Meta Update: Short-form video ad boom (Patreon)

Reels is quickly becoming a major player in the short-form video advertising market aka TikTok mkt. 

In the first quarter of 2023, Reels accounted for 10.8% of Instagram impressions, up from 2.5% in 2022. This growth is being driven by a number of factors, including Reels' increasing popularity with users and advertisers, as well as Meta's efforts to make it easier for businesses to advertise on the platform.

While Reels is still playing catch-up to TikTok, it is gaining ground rapidly. In fact, some experts believe that Reels could eventually surpass TikTok as the leading short-form video platform. This is due in part to Meta's deep pockets and its ability to leverage its existing user base on Facebook and Instagram. However, it will also be important for Meta to continue to innovate and improve Reels in order to keep users engaged.

Moreover, their aggressive cost cutting and advanced marketing tools that are AI driven should be a boon to the business hence after the news today I decided to cover. 

Here are some more great details around what Meta have in the pipe:

• Meta recently announced new ad tools that use generative AI to create alternative ad copies through its AI Sandbox offering.
• Meta's new product follows the launch of its Advantage+ tool, which enables advertisers to upload up to 150 creatives for automated A/B testing.
• The use of data collected through Advantage+ could place AI Sandbox at an advantage against the generative AI tools by other digital ad platforms.
• Meta could enable advertisers to generate ad creatives through natural language queries alone and without any manually uploaded examples.
• In the future, Meta could offer end-to-end AI-generated campaigns with minimal human intervention.
• Meta's breadth of data could put it at a competitive advantage to TikTok, which relies on an ad creative dataset that mostly comprises short-form video content.
• Meta's relatively homogenous user experience could give it an advantage over Google, which seems to rely on specific ad formats for different properties.
• As AI enables more campaign automation, the consistency of ad formats across Facebook and Instagram could give Meta a competitive advantage to Google and others in generating creatives that perform across platforms.
• Meta has made meaningful contributions to the open-source AI community, developed in-house AI chips and an AI supercomputer, and experimented with consumer-facing AI.
• Meta's total monthly active user base growth has decelerated from 11% in 2020 to 7% in 2021 and 2% in 2022 but they hope to grow that soon.
• Meta's commercialization of AI has clearly benefited advertisers, but it remains to be seen whether Meta will remain compelling for consumers.