Meta‘s Instagram wants to make it easier for marketers to buy ads that tap into viral moments on its short-form Reels videos.
Instagram announced that it is expanding Reels trending ads (RTA) inventory to add “TV & movies” as a new trending-content category alongside other new verticals like travel, business, and finance and investments. (Those join existing categories such as fashion, beauty, pets, autos and sports.) Instagram also launching new, limited-content lineups for “key cultural moments” such as Fashion Week, Formula 1 races, Black Friday and NFL games.
The news came at Meta’s 2026 NewFronts presentation Thursday, part of the digital marketing series of events taking place this week in New York City.
Meta also will introduce a new reserve-buying option (in a “limited alpha” test) designed to help advertisers “win share of audience” during a short window of up to 24 hours. “Built to capture the surge in engagement across our apps during tentpole events, like cultural moments, seasonal peaks and product launches, this high-visibility solution helps brands show up big when attention is highest,” according to Meta.
Brittany Humes, VP of media for Universal’s Focus Features, said that Instagram’s Reels trending ads help the studio “show up in the moments moviegoers are already leaning into — alongside the trends and creators shaping culture in real time.” Humes, in a statement provided by Meta, said, “Our RTA campaigns deliver meaningful, incremental reach and strong video engagement, while also lifting the outcomes that matter most to our business, from awareness and intent to ticket purchases.”
According to Meta’s analysis of 59 internal studies, Reels trending ads delivered an incremental 6.6 percentage point ad-recall lift on top of concurrent media compared with control groups with no Reels trending ads exposure.
Also at its NewFronts presentation, Meta said it is expanding the capabilities of the Advantage+ creative generative AI video tool, which allows advertisers to generate studio-style videos from single image assets. The enhanced features of Advantage+ will let brands create videos in the style of user-generated content (UGC) with avatars and voiceovers. The company also is testing new ways advertisers can enhance their existing or generated videos and images with AI-generated voiceovers for additional context. In addition, Meta is expanding access to generative-AI voiceover translation capabilities to more advertisers, and it’s introducing translations for text in image overlays.
The goal is to make it easier to produce video ads “with engaging storytelling across a variety of campaign needs, from scaling content for localized markets to representing unique products, while offering flexibility for brands of all sizes and objectives,” Meta said.
Meta provided an animation showing an example of Advantage+ creating different AI-generated videos using image assets:
Other announcements from Meta:
- For catalog advertisers, the company is developing tools that automatically transform product catalogs into immersive video ads. Meta also is testing new catalog product video designs on Instagram Reels that “adapt based on the available creative assets.” With this approach, Meta’s ads system will select the best video layout for each product, creating “a more immersive shopping experience for people browsing Reels, while helping improve advertiser performance,” the company said. According to Meta, campaigns with catalog product video that delivered to the Reels placement had 33% higher incremental conversions than campaigns that didn’t.
- Meta is introducing enhanced target-audience filtering for the 1.5 million-plus creators in Instagram’s creator marketplace, designed to makes it easier for businesses to identify creators who are a good match for their marketing goals. Meanwhile, Facebook Collabs are now available in the Partnership Ads Hub and will soon be added to recommended creator content types.