Meta used its Brand Building Summit on October 15, 2026 to announce four changes to how brands buy attention on Facebook and Instagram. The most immediately useful for most advertisers is the expansion of Reels Trending Ads.
Reels Trending Ads now has 15 always-on topics
Reels Trending Ads places an advertiser’s ad immediately after the most-watched and most culturally relevant Reels on Facebook and Instagram, rather than targeting a demographic and hoping the placement lands somewhere reasonable. Meta opened the format to all advertisers globally in September 2025 after an initial beta.
The October 2026 update takes the topic list to 15 always-on standard options, adding Home & Garden and Spanish-language content to the categories already available, and introduces seasonal lineups built around the holidays and the start of the football and basketball seasons. Meta also said custom audience exclusions are coming later this year, which will let brands keep chosen audiences out of campaigns using the format — a control that has been missing.
On performance, Meta said campaigns that included Reels Trending Ads delivered action intent up more than 5 percentage points versus control groups and an incremental 5-point lift in unaided brand awareness. The company did not publish how many campaigns or which markets those figures cover, and it did not list all 15 topics or confirm that every topic is available in every market. Treat the lift figures as vendor-reported.
Ads Super Burst goes to general availability
Ads Super Burst lets an advertiser book a concentrated window of 3 to 24 hours, with optional category exclusivity, described by Meta as reaching audiences at “TV-like scale.” It moves to general availability during October in phases. Meta’s test figures: median ad recall up 2.9 points, intent up 0.6 points, and a median of 34 million people reached per flight — which Meta characterises as about 14% of US online adults in a single day. The format suits launches, live events and anything with a short, fixed moment rather than an evergreen campaign.
First Impression Ads and a new video metric
First Impression Ads put a brand in the very first ad slot when someone opens the Facebook app. This is an early test limited to the United States, with one brand per day, and Meta published no results.
Meta is also testing Aggregated View Time, an alpha-stage measurement that counts total time spent with a brand across a week rather than counting individual video views. Meta’s supporting research claims that five seconds accumulated over a week drove 32% more offline sales than a single five-second view. If that framing holds up, it changes how short-form video campaigns should be planned: repeated small exposures would matter more than a single complete view.
What to do with this
For a small advertiser, the practical takeaway is the Reels Trending Ads topic list plus the coming audience exclusions, since those are available without a bespoke buy. Ads Super Burst is worth testing only if you have a dated moment to build around. First Impression Ads is not available to most advertisers yet. And Aggregated View Time is a measurement change, not a targeting one — do not rebuild a campaign around an alpha metric.
Sources
- Meta for Business, “Meta Brand Building Summit: New Ways to Help Marketers Build Unforgettable Brands on Meta”: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/meta-brand-building-summit-2026
- Search Engine Land, “Meta introduces new brand advertising formats across Facebook and Instagram”: https://searchengineland.com/meta-introduces-new-brand-advertising-formats-across-facebook-and-instagram-496608
- Social Media Today, “Meta offers enhanced ad campaign exposure”: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-offers-enhanced-ad-campaign-exposure/833171/
- Relevant Audience, “Meta Brand Building Summit: Ads Super Burst goes GA”: https://www.relevantaudience.com/meta/meta-brand-building-summit-ads-super-burst/
