Add a video design to a Meta design group so your own rendered video rides alongside your images — and takes the place of the videos Meta adds to your catalog by itself.
Updated September 21, 2026
A Meta catalog ad doesn't have to be a still image. Meta can show a product's video instead, and it decides which one to show per impression through a feature it calls Dynamic Media.
There are two ways to give it video. This article covers the one that lives inside a design group — a video that belongs to a named creative concept and is pinned along with it. If your channel doesn't use adaptive designs and you just want a plain product video column, see Animated product videos instead.
Dynamic Media is on by default for catalog ads. Meta may already be showing videos on your catalog ads today, whether or not you supplied any — because where a product has no video, Meta may go and find one.
That's the real reason to do this, and it's covered in its own section below.
Rendering video is the most credit-intensive thing on the platform, since every product needs a full render. Start with a small product set while you're iterating. See What uses my credits.
On the channel's Fields tab, open Adaptive designs.
Every group in the grid is two rows — its image designs, then its video designs — and the video row stays collapsed to a single Add video link until the group has its first video design. Once it opens, a video design is easy to pick out: its tile carries a play badge and its caption ends with how long the video runs.
Image and video designs in a group are two facets of one creative concept, not two things to choose between. You pin the group; Meta picks the medium.
Afterwards, any single video design can be pointed at a different video template on its own: hover its cell and click the pencil. The picker offers only templates that can render video, in the shape of the column you clicked, and the design keeps its name — see Set up design groups.
Your feed's default designs carry Meta's reserved shape markers — that's what lets Meta match one to a surface with no pinning — and groups you add afterwards deliberately carry none. A video design needs neither, which is correct rather than an omission: a video's shape is intrinsic to the file. In Meta's words, "if a video matches the aspect ratio for the ad placement, that video is returned."
The same goes for the Instagram, Stories and Reels marks on the default image designs: Meta documents those for images and defines no video equivalent, so a video design's picker doesn't offer them at all.
Meta doesn't say how it determines that match, so Renable doesn't either. What you can do about it is straightforward: supply the ratios you care about — a video design per size your video template carries — and let Meta match them.
What that means in practice is that a video's shape lives in the file, not in a marker Renable writes. Renable still places each video design in the shape column its bound size resolves to — a 1080 × 1920 video design sits in the Story column exactly as a 1080 × 1920 image design does — so a group's video coverage reads the same way its image coverage does, and its picker offers only sizes of the column you clicked. What Renable does not do is tell Meta which shape a video is; Meta reads that from the video itself.
Press Publish on the channel. Until Meta fetches the updated feed, the video designs aren't in Meta's copy of your catalog. The Renable Options panel's freshness line tells you when Meta last fetched.
One thing to expect and not worry about: the panel never warns that Meta is missing a video design. Meta fetches catalog video lazily and may not fetch it until the product is in an active campaign, so "not in the sample" and "not fetched yet" look identical from outside — and a warning that fires on every healthy new video design is a warning people learn to ignore.
Open the ad in Meta Ads Manager with the Renable Options extension installed, find the group, and click Use. The panel shows a group's image and video designs together, because they travel together.
Renable turns Dynamic Media on for the new version when it can pin the group's video by name. That switch is what lets a catalog video serve at all, so pinning a video-carrying group without it would suppress the very thing you pinned. For an image-only pin Renable does the opposite and turns Dynamic Media off, so Meta shows exactly the design you chose.
The confirmation tells you exactly what it set — worth reading rather than assuming, because the direction follows what Renable was actually able to pin, not simply whether the group has video designs in it.
After that, the panel changes what it says about Dynamic Media on this ad. On an image pin, Dynamic Media being on is a warning — Meta may substitute something for your design. On a video-carrying group pin it's the mechanism doing the work, so the panel notes that it's what lets the video show — and warns you if it has been switched off, because then the video can never surface.
This is the part most people don't know about.
Meta automatically adds product videos to catalogs, and the setting is on by default. Where a product has no video, Meta may scan your public product pages, videos you've uploaded to Ads Manager, Reels and videos on your Facebook Page or Instagram profile, other products in the same catalog, and your other catalogs — and add what it finds. There's no approval step; auto-added videos appear immediately.
Those are videos you didn't make, didn't brief, and don't control, running beside creative you did.
The fix is structural, and it's the point of this article. In Meta's own words: "If you add a video to a product yourself, it takes priority over all automatically added videos, which makes them disappear from the catalog." A video-carrying design group supplies your video for every product it renders, which evicts the scraped ones per product. Your remaining exposure is only products your feed gives no video to.
If you'd rather switch the behaviour off entirely, the setting lives in Meta's Commerce Manager under the catalog's settings, as Automatic product video updates — turning it off removes auto-added videos within about a day. You can also reject them, but rejection is per product and all-or-nothing: you can't reject one of several auto-added videos on the same product, and rejecting permanently stops auto-adds for that product. Meta moves Commerce Manager's settings from time to time, so if you can't find the switch, Meta's own guide to automatically added product videos has the current location.
Some channels carry a plain product-video field from before adaptive designs. Renable leaves it alone: the Adaptive designs dialog acknowledges it, it stays your ads' default video, and video designs are added beside it. Nothing is converted, and nothing is removed.
Two facts worth having, both from Meta's documentation, because both get misquoted:
Renable writes the video designs into your feed and writes the pin onto the ad's creative. Everything after that is Meta's, and the copy in the product stays on the right side of that line:
Removing the videos one at a time is the way back: hover a cell in the group's video row, click the pencil, and use Remove design at the bottom of the picker. That takes just that video out of the feed on the next publish, leaving the group's image designs — and everything else — untouched, so ads pinned to the group keep their images. Beyond that, delete the group to remove the whole concept, or turn off adaptive designs to leave the feature entirely. In every case the video designs are removed rather than converted, because there's no plain field for them to become.
The confirmations differ in how much they tell you. Remove design names the one design it is about to remove, and turning the feature off lists every video design it will remove, by name, before anything happens. Deleting a group warns you that its designs leave the feed on the next publish and that ads pinned to it fall back to your default designs — without naming them individually, so read the group's row first if you want to know exactly what's going. See Run different designs for different campaigns or seasons for why deleting a group is usually the wrong move when un-pinning would do.