Meta announced a suite of new advertising solutions across its platforms during the IAB NewFronts 2025 presentation, expanding options for brands to connect with creators and consumers through trending content.

The company is testing “Reels trending ads,” a new short-form video solution that delivers advertisements immediately after popular creator-made content. Brands can choose to place ads next to overall trending Reels or within specific topical categories such as beauty or sports.

“When your ad is at the center of the cultural conversation, this helps break through and capture your customer’s attention,” Meta stated in its announcement. The new format leverages Meta’s brand safety controls, defaulting to the “limited” setting of its Inventory Filter.

Enhanced Creator Marketplace Features

To address advertiser demand for real-time insights, Meta is testing “Trends in Instagram’s Creator Marketplace,” enabling businesses to access cultural insights and create relevant content for partnership campaigns. The feature uses AI to identify trending topics on Instagram Reels.

The company is also beginning to test a Creator Marketplace Discovery API for Instagram, designed to help businesses discover and connect with creators at scale through agencies and third-party tools.

Meta introduced several new ad formats, including the ability to run Partnership Ads with one partner featured in the ad’s header on Facebook and Instagram, giving marketers options to leverage creators’ authentic voices.

The company is also testing Facebook Live Partnership ads, allowing advertisers to boost live videos in partnership with creators.

Image source: Meta

Video Ads Expansion

Meta has begun rolling out Video Expansion on Facebook Reels, which automatically adjusts video creative assets by generating unseen pixels to expand aspect ratios, creating what the company describes as a “more immersive and native experience.”

Additionally, Meta is testing video ads on Threads following April’s global expansion of advertising on the platform to all eligible advertisers. The test will allow a select group of advertisers to use 16:9 or 1:1 video ad creative between organic content in Threads feeds.

Business Performance Context

The ad format expansion comes amid strong financial performance for Meta, which reported Q1 2025 revenue of $42.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s business is “performing very well” with improvements to recommendation systems leading to increased engagement across platforms.

Meta’s advertising business has shown continued strength, with Family of Apps ad revenue reaching $41.4 billion in Q1, up 16% year-over-year, alongside a 5% increase in ad impressions and a 10% increase in average price per ad.

Meta’s rival TikTok also unveiled advertising features at this year’s IAB NewFronts. TikTok introduced Pulse Core, an expansion of its TikTok Pulse suite that places advertisers alongside trending user-generated content, and announced new premium publisher partnerships with F1, Red Bull Media, and Warner Bros Discovery.