• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

With half the world's population using Meta's family of apps, the social media powerhouse is still focused on helping brands tap into cultural conversations.

Ahead of its NewFronts presentation on Thursday, the company announced that it is testing “Trending Ads” on Reels, as well as new creator marketing solutions on Facebook and Instagram, and the addition of video ads on Threads.

Currently in testing, Reels Trending Ads are a new content targeting product designed to “deliver ads immediately after the most popular, engaging creator-created Reels” across Meta's platforms, according to the company.

Similar to TikTok's "Pulse" ad suite, "brands may choose to run their ads next to overall top trending Reels or top trending topical lineups such as beauty, sports and more content lineups in the future,” Meta explains.

Meta says that advertisers are constantly asking for further access to real-time insights and trends (like “spring nails” or “festival vibes”), so the company has also begun testing “Trends” in Instagram's Creator Marketplace, in order to help businesses to create culturally relevant creator content for their partnership ad campaigns.

"Trends leverages AI to identify topics that are trending on Instagram Reels,” Meta says. “We then rank the trends based on a variety of metrics and showcase relevant reels content along with recommended creators.”

Partnering advertisers with creators on Reels is also a key area of focus for Meta right now, as 53% of people agree they are more likely to purchase an item if it has been promoted by a creator on Reels, according to an internal survey.

Building off its recent launch of AI-powered creator content recommendations on Instagram within the Partnership Ads Hub, Meta is now expanding the feature to Facebook. A beauty brand that has visibility into their organic branded content in the hub, for example, will receive automatic suggestions for which content to leverage in partnership ads campaigns.

Meta is also planning to run a limited test of a Creator Marketplace Discovery API for Instagram, inviting chosen partners to search for creators and gather insights to help find the right creator for their next campaign.

In addition, marketers will soon see AI-powered keyword search suggestions, hook rate, interaction rate and a creator's past partners.

Furthermore, Meta is currently testing Facebook Live Partnership ads with the option to boost user-generated content. This will give advertisers the ability to boost live videos in partnership with creators as a partnership ad.

Advertisers will begin to see “Video Expansion” on Facebook Reels as well, a tool designed to help brands unlock enhanced performance from their video assets by adjusting video creative by automatically generating unseen pixels in each video frame to expand the aspect ratio. The feature was built to make video look more immersive and native to the chosen platform.

Meta is also pushing forward with ads on its newest app, Threads. Having recently started testing ads with Wendy's and GroupM, expanding Threads ads to all eligible advertisers across the globe, Meta is now beginning to test in-app video ads.

Soon, a small number of brands will be invited to test 16:9 or 1:1 video ad creative delivered in between pieces of organic content in the Threads feed, the company says.