• by Colin Kirkland , October 11, 2023

To help brands increase the performance of their ad creative ahead of the year's first AI-powered holiday shopping season, Meta has announced new features for Reels ads, including text, template and music optimizations as well as brand-suitability updates.

With Reels plays exceeding 200 billion per day on Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta, the company is heavily focused on making the Reels ads as engaging as possible.

Meta is adding Collection Ads, a singular large video or image ad format accompanied by smaller images.

Collection Ads is designed to allow users to swipe seamlessly through a brand’s product images. The format has already launched on Instagram, but is now testing on Facebook. TikTok launched its own “Collection Ads” format back in 2021.

Meta has also launched multi-destination Reels carousel ads on Facebook and Instagram Reels, which will allow businesses to direct users to multiple product pages through the same ad in an attempt to increase sales. 

In addition, the company has announced Swipe Left functionality for Facebook and Instagram Reels ads “to help move people from passive viewers to active shoppers of Reels ads,” it says. The feature makes it possible for users to more easily swap between products in an ad.

In terms of artificial intelligence, Meta is continuing development on its Advantage+ creative suite by introducing more automation solutions for Reels ads like Creative Optimization, new auto-generated templates that convert horizontal media to vertical media, 3D motion and depth, aspect ratio variance, and filters to sharpen color on images and improve video resolution.

“We automatically show an optimized version of your creative or your original creative based on what we predict will have the best results,” the company says about the new tool.

The Advantage+ suite will also feature a new music selection tool available to all advertisers on iOS. The tool automatically applies free music from Meta's Sound Collection library to an ad in a way that’s supposed to match the desired message.

Meta is also introducing brand suitability updates, adding its brand suitability Inventory Filter control and its third-party brand-suitability verification solution via Zefr to Facebook and Instagram Reels. The solution originally launched for the Facebook Feed in March, then expanded to Instagram in July. 

“AI is one of the driving forces behind these industry-leading solutions,” Meta wrote in a blog post from July.

“Inventory filter allows advertisers to control the type of content that shows up next to their ads (aligned with the GARM Brand Suitability Framework), while third-party verification, currently offered through Zefr, acts as independent measurement and provides advertisers with transparency and reporting on content adjacent to ads,” the company added in this week’s announcement. “A simple way to think about brand suitability differences varying between brands is a toy company vs. an adult clothing company: the content these two brands would be comfortable having their ads appearing next to may be quite different.”