a diversification strategy, including video genAI tools. We’re already seeing a meaningful percent of our ad revenue coming from campaigns using one of our Generative AI features.
Harness the Power of Reels + Creators: Tapping into Cultural Moments for Maximum Impact
The Insight: With the continued rise of short form video consumption, connecting with customers on Facebook and Instagram through Reels has become table stakes. 79% of people surveyed say they’ve purchased a product or service after watching Reels. Meta's Q2 results also show continued Reels momentum, with video time spent increasing YoY. Savvy advertisers are upleveling their Reels strategy by tapping creators who are masters of creating entertaining, digestible, and relatable video content. By mixing creator content into always-on campaigns with partnership ads, advertisers can reduce acquisition costs by 19% and increase brand lift by 71%, on average4.
The Inspiration: To effectively tap into the growing K-beauty momentum and reach new audiences, skincare brand Anua utilized creator-generated Reels with partnership ads. The brand saw strong results across brand, buzz and conversion lift:
What Businesses Can Do Today: To help maximize the performance of your Reels, integrate the creative essentials: 1) build for vertical with 9×16; 2) add audio; 3) build in the safe zone (ensure your key message isn’t overlapped by the Reels user interface). By adding 9:16 video with audio to always on strategies, on average advertisers have seen 34.5% lower CPA than image ads on Reels5. Second, integrate creators into the mix. Instagram's creator marketplace is a great place to start to find creators that match your brand voice. When searching for creators, we recommend you start with broad keywords that meet your requirements, then add filters to narrow your search.
Optimize for What Your Business Values Most
The Insight: In an era of AI-enabled advertising where the best performing campaigns are those that have the flexibility to find the most relevant customers, our goal is to help advertisers guide our ads system to optimize for the outcomes that are most important to their business. That’s why this quarter we introduced updates to tools like Value Optimization and Value Rules, allowing advertisers to optimize for the outcome they care about the most while still benefiting from performance improvements from AI model advancements like GEM. These tools work across different placements and ad formats on our apps, and empower you to make sure your creative assets, including video, are working to drive the conversions that matter most for your particular business.
The Inspiration: Ull Popken, a leading plus-size clothing retailer headquartered in Germany, leveraged Value Rules within Advantage+ sales campaigns to better target high-value audience segments. By tailoring bids to focus on specific demographics with higher lifetime value, their campaign achieved remarkable results–one campaign delivered 12X more incremental content views compared to campaigns without Value Rules, while also reducing the cost per add to cart by 49%.
Simone Plate, Team Lead of Performance Marketing at Ull Popken, shared, “Our business benefits from conversions generated by people of all ages and genders. With Value Rules, we tailored campaigns to focus on audience segments with higher lifetime value, reducing cost per new customer by half.”
What Businesses Can Do Today: Get started with our collection of value products to tell us what you want to achieve. Couple this with a robust creative diversification strategy that taps into the power of video to give our AI the most flexibility to find the customers you value most.
The Video-First Future is Now
The future of advertising is video-first, AI-enabled, and culturally connected. By implementing these three strategic approaches, your business can transform video from a content format into a powerful lever for sustainable growth on Meta's platforms.
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