Earlier this May, Martin Ash, one of our media and digital specialists, and Bex Lauenstein-Dean, Associate Research Director, were featured in Episode 9 of Meta’s You’re Better Off Knowing podcast, hosted by Torsten Mueller-Klockmann, Marketing Science Manager at Meta. Together with Sonja Wedekin and Dan Moller from Meta, they discussed findings from Toluna and Meta’s collaborative study on short-form video. Read the highlights below.
Short-form video now sits at the center of platform usage and ad spend, but most of what marketers know about « good creative » is still directional: use vertical format, design for sound-on, keep it native. Useful, but not specific enough to plan a media plan around.
Meta and Toluna set out to close that gap. Instead of asking marketers what they believed worked, the study coded the creative itself: roughly 100 ads, 100 viewers per ad, across four markets (Germany, the UK, Italy and Turkey), with over 65 creative variables logged against each execution. Rather than a lift test on a handful of variables, the analysis compared the top 20% of performing ads against the average, controlling for country-level differences in response, to isolate which specific creative decisions were doing the work.
The first five seconds decide more than marketers assume
Ads that established both brand and core message within the first five seconds were 1.7 times more likely to drive strong purchase intent. That runs against a common assumption in short-form: that holding branding back keeps viewers watching for longer. The data suggests the opposite. Delaying the brand doesn’t build suspense; it just costs clarity.
Branding works better spread out than saved up
A single end-frame logo underperformed against branding that appeared multiple times across the ad. Ads using this kind of dynamic branding were 1.8 times more likely to perform strongly. The brand becomes part of the narrative rather than an interruption to it, which appears to reinforce recall without breaking the viewing experience.
Sound is doing more work than most creative briefs assume
Reels and other short-form formats are watched sound-on far more often than traditional feed content. The study found that creative combining audio and visual cues, rather than relying on visuals alone, consistently outperformed. Treating sound as an afterthought in short-form production is, on this evidence, a real gap in most current briefs.
Native beats polished
Elements that read as native to the platform, such as emojis, direct-to-camera delivery and lower-fidelity production, outperformed more heavily produced creative. Emoji use alone was linked to a 2.5x uplift in purchase intent. The likely explanation isn’t that audiences prefer lower quality; it’s that native-feeling content signals it belongs in the feed, rather than being an ad interrupting it.
For lower-funnel activity, restraint matters
The pattern shifts slightly for conversion-focused creative. Branding still needs to be present, but ads that kept it under roughly 25% of total duration performed better than those that leaned on it more heavily. Over-branding, in other words, has a cost, particularly once the objective moves from awareness to conversion.
There is no formula, and that’s the point
Every one of these findings is a probability driver, not a rule. As Martin Ash, who worked on the study for Toluna, put it on Meta’s podcast, these elements increase the likelihood of a strong result, but they won’t work identically for every brand, category or audience. The practical implication is that creative needs to be treated as a system to be tested and iterated, not a one-off asset signed off before launch.
That has a knock-on effect on how testing itself gets done. The study also re-ran a subset of ads using AI-generated synthetic personas instead of human panels, and found the results tracked closely with human testing, at a fraction of the time and cost. For marketing teams, that’s the more structural finding: creative testing is moving from an occasional lift study to something closer to continuous, always-on validation.
What this means for marketers
None of this replaces judgement about brand and category. But it does give marketing teams a sharper set of questions to bring to their next round of short-form creative:
Is the brand and the core message visible in the first five seconds, not saved for the end?
Is the brand repeated across the ad, rather than confined to a single frame?
Has the ad been designed for sound-on viewing, not adapted from a silent cut?
Does it read as native to the platform, or does it look like an ad?
For lower-funnel activity, is branding proportionate, or is it crowding out the message?
The brands that get the most out of short-form video won’t be the ones with the most polished output. They’ll be the ones running the tightest test-and-learn loop against evidence like this.
