Meta’s 7 Rules for Threads Ads

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are sitting the starters:

↘️ META: $6.78 | ↘️ TIKTOK: $1.62 | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $10.72

In this week’s edition: 

• 🤖 New study: how relevant is ChatGPT’s ad delivery?

• TikTok is tops for social shopping—but people check Reddit before they shop AI 🛍️

• 🧪 This publisher sold ads aimed at AI agents. One LLM has already blocked them.

But first…

🧵Meta’s 7 Rules for Threads Ads

As Meta pushes Threads further into its advertising ecosystem, it’s also starting to define what good creative looks like on the platform. Here are the 7 rules you should be implementing now:

• Caption is key. Image, video, and carousel ads with text have performed significantly better than those without.

• Keep captions short. Anything over 80 characters risks truncation, so front-load the hook and write to spark a reply.

• Jump on trends. Cultural moments and current events already top of mind outperform evergreen messaging.

• Humor works. Humorous content earns more views on Threads.

• Communicate human to human. Personal and conversational beats a scripted brand tone. This is the biggest shift from how creative usually gets built for other placements.

• Know your formats. This is what’s supported: single image, single video, carousel. Aspect ratio: 1.91:1 to 9:16. Anything taller than 4:5 gets center cropped to 4:5 (carousel crops to 1:1). Recommended resolution: 1440 x 1800 video, 1440 x 1440 carousel. Caption: up to 2,200 characters, up to 30 hashtags. Headline: up to 250 characters, aim for one line at roughly 40. Carousel: 2 to 10 cards, unique landing page per card supported.

• Know your limitations. URL links in captions are not tappable, so drive clicks through the headline and CTA. And closed captions on video are not yet supported, so burn in any critical text.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta is gradually rolling out new formats throughout this quarter on Audience Network, including:

• Increased product-catalog support, improved product carousels, and shoppable mid-cards and end-cards in Advantage+ catalog ads, with promotional metadata.

• Rewarded ads now support image and carousel creative in addition to video.

• App install end cards now carry additional metadata (ratings, reviews, and promos).

🎯 Meta added the option to create exclusion-only audiences for Meta ad sets, providing another way to omit specific people from ad targeting. Unlike a regular custom audience, an exclusion-only custom audience cannot be used to include people in your audience. The option can be used as a permanent guardrail against accidental inclusion when utilizing custom audiences.

🛒 As of June, Meta began turning on "Product Browsing" by default for “eligible ads” within Ads Manager's Destination tab.

• When users tap an ad's call-to-action button, this feature displays a personalized in-app shopping experience—featuring relevant product details, recommendations, and catalog collections—before directing them to your website.

• Advertisers can opt out by toggling off "Product Browsing" under Personalized Destinations.

📺 Meta’s Live Video Ads for Facebook and Instagram, originally introduced in June, are expected to fully roll out by the end of this month.

📈 Meta is updating its ROAS goal options, giving advertisers the flexibility to maximize number of conversions at a set ROAS target, while also choosing whether or not to let Meta sometimes go above your goal to deliver higher volume.

🔎 Google is planning to roll out a new benchmarking feature to help you figure out the health of your campaign and website performance relative to competitors. That’s right: no need to go searching for the right 3rd party vendor to dig up those top level competitor comparisons. GA4 will soon allow advertisers to compare campaign performance against anonymized averages from similar businesses. Here’s what we know:

• This is an announced feature to be added to GA4 alongside an upgrade to the Google Ads UI Dashboard AI-driven data visualization, all part of their upgraded Ask Advisor AI.

• Neither feature is fully rolled out with the Google Ads updates in Beta and the GA4 upgrades pending.

👉 Starting to experiment with PMax Lead Gen? Google has published three new Help Center pages detailing:

• Campaign settings for Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals.

• Targeting options for pay-per-lead campaigns.

• Best practices for maximizing performance.

📺 YouTube appears to be testing a new mobile ad format that displays static image ads during horizontal video playback. A sponsored image ad is overlaid on part of the screen while a video continues playing in landscape mode. Unlike traditional pre-roll or mid-roll video ads, the image doesn’t pause or replace the content being watched.

⏰ TikTok has expanded Focused View to allow advertisers to optimize specifically for 15-second video completion rate. This optimization is a new way to drive stronger completion rates by extending the attention of audiences who are already leaning in. TikTok says early results show an 85% lift in Video Completion rate compared to non-optimized campaigns. TikTok recommends using when video completion is a KPI, creative is between 16-30 seconds, and a slightly higher CPFV is acceptable.

🐭 TikTok announced a deal with the Walt Disney Company that will let TikTok creators use Disney characters and scenes in their creative content. The quid-pro-quo: Disney will be able to use any created clips in its own short-form video feed on Disney+. This deal will pilot in the US in the coming months with the intention of other markets to follow.

🛍️ Guess who’s getting the bag? According to an April survey from Bazaarvoice and eMarketer, 70% of U.S. social buyers have made a purchase on TikTok in the past year, more than on any other social platform. And within that buying group, TikTok users aged 25-44 were more likely than other age groups to buy a product or service that they heard about on TikTok, according to an Edison Research study from December 2025.

👽 Reddit’s latest Path to Purchase survey-based research study highlights the platform’s growing role in product discovery and purchase decisions. Half of U.S. shoppers now use Reddit to verify product recommendations from AI chatbots, while more than 1 in 3 U.K. shoppers do the same. The research also found:

• Reddit ranked first among all social platforms for helping people make faster purchase decisions.

• Reddit users are more likely to trust the platform to verify AI recommendations than family or friends.

• Half of Reddit users say they turn to the platform for honest perspectives on products, brands, or services that AI can’t provide.

• More than 1 in 5 shoppers now include Reddit directly in their search queries to find real human perspectives.

🧠 ChatGPT Ads are racing to catch up to the social platforms you know and (maybe?) love. Next up: the platform has been seen testing ad product carousels, according to Digiday. 

🤖 A study from SE Ranking analyzed 50,000+ commercial prompts to understand how frequently ChatGPT serves ads, where they appear, and how relevant they are.

• It found sponsored placements on 25.94% of commercial ChatGPT prompts.

• Every ad observed appeared below the generated response and contained a single sponsored offer without another advertiser competing alongside it.

• However, the study claims that 14.35% of ChatGPT ads were effectively unrelated to the prompt they appeared alongside.

🧪 In the lab: Perplexity bans Time Inc.’s ads aimed at LLM agents

By some estimates, AI bots account for more than half the traffic on the internet, which meant that it was only a matter of time before internet publishers began advertising directly to bots instead of humans. 

Enter Time, Inc.: the publisher began inserting ads into markdown versions of its webpages, which have been designed for AI systems and agents to read. The ads themselves are formatted as FAQs with a brand’s information and messaging, and labeled as sponsored content. Time claims it’s the first time a publisher has offered such a channel. 

The ads are already polarizing. Perplexity AI promptly blocked Time’s Agent Ads, calling them “deceptive.” But Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian, the company working with Time to run the special ad inventory, reports that the "Agent Ads" are already seeing immense traction and advertiser interest, and claim that the ads are “good for the [AI] models.” “The models that ignore accurate, current, sourced brand facts will get facts wrong and lack real-time information,” he writes, “and we will see it in their results.” 

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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This week’s edition of the Thread was created by Jess Dashner, Anoushka Madan, Mariya Samardzhieva, Sabina Saktaganova, Sims Wilson, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Kayleigh McDonald, Caitlin LaValle, and Carly Carioli.