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E-commerce advertisers, the largest contributor to Meta’s ad growth, will now have the ability to create more video ads that can be adjusted to look like Reels with two new generative AI ad tools. The tech giant introduced the tools, called Video Expansion and Image Animation, on Tuesday at Advertising Week New York.
Meta is giving priority to video elements in ads across both Instagram and Facebook as video usage on the platforms grows. Video now accounts for 60% of time spent on Instagram and Facebook, Meta said.
For Q2, Meta reported total revenue of $39.07 billion, and 98% of it ($38.3 billion) came from selling ads. “Within ad revenue, the online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year over year growth, followed by gaming and entertainment and media,” Meta CFO Susan Li noted on the earnings call.
Video Expansion, currently in beta, adjusts the aspect ratio of a brand’s existing video creative to make it look like Instagram Reels by generating unseen pixels in each video frame to expand it without any help from humans, Meta said.
Meanwhile, with Image Animation, advertisers can generate video creative from a single image without any existing video assets on Instagram Reels, Meta said. Simply put, brands don’t have to have videos to start with.
Helen Ma, director for product management at Meta, told Retail Brew, the opportunity for AI to automatically transform banner and photo heavy creative, typically used by smaller DTC brands, into video is “big.”
“Maybe [smaller brands] aren’t ready yet to invest super heavily in creative,” Ma said. “It’s an opportunity to say, ‘I’m gonna stay at my core, but I’m gonna use AI to figure out how to then transform this in a video environment.’”
“Reels is fully sound on, fully full screen,” Ma added. “And, so, if you’re not shooting sound-on, full-screen creative, it’s not going to resonate as much. So now you don’t have to. You use the creative that you have. We add music to it, we make it move like video, and it resonates a lot more.”
The new video updates add to Meta’s suite of generative AI features available in Ads Manager Advantage+. Meta has begun rolling out the new features, and aims to make them more broadly available by early next year.