Meta opens its AI video ad tools to all advertisers

Meta opened its AI video advertising tools to all advertisers on October 6, making Advantage+ Creative's image-to-video generation generally available and widening access to Ads Creative Studio. Meta says video now accounts for more than 60% of the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram.

The announcement landed at Advertising Week New York 2026, which opened Monday at The Penn District, in a Meta for Business post. Advantage+ Creative now lets advertisers and agencies generate video from existing static assets, and Meta calls the feature generally available, meaning any advertiser can use it rather than a hand-picked group of testers. Meta's product page describes the tool as running inside Ads Manager, with previews, per-feature labels for the options that use generative AI, and switches an advertiser can turn off.

Ads Creative Studio is the second piece. Meta introduced the creative workspace over the summer and tested it with select partners, and it is now rolling out more broadly. Marketers can generate new video concepts and variations and edit them with controls for hooks, audio, clip length, text overlays, captions and end scenes. "Ads Creative Studio from Meta is a strong foundation for creative optimization," said Whitney Mortimer, a vice president and executive creative director at the agency Tinuiti, in the announcement.

Meta tied the tools to product catalogs, which matters most to small advertisers. Catalog advertisers can turn product images into product video at scale, and eligible beta advertisers can reach it through Advantage+ Creative video generation in Ads Manager and Product Video Creator in Commerce Manager. Meta also said it will scale smart product recommendations this fall, which read an ad's image, text and landing page to suggest other products from the same collection, or best sellers, to pair with the ad.

The Meta AI business assistant gained memory and context. Meta said each conversation now carries what an advertiser tried last quarter, its seasonality and the goals it stated, and it is testing importing strategy, voice and brand guidelines from the AI tools an advertiser already uses. Meta is testing agentic features that let the assistant plan and create a campaign, generate imagery and text, change targeting or budgets conversationally, and schedule recurring performance reports and alerts. Meta says advertisers who adopt the assistant's recommendations typically see 5% more conversions at the same cost per conversion.

The scale behind the release is Meta's own. On its Q2 2026 earnings call, Meta said its Advantage+ suite reached an annual revenue run-rate above $75 billion, and 9 million small businesses were using at least one AI ad creative tool. Adoption of image generation, which now produces creatives at scale from existing content, more than doubled that quarter.

The tools sit at the front of a longer plan. Meta is working toward letting an advertiser launch a full campaign from a product image and a budget, a target the Wall Street Journal reported aims to be met by the end of 2026, as summarized by Marketing Dive. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described the endpoint in a Stratechery interview: "you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out." Meta also expanded its Ads MCP server so third-party AI tools can build and manage campaigns, with each action gated behind advertiser permissions and approval.

For anyone who makes video, the practical effect is a lower floor on the simplest paid work. A creator or small business that needs a product spot with music, captions and a hook can now assemble it inside Ads Manager, and no separate subscription is listed for the creative features, so the cost sits in the ad spend. The same tools push paid video work toward concept, brand and the shoot a generator cannot stage, which is the part Meta's numbers do not reach.

Advantage+ Creative video generation and the expanded Ads Creative Studio are inside Ads Manager now; Meta says AI-enabled audience discovery arrives in Detailed Targeting by the end of the year. Advertising Week New York runs through October 8.