Meta Brand Summit 2025: The New Rules of Attention for Ecommerce Growth

Meta’s latest research has a clear message for ecommerce brands: stop chasing seconds, start chasing outcomes. From the way attention is measured to how brand and performance work together, the new rules are here and they could change how you plan your next campaign.

For years, we’ve been told that the longer someone watches an ad, the better. Turns out, that’s not the full story. In fact, Meta’s latest data shows almost half of all online purchases driven by their platforms happen within the first two seconds of an ad being seen.

If that doesn’t change how you think about creative, it should.

Attention Has Changed And So Should Your Ads

We all know people scroll faster than ever, but the research from Meta puts numbers behind it. Attentive seconds do not determine impact; formats without shorter view times often deliver similar or better results, with content watched on feed placements the most valuable.

And if you’re aiming at Gen Z or younger millennials? They need half the attention time of older audiences to remember your brand. The trade-off? They have to see you more often. That’s where smart frequency comes in, think multiple touchpoints, each delivering a quick but memorable brand hit.

Creative Is the Growth Lever

Meta couldn’t have hammered this home more: creative quality is the number one driver of attention - which shouldn’t come as surprise if you’ve been working in marketing for the last few years.

The biggest uplifts came from ads that:

• Feel human (+81% effectiveness when there’s a single person, eye contact, and emotional connection)
  
  
• Carry distinctive brand cues (+67%)
  
  
• Move dynamically (+74%)

For ecommerce, this means rethinking how you show your products. Build for mobile first. Lead with an attention grabbing hook, not a polite introduction. Make sure your brand shows up early, naturally, and in a way that feels native to the platform.

One feature to watch: Meta Story Builder, which lets you sequence ads to tell a story over time. Nissan used it to highlight 15+ features of a new car without overwhelming people in one video. 

Brand + Performance = Better Results

Here’s the stat every ecommerce marketer should care about:

When brands ran Reach campaigns alongside their usual conversion ads, they saw:

• +23% incremental purchases
  
  
• 2x reach
  
  
• 41% higher ROAS from new customers
  
  

This isn’t just a brand halo effect. It’s proof that awareness and conversion campaigns can work harder together than they do alone. In 2025, we’ve seen awareness campaign performance grow and their spend increase at the expense of traffic driving activity - which we think is a result of people’s reduced propensity to click ads (especially in younger demographics).

Measuring What Matters

Let’s be honest,  for many retailers, brand spend feels risky because it’s harder to measure. That’s changing. Meta’s full-funnel measurement approach — Brand Lift, Search Lift, Conversion Lift, and modernised Marketing Mix Modelling — is making it easier to connect brand investment directly to sales. 

Nothing necessarily too new here, but running these tests as BAU to build a baseline of audience sentiment will become increasingly important

What This Means for Ecommerce Right Now

If you’re selling online in 2025, here’s the shift to make:

• Lead with impact — get your key message or product into the first second of your creative.
  
  
• Think cumulative attention — it’s not one ad, it’s the sum of every brand moment a customer sees.
  
  
• Blend brand with performance — because the data says it pays.
  
  
• Test and measure everything — so you can scale what works and ditch what doesn’t.
  
  

At Genie Goals, we’ve seen this play out first-hand. The ecommerce brands that grow fastest are the ones that stop thinking in terms of “brand vs performance” and start building campaigns that do both