Meta has unveiled a range of new ad updates at the NewFronts 2025, including improved creator collaboration tools, a new means to tap into trending Reels, updated Partnership Ads, video ads on Threads, and more.
Yeah, there’s a bit to take in, and if you’re looking to maximize your promotions, you do want to be taking in the details on these ones.
First off, Instagram’s now testing out Reels trending ads, which will enable brands to display their promotions alongside trending Reels content.
As per Meta:
“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.”
It’s very similar to TikTok’s “Pulse” ads, providing high-value placement in popular content on any given day. Which could be a great way to boost brand awareness and resonance, aligning your promotions with topic-aligned clips.
Trending content is also the focus of Meta’s latest update to its Creator Marketplace hub, which is getting its own trends display in-stream.
“Trends leverages AI to identify topics that are trending on Instagram Reels, we then rank the trends based on a variety of metrics and showcase relevant reels content along with recommended creators.”
As you can see in this example, the new trends listing will provide a basic overview of each topic, along with a quick link to relevant clips for added context. You’ll be able to sort the listing by region, topic, and in 24-hour, 7-day, or 30-day timeframes, which will help to guide your thinking on creative options, as well as highlighting potential creators to work with.
In addition to this, Meta’s also adding more indicators on creator profiles in Creator Marketplace, show how their past brand collaborations have performed.
The updated display will show stats like hook-rate and interaction rate to better inform your creator outreach.
Meta’s also expanding its AI-powered creator content recommendations to Facebook.
Back in March, Meta added content recommendations within its Partnership Ads Hub in Ads Manager, which highlights relevant organic content that mentions your brand, and is also likely to perform well as a paid promotion.
Now, the same will come to Facebook, providing extra opportunities to creator collaborations.
And lastly, on Creator Marketplace, Meta’s confirmed that it’s testing a Creator Marketplace API, which will eventually provide expanded opportunities for businesses to discover and connect with creators.
Meta’s also announced an update to its Partnership Ads that will enable brands to display their brand handle or not on Partnership promotions.
As you can see in the first example here, currently, Partnership Ads display the handles of the brand and collaborator at the top of the post. But now, that’ll be an optional setting, which could make these posts seem more organic in-stream.
Which may also be more deceptive, with the small “Sponsored” tag in place of the location marker now the signal that this is an add. Obviously, Meta’s found that users don’t respond as well to more blatantly tagged promotions, but it feels like a slight step backwards in regard to transparency.
Meta’s also testing Facebook Live Partnership ads, with an option to boost user-generated content, “so advertisers can boost live videos in partnership with creators as a partnership ad.”
That’ll provide another way to tap into the popularity of creators in the app, and the engagement of live streams, which will also add incentive for more creators to go live on Facebook.
It’s also testing video ads for Threads, following on from its recent launch of Threads ads for all businesses.
“Soon, a small number of advertisers will test 16:9 or 1:1 video ad creative delivered in between pieces of organic content in Threads feed to offer businesses a new way to engage with their audience.”
Threads video ads will autoplay when displayed in-stream, and will expand when clicked, with a CTA button along the bottom of the playback window.
In some ways, it feels like Meta may be pushing a bit hard on Threads ads, given that static ads have just been rolled out on the app, and video may be more disruptive to the user experience. But really, we’re mostly used to ads like this anyway, so I doubt that they’ll have a significant negative impact, even in video form.
Meta recently announced that Threads is now up to 350 million monthly active users.
Finally, Meta’s rolling out AI-powered video expansion on Facebook Reels, which will automatically adjust your video creative assets by generating “unseen pixels” in each video frame to expand the aspect ratio.
The option will make it easier to scale your campaigns across different formats, without having to film new content, though I would assume that results will vary, and some of those expansions won’t look as seamless as this.
A heap of new Facebook, IG, and Threads options to consider, which could factor into your planning.
You can read more about Meta’s NewFronts announcements here.
