Snapshot taken July 11, 2026. We track 82,856 live and recently-active Meta ads from 1,633 hand-picked DTC and B2C brands. The winners get hand-tagged by hook and angle into the swipe file. Run-time uses Meta's own ad start date where available. Curated, not scraped.
You've been told video won. Every agency deck, every LinkedIn guru: "video-first or die." We counted 82,856 real DTC Meta ads and the consensus falls apart on contact. Video is 46.7% of the feed. Static and image ads are the majority at 53.3%. The camera didn't win. It's a coin flip — and which side comes up depends entirely on what you sell.
The split swings hard by sector
Beauty, pets, skincare, and food are genuinely video-led (54–57%). But apparel and accessories are static strongholds — barely a third of their ads use video (37% and 36%). If you sell apparel and someone told you to go video-first, you're being coached to fight the market instead of reading it.
| Sector | % video | Video ads | Static ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pets | 54% | 1,751 | 1,514 |
| Beauty | 56% | 3,975 | 3,063 |
| Skincare | 55% | 4,492 | 3,695 |
| Food | 55% | 3,791 | 3,049 |
| Wellness | 49% | 4,810 | 5,037 |
| Fitness | 48% | 2,082 | 2,257 |
| Home | 46% | 2,788 | 3,218 |
| Apparel | 37% | 6,222 | 10,759 |
| Accessories | 36% | 3,287 | 5,840 |
Here's what 500 DTC brands are running this week
A small slice of the curated swipe file — every ad here is currently in market, hand-tagged by hook + angle. Open the full feed →
Video barely outlives static
Does video earn its production cost with longer runs? Barely. Video ads have a median run of 19 days versus 16 for static — a three-day edge for something that costs 10× the time to produce. The volume math often favors static: you can ship five image variants in the time one video takes to cut, and test your way to a winner faster.
The honest rule: format is a sector decision, not a commandment. Match the category norm, then win on hook and angle. If you're in apparel or accessories, static isn't a compromise — it's what the survivors run. Every ad in the swipe file is tagged by format, hook, and angle, so you can see exactly what's working in your sector. Filter the feed → (or study the static-ad teardowns).