The Future of Brand Performance: Insights from Meta’s Brand Building Summit
Meta's 2025 Brand Building Summit highlighted a key truth: social isn't just one channel among many. It's the cultural force driving the entire omnichannel system. With consumers spending more time on social than anywhere else, it has become the place where trends take shape, conversations unfold, and brand interactions begin. For advertisers, this means social is no longer a siloed tactic but the source of inspiration that powers campaigns across CTV, desktop, retail, and beyond.
Marketers see social as the gateway to culture, creativity, and commerce. But to turn that influence into measurable business results, new methods are needed. From AI-powered personalization to compound branding and cultural agility, advertisers have a unique opportunity to harness Meta’s evolution into a full-funnel performance driver.
Here are five takeaways on how brands can operationalize these shifts—and how Innovid helps connect them across the omnichannel mix.
1. Social is the performance engine of the omnichannel mix
Social isn’t a stepping stone to performance—it’s the performance engine itself. The scale is undeniable: consumers spend more time on social platforms than anywhere else, making it the most immediate driver of discovery, engagement, and conversion. Haley Paas, Verizon’s SVP of Media, Marketing Effectiveness, & Agency Management, shared that their early participation in Meta’s Reels Trending Ads alpha drove a 3x lift in ad recall—proof that when brands lean into new formats, they don’t just capture attention, they move the full funnel.
Innovid tip: Social’s impact is maximized when it’s connected to the broader omnichannel mix. By tying social outcomes to metrics like CPA and ROAS, our platform allows enterprise brands to quantify social’s true performance role and seamlessly operationalize those strategies across CTV, desktop, and beyond.
2. Embrace AI-powered personalization—or fall behind
If culture is personal, then personalization is the bridge between brand storytelling and consumer relevance. As Simon Whitcombe, Meta’s VP, Global Business Group, North America put it: “Culture is personal, which means delivering on it requires the right type of personalization, which, of course, brings me to my favorite topic, which is AI.” Meta’s Advantage+ suite was highlighted as a breakthrough because it enables brands to adapt creative and targeting dynamically, keeping pace with culture in real time.
And the scale challenge couldn’t be more clear: Unilever shipped more than 20,000 assets in the first half of this year. Without automation, managing that volume would be impossible. So AI isn’t just an efficiency play, it’s the enabler of relevance at scale.
Innovid tip: We integrate AI-driven workflows across desktop, CTV, and social to help brands move faster while protecting brand integrity. From creative iteration to dynamic targeting to creative insights, we ensure advertisers can scale personalization without sacrificing governance or consistency. Our Enhanced Catalogs, combined with Advantage+ Shopping, even helped one retailer achieve a 45% lift in conversions and a 14% improvement in ROAS with learnings they were able to apply across other formats.
3. Agility is the key to cultural relevance
Agility isn’t just speed—it’s strategic flexibility. The strongest brands adapt in different ways, depending on what the moment calls for.
For Calvin Leung, GAP’s VP of Global Brand Creative, that means looking inward. He emphasized that cultural relevance doesn’t always come from chasing what’s new: “The answers [to culture] are in the archive. It’s just about giving this book a software update into today.” Their recent KATSEYE campaign leaned into the brand’s archives and OG aesthetic, proving that sometimes the best creative inspiration comes from heritage, reimagined for today’s audience.
For others, agility is about adapting to what’s already happening. Dove tapped into Charli XCX’s Sweat Tour, tying their new full-body deodorant to an existing cultural moment and showing how agility can mean amplification rather than reinvention.
Innovid tip: Brands that leverage our tech stack for rapid testing, modular production, and quick cross-channel activation can both remix heritage and ride cultural waves, turning cultural resonance into real brand performance.
4. Shorter assets, bigger impact
Today’s consumers are inundated with content, and the window for capturing attention is shrinking to just a few seconds. As Jimmie Stone, Meta’s VP, Global Head of Creative Shop, put it, “Six is the new 60. Brands need to be able to tell stories quickly, concisely, and compellingly.” Meta also highlighted that short bursts of attention, as little as 0.3 seconds, are 21% more impactful at driving sales and 23% more effective at brand metrics.
Compound branding—layering multiple brand signals like logos, colors, sounds, or ambassadors into even the shortest assets—ensures recall when it matters most.
Innovid tip: Micro-attention doesn’t have to mean micro-impact. Our platform enables advertisers to take a single six-second asset and transform it into dozens of hyper-personalized versions, with dynamic elements like maps, carousels, local store details, or shoppable features. This turns fleeting attention into meaningful engagement and purchase intent.
5. Innovate fearlessly without sacrificing authenticity
Verizon’s Paas put it bluntly: “If something is fully proven, you’ve kind of missed it already.” The most successful brands aren’t waiting for certainty, they experiment boldly, take creative risks, and lean into what makes them distinct. Measurement and in-flight optimization act as a safety net, letting brands test, iterate, and serve the right creative in every moment without fear of failure.
As Gwyneth Paltrow, CEO and Founder of Goop emphasized, innovation also means recognizing that not everyone is your audience: “If we try to be all things to all people, that’s when you dilute.” Goop thrives precisely because it embraces a niche. By being authentic to its core consumers, it fosters strong identification and loyalty. Playing it safe to appeal to everyone often weakens brand identity, while measured risk-taking allows brands to show up boldly for the people who truly matter.
Innovid tip: Our platform empowers advertisers to innovate with confidence. By integrating meaningful measurement, creative testing, and real-time optimization across channels, we make it possible to experiment creatively, stay true to your core audiences, and turn risk into measurable impact.
Bringing it all together
The Summit made clear that Meta’s user base and the culture it fosters are evolving faster than ever. As Meta’s Stone noted, “Don’t cut through the noise, but embrace it. Instead of fighting against fragmentation, learn how to harness the power.” The brands that succeed aren’t just chasing trends—they embrace AI-powered personalization, compound branding, and cultural fluency, all while leaning on measurement to mitigate risk and drive innovation.
Leung reinforced this perspective: “The future is that it’s the community telling brands what they should be.” The most impactful brands meet their audiences where they are, listening, learning, and responding in real time.
As an AI-driven advertising software platform, we help advertisers operationalize these strategies and maximize Meta’s performance potential across every screen, turning fleeting attention into cultural impact.
For more information, or to get in contact with an expert from our team, reach out to us.
