• by Colin Kirkland , 5 hours ago

At Meta's Brand Building Summit, the tech giant shared AI ad updates on Reels and Threads that are designed to help brands reach their target audiences during culturally relevant moments throughout the upcoming holiday season.

Advertisers with a Meta sales representative can now begin experimenting with Reels trending ads, which use AI to curate trending and culturally relevant short-form video inventory for brands running campaigns across Meta’s family of apps.

“Available lineups include all overall trending content or specific categories like animals & pets, beauty & fashion, cars, sports, with more to come next year,” the company says, adding that early tests of Reels trending ads drove 20% unaided awareness, outperforming TikTok Pulse by 6%.

On Threads, Meta is also rolling out new ad features focused on connecting brands with current culture.

The social media company is testing 4:5 rendering for single image and video ads, as well as carousel ads on the X-copycat app.

Meta says that it soon will begin testing its Advantage+ catalog ads and app ads campaigns on Threads as well.

In addition, brands no longer need a Threads profile to run ads on the platform.

Advertisers can now use their Instagram account for Threads ads, or use an existing Facebook or Instagram post to create ads on Threads via Ads Manager.

As for ad targeting, Meta is launching “value rules,” which allow advertisers to guide Meta's AI in order to focus ad delivery on the audiences they most want to target.

Available now for sales and app campaigns, as well as awareness and engagement objectives, value rules have driven 2x more high-value conversions compared to regular campaigns, Meta says.

With the removal of detailed targeting exclusions, value rules provide brands with an additional option to manually impact Meta's AI targeting systems.