Meta releases new AI video and partnership ad tools

Earlier this week, Meta released a full-screen video tab on Facebook. Considering that the average user now spends 60% of their time on Facebook and Instagram watching video, decking out the video tab made a lot of sense.

However, Facebook's users aren't the ones keeping the lights on. That honor goes to its advertisers. So, as per usual, the user upgrade also comes with an advertiser upgrade.

These new advertiser features include standalone video ads, carousel ads, in-stream ads, overlay ads, and, most interestingly, AI video editing tools.

This isn't Meta's first foray into AI ad tools. More than 1 million advertisers created 15 million ads with them last month, and campaigns enhanced with AI had a 7.6% higher conversion rate. So, there is clear product-market fit here, and thus, room for new video tools.

The first of these tools is Video Expansion, the video form of the popular Image Expansion tool. Basically, Video Expansion generates unseen pixels in each video frame to expand the aspect ratio.

The second is Image Animation. As you can probably guess, this tool can turn your static images into videos.

Combine these tools with Meta's existing capabilities, and advertisers have themselves a pretty powerful AI arsenal.

Partnership tools

In addition to the AI tools, Meta is also making it easier for advertisers to partner with creators and influencer. This might actually turn out to be impactful than the AI upgrades, as Meta says that partnership ads have a 9.6% lower Cost Per Conversion, 4.3% higher Click Through Rate, and 11.8% higher Conversion Rate compared to campaigns with only carousel ads

So, Meta is now:

• Allowing advertisers to upload a creator image or video as a “hero” asset for collections ads in Ads Manager.

• Testing the ability to add a creator testimonial to a partnership ad.

• Creating a single place for all of your partnership ad tools, the Partnership Ads Hub.

Return to Zuck

Ads are often a dirty word for indie hackers, but with how crowded the "traditional" marketing methods of building in public and Product Hunt now are, it might be time for that to change. Nico Jeannen certainly thinks so, as does Jakob Greenfield.

To be clear, ads aren't a magic fix anymore than SEO, building in public, or side project marketing is. But, if you do it right, it can be insanely powerful.

Meta's ad algorithm is widely considered to be the best in the world, and AI is making it easy for anyone to run a decent ad.

If there was ever a time to give it a try, it'd be now.