Meta pitches advertisers on tools to help with shrinking user attention spans at NewFronts

Comedian Roy Wood Jr. returned to host Meta’s NewFront on Thursday and called the presentation the “advertising version of the Golden Globes,” noting that attendees could look forward to alcohol consumption.

While Wood did host the New York shindig again, as did comedian Nikki Glaser with the Globes this year, the NewFronts are far too buttoned-up to truly be akin to the sauced-up awards show. Wood, like comedian Tiffany Haddish at Tubi, ribbed the audience for their lackluster response to the comedy meant to liven up the event. (We can debate if the Clios, the One Show, or the Effies would be the Globes to Cannes Lions’s Oscars another time.)

The difficulty in getting audiences to engage and pay attention is something marketers are all too familiar with, and something Meta execs flicked at throughout the presentation ahead of highlighting new trending Reels ads, a redesigned partnership ads hub inside Instagram’s creator marketplace, generative AI tools, and product video tools.

“Attention spans [are] decreasing and shrinking, but the processing power of our brain is also increasing,” Jimmie Stone, VP and global head of Creative Shop at Meta, said. “Imagine it takes 0.4 seconds for us to register a positive or negative response to a mobile ad. That’s why we say six is the new 60.”

Given audiences’ changing attention spans, marketers should rethink their approach, moving from “linear, simple, neat stories” to a wide breadth of content that can be “shared, reshared, and reshaped” as they “accumulate attention one second at a time,” Stone said. “That is, today, the essence of modern brand building. We call this ‘compound branding.’”

Meta pitched the company’s tools and updates as a way to help marketers execute on this evolution throughout the NewFront, which also, once again, featured Wood playing a game with creators. This time it was hot takes from Soft Bar founder Carl Radke, FundamentalCo partner Jenna Lyons, and creative strategist Dara Denney.

Cultural relevance: The company is adding new Reels trending ads for events like Fashion Week, F1, Black Friday, and NFL games in a bid to help brands be part of cultural conversations on Facebook and Instagram and, ultimately, get brands closer to culture. At the same time, the company has “improved tools and insights in Instagram’s creator marketplace,” according to the company, as well as redesigned its partnership ads hub.

Generative AI tools: Meta is assisting marketers with video asset generation, adding new “translation features, including video voice-over, and UGC-style videos with avatars,” per the company, to help in delivering the personalization expected of marketers and algorithms today.

“Our systems are now so sophisticated that they are capable of connecting the right content to the right person in the right millisecond of decision,” Stone said. “But to do that, they need a rich, diverse library of creative content to draw from. When you feed the system with differentiated video, grounded in your ethos, but varied in formats and messaging, AI does the heavy lifting. Your brand [is] personalized at scale.”

Video catalog: Meta is “testing new tools that automatically create immersive product videos from an advertiser’s catalog,” according to the company, in an effort to meet the myriad video needs of marketers today.