Instagram is now three products wearing one logo, and each wants a different video. Reels are vertical, fast and shown largely to people who do not follow you. Stories are vertical, intimate and shown almost entirely to people who do. The feed still rewards the square crop. A single video rarely serves all three, which is the practical problem most brand accounts never solve.
Reels: the discovery surface
Reels is where people who have never heard of you might. That changes what belongs in one. Content that assumes the viewer already knows your brand will fail here, because most of the audience does not.
What works: one specific, demonstrable thing about a product, shown immediately. What does not: a montage of your catalogue set to trending audio, which is a video about you rather than about anything the viewer wants.
Format: 9:16, planned vertical. Not cropped from a landscape edit. A crop puts your product where the caption and the buttons sit.
Stories: the follow-up surface
Stories reach the people already interested. That makes them the wrong place for a first impression and the right place for detail, restocks, the answer to a question three people asked in comments. It is also the only Instagram surface where a link is natural, which makes it the one that actually sends traffic.
The feed: still worth a square
Feed posts persist on your profile, which nothing else on Instagram does. A visitor deciding whether to follow you judges the grid. 1:1 or 4:5 holds more of a phone screen than a landscape crop.
Generating for all three
Paste one product URL from your store and generate for each placement in turn. The AI reads the title, description and images, plans the ad, and renders it in the ratio you chose. Generating twice takes minutes, which is almost always better than cropping once.
The €5 entry offer produces one short clip of about 12 seconds, which is a natural Reel length. The paid plans produce multi-chapter videos of 24, 32 or 36 seconds, built from 12-second chapters with audio continuity, for when a product needs more than one beat. Files come out at 720p by default and 1080p on the premium models.
Ideas that hold up
- The detail a photograph flattens. Texture, weight, how something catches light. This is video's genuine advantage and most brands never use it.
- The mechanism. Anything that opens, folds, extends or connects.
- The scale reference. The single most common source of returns is a product that arrived smaller than imagined.
- The context. Where the thing lives once it is bought, which is a different image from the one on a white background.
Habits that matter more than the algorithm
Post at a cadence you can actually sustain; irregular bursts teach the system nothing. Use a few precise hashtags rather than thirty vague ones. Read the comments, because the questions people ask are a list of the videos you should make next. And treat Reels as a testing ground: what performs organically is a strong hint about what will perform when you put budget behind it.
Related reading: AI video for Instagram and TikTok & Instagram product videos that convert.