Helping businesses grow with AI, messaging and video

At Meta, we’re focused on building products for businesses that meet people where they are. We're investing in a discovery ecosystem that generates connection with customers, demand for products and interest in brands.

Today, we’re announcing new ways for advertisers to reach customers in a range of ways based on how they are spending their time—whether through video, messaging, ads or AI-enhanced experiences—and updates on our ongoing efforts with industry partners.

Introducing new Facebook Reels ads and video ecosystem updates

People aren’t simply consuming Reels—they are actively engaging and having conversations around them. As we shared in Q2 earnings, we saw a more than 30% increase in the time people spent engaging with reels across Facebook and Instagram.

Audio is also an important hook to drive Reels engagement. To make it easier for businesses to create Reels ads, we are rolling out free, high-quality songs from our Meta Sound Collection that can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels. Businesses can select a song from our library or allow the app to automatically choose the best music for an ad based on its content.

To help businesses better connect with customers through Reels on Facebook, we’re launching a test of post-loop ads—4 to 10-second skippable and standalone video ads that play after a reel has ended. When the ad finishes playing, the original reel resumes and loops again. We’re also testing image carousel ads for Reels starting today. These horizontally-scrollable ads can include anywhere from 2 to 10 image ads and will be shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content.

Making campaigns more performant with AI

Artificial intelligence and automation are helping businesses learn and unlock value from their ads investment more quickly.

Meta Advantage Suite is becoming an essential tool for businesses looking for performance improvements thanks to sophistications in automation. In a recent test of 31 advertisers, we found that Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns led to a 17% improvement in cost per acquisition and a 32% increase in return on ad spend.

We are also rolling out Advantage custom audience, a new targeting automation product that leverages an advertiser’s Custom Audience to reach new and existing customers. This is similar to Lookalike audiences that find people who are likely to be interested in your business, except that Advantage custom audience goes beyond the 1%, 5% or 10% similarity ranges you are used to, while also prioritizing delivery of ads to people in your Custom Audience. This entire process is guided by AI and machine learning to help improve advertiser campaign performance with less manual effort.

Using AI for better business messaging conversations

We’re also bringing the power of AI to our business messaging and lead generation products to help businesses maximize their return on ads investment by making it easier to reach your customers.

Recently we launched conversion optimization for Click to Messenger ads. Typically, we show Click to Messenger ads to people who are most likely to initiate a conversation with a business on WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram Direct. With this update, we’re introducing the ability for advertisers to run Click to Messenger ads which will reach the people who are most likely to make a purchase in a thread.

We have also introduced a new ad format for lead generation that funnels customers to either Messenger or a form, depending on which one the customer is most likely to interact with. This personalization is a great way to help lead generation advertisers acquire more leads, save time and, ultimately, reduce costs.

Introducing new ad placements and formats on Instagram

To help businesses tell their story and reach new customers, we’re launching new ad placements and formats on Instagram. Starting today, advertisers can use these features to better connect with people on Instagram:

• Ads in Explore home and profile feed: Businesses can now place ads in Explore home, the grid that people see when they first arrive on the Explore tab. We are also beginning to test ads in profile feed, which is the feed experience that people can scroll through after visiting another account’s profile and tapping on a post. As a part of this test, we will experiment with a monetization opportunity that will allow eligible creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds, beginning with select U.S. creators.
• AI-powered multi-advertiser ads: When a person engages with an ad, we’ll deliver ads underneath what we think may be of interest, powered by machine learning. We've found that adding multi-advertiser contextual ads to existing Instagram feed ads campaigns outperformed running campaigns for the Purchase outcome compared to those that did not include multi-advertiser ads.¹

Educating more businesses and creators about the metaverse

As we build more opportunities for business and consumers to connect today, we’re also laying the groundwork for a transformational future. On Instagram, we are launching the open beta test of Augmented Reality (AR) ads in both Feed and Stories, through which brands can encourage people to interact with an effect through their surroundings, such as testing furniture in their home or test driving a car.

By giving businesses tools to create more personalized and immersive experiences today, we’ll help them drive performance and prepare for the metaverse. And to help businesses, creators and others prepare for the metaverse, we’ve partnered with Coursera to develop a free course: “What is the metaverse?”

This course explains what the metaverse is, what we know about it today and what it means for the future of work, play and life. We’re working with partners like Coursera to give people, businesses, creators and developers the tools needed to succeed as the metaverse takes shape.

The course will launch October 31, but anyone can pre-enroll for it today. Together, we will continue to build products that meet the evolving needs of people and businesses.

Working with the industry on video measurement

Meta also recently received accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC), an independent nonprofit organization that administers accreditation for media research and rating purposes, for first-party reporting of 2-second viewable mobile in-app video impressions on Facebook and Instagram Video ads. This accreditation validates that Meta’s measurement of viewable video impressions are compliant with industry standards, further underscoring our commitment to help advertisers better understand how their marketing helps grow their business.

Continuing our commitment to brand safety and suitability

We are starting testing for our content-based inventory filter for Facebook Feed and Instagram Feed as well as the third-party verification solution for Facebook Feed with our Meta Business Partner, Zefr. Both are substantial progress for our brand safety and suitability tools and are set to be broadly available in early 2023.

Yesterday, we shared these updates and more at a press event in New York. In addition to the news above, we're sharing additional resources today on our progress building privacy-enhancing technologies, how we're giving brands more control of how they appear on our platform and early insights on the future of shopping in the metaverse.