Meta expands ad offerings across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads with focus on creators, AI, and video

Meta unveiled a series of advertising updates across its platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—during its presentation at IAB NewFronts 2025, reflecting its push to evolve brand engagement through creator partnerships, AI-driven insights, and new video formats.

One of the key announcements is the testing of Reels Trending Ads on Instagram. Similar in concept to TikTok’s Pulse program, these ads allow brands to place promotions directly after popular creator Reels or within topically aligned Reels categories like beauty or sports. The new ad format is supported by Meta’s brand safety tools, including its default “limited” inventory filter.

To support this, Meta is introducing a Trends feature within Instagram’s Creator Marketplace. Powered by AI, the tool identifies and ranks trending Reels content based on engagement metrics and suggests creators for potential partnerships. Trends can be filtered by topic, region, and time frame (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days), offering advertisers real-time insight into cultural conversations.

Meta is also refining how advertisers can evaluate creators. The Creator Marketplace now includes performance indicators like hook rate and interaction rate, and testing is underway on a Creator Marketplace API. This will eventually allow brands and agencies to search for and evaluate creators at scale using third-party tools.

In terms of broader ad tools, Meta is expanding its Partnership Ads across Facebook and Instagram. Advertisers can now choose whether to display both the brand and creator handles in a post, or only one, potentially making the content appear more organic. A new format is also in testing: Facebook Live Partnership Ads, enabling brands to promote live-streamed content in collaboration with creators.

On Threads, which Meta reports now has 350 million monthly active users, the company is beginning to test video ads in 16:9 or 1:1 aspect ratios. These ads will autoplay between organic content and include clickable calls to action. While static ads only recently launched on Threads, the company is quickly expanding its ad surface to match user engagement trends.

Meta is also leveraging AI to streamline content creation and scaling. A new Video Expansion feature for Facebook Reels uses generative AI to automatically enhance aspect ratios by filling in additional pixels, allowing a single asset to adapt across different placements without manual editing.

In addition, Meta is bringing its AI-based creator content recommendations—previously exclusive to Instagram—to Facebook. These recommendations suggest high-performing organic content that brands can use in paid campaigns, helping advertisers identify which creator-led content might drive the best results.