Creative sessions with Meta are always goldmines stacked with platform updates, quick strategy wins I wish I’d thought of earlier and pitch-ready stats. This one started off a little different.
Of course, the host of experts went on to take us through the exciting new product rollouts, however, what made this event different for me was distilled in a quote from Sarah-Jane Lowes from Droga5. She said, ‘you can’t ask an LLM to be ‘more random”. In a world (and industry) that is inundated with daily, sometimes even hourly AI updates, cheat sheets and courses, this short sentence said the most. Our favourite tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are great at solving issues, creating docs and decks based on context and inputs, but what they can’t do is create novelty; something that only true and inspired creative, that is produced by humans, can do. If you ask an LLM for a ‘fun’ or ‘creative’ idea for a new ad, there’s a high chance the person on the desk next to you will get a similar answer. Ask any of them for a number between 1 and 10 and it’ll probably be 7 (ask for another and it’ll probably be 3). We are, and should always be, the ‘difference makers’.
Enough with the philosophy, onto the facts and opportunities. People are spending 95% of their time on social media watching short form video, a figure that only reinforces the importance of including video content in your creative mix. Compounding this is the growth of Reels. According to Meta, it needed only 5 years post-launch to become the biggest video format, surpassing TikTok and YouTube in forecasted revenue. If you and your assets are static, you’re left with only a 5% window to grab a user’s attention, as Oliver Sewell, Director of the Northern Europe Small & Medium Business Group at Meta, explained. Every advertiser now needs these in their arsenal regardless of objective; Partnership Ads, Catalog Product Video and performant Reels.
So, what’s actually new and what we’re doing about it?
Partnership Ads: the creator angle is now impossible to ignore
Arguably the most mature and well-evidenced part of the summit was the Partnership Ads section, and the data Meta brought to support the creator-to-paid content pipeline was compelling. Using recommended creator content from the Partnership Ads Hub, rather than brand-owned assets, drove an 18% lower cost per conversion across an 8-test meta-analysis spanning NA, EMEA and APAC. That’s not a marginal difference; that’s a structural argument for building creator content into your paid strategy and not just treating it as a ‘nice to have’.
The Creator Marketplace update makes this more actionable than it’s ever been. Brands and agencies can now surface verified demographic, audience and engagement data for creators directly in-platform, and filter for those who have Partnership Ads experience and brand collaboration history. Creators can also upload content with ‘pre-permissions’ for brands to use, removing a lot of the admin that often slows things down when it comes to utilising content creators in campaigns. For agencies managing influencer spend on behalf of clients, removing the due diligence friction here is genuinely useful, and the TheFork case study demonstrated just how significant the impact can be. By layering creator-led Partnership Ads on top of usual ads, TheFork achieved an 82% lower cost per incremental conversion for total bookings, 59% lower for in-app restaurant bookings, and 76% lower when running organic search traffic alongside. Remarkable numbers, and a hospitality use case that resonates well with our client portfolio.
Catalog Product Video: relevance at SKU level
Further reinforcing the video-first message was the push around Catalog Product Video, which takes the logic of dynamic product ads and extends it into video format. The idea is simple: rather than serving a static product image, Meta uses automation and product ranking signals to deliver video creative matched to the most relevant SKU for each individual. Ad sets using Catalog Product Video saw 20% more conversions per dollar in Meta’s own analysis, with an additional 4% uplift when video was built following Reels creative best practices.
For ecommerce, hospitality and retail clients in particular, this offers a chance to show off a product or offering and for B2B advertisers, it’s a chance to educate. The scale, personalisation and discovery benefits are well established in dynamic ads; this is simply the video-native iteration of a proven social format.
Creative workflows: scaling without the chaos
One of the more practically useful updates shown was the evolution of creative workflows inside Ads Manager. Currently in testing, the new tooling allows you to upload multiple images and videos into a single ad unit, with format transformations handled automatically to reach more placements. On the surface, this might sound incremental. In practice, for teams managing large creative libraries across multiple clients, it’s a meaningful step toward removing the manual bottleneck between briefing and going live. Less time reformatting assets means more time thinking about why those assets should work in the first place.
Advantage+ Creative: from static to video, automatically
The headline product update for creative teams was the expansion of Advantage+ Creative’s video generation capabilities that’s now in beta. The feature does two distinct things: it can generate animated video from a single static image, and it can stitch multiple images into a dynamic, multi-scene video with text overlays. No video production budget required.
The performance data presented was hard to ignore. When more than 90% of campaign assets used the beta version of video generation, Meta observed a 10% higher CTR and 7.7% higher CVR compared to those that didn’t. For clients who have historically depended on static assets due to production constraints, this opens a genuine conversation about format diversification at pace.
Creative Insights: knowing when your creative is tired
The final update worth highlighting was account-level Creative Insights (still in testing); a dashboard that tracks creative fatigue over time and benchmarks your active themes against top-performing industry examples. It categorises your spend by theme (Human Connection, Product Experience, Social Proof, and so on) and surfaces where you’re under-indexed versus what the platform’s data suggests performs best in your vertical.
This is the feature that could become one of the most valuable in Ads Manager. Many 3rd party tools do similar things, but a native tool of this kind will be a game-changer. Creative fatigue is one of the most common performance drags we diagnose, and the ability to visualise it – with a timeline showing when new creatives were introduced relative to fatigue curves – gives both teams and clients a much cleaner conversation around refresh cadence.
The thread running through all of it
What made this summit feel super coherent and pointed, was the consistent underlying message: Meta is building tools to reduce the distance between creative concept and live, optimised, video-native ad delivery. The bet is that if the technical barriers are lower, better human creative thinking can fill the space. Sarah-Jane Lowes’ LLM comment wasn’t an aside, it was the thesis. The platforms are getting smarter at execution, but the brief is still on us. If you’d like to discuss any of the latest updates further, the just get in touch with our team.
