Car dealership Facebook ads and Facebook ads for car dealerships built on video scripts your salespeople can film

Yes, for the jobs they are good at. Shoppers in your market spend time on Facebook and Instagram well before they walk onto a lot, and Meta's automotive inventory ads can put the exact vehicles they browsed back in front of them. That part is a data feed, and most dealer platforms set it up for you.

What the feed does not do is sell the store. Every dealership in the market can run the same catalog of the same trucks. The ads that pull a buyer to your lot are the ones a person can only get from you: a salesperson they recognize, a vehicle they can see is real, a town they know, and a reason to come in this week. That is a video and script problem, not a feed problem, and it is the gap most dealer campaigns leave open.

Five formats cover almost every dealership campaign. All five can be shot on a phone, and the generator writes each of them from the same description of your store.

The customer testimonial format needs the buyer's own words, not lines you wrote for them. If you run the same footage on Reels, the Instagram Reels ads page covers the safe zones.

Two federal regulations decide most of what a dealer ad can say about money, and both apply to the words spoken in a video and the text on screen. We read them at their source in October 2026. None of this is legal advice, and your counsel and your state's current rules have the final word.

The FTC's CARS Rule, the dealer-specific rule that would have added more, is gone. The Fifth Circuit vacated it on January 27, 2025, and the FTC formally withdrew it in a Federal Register notice in February 2026. The FTC Act's general ban on deceptive advertising still applies to dealer ads, and so do the two regulations above.

The practical rule for a script is simple. A video that says "come see the new Tacoma" needs none of this. A video that says "$389 a month" or "$0 down" has just triggered the full set of disclosures, and they have to be in the ad. So the generator writes walkarounds and salesperson videos around the vehicle and the store, not around a payment, and leaves any offer line for you to add with its terms.

Yes, but a monthly payment is a triggering term, so the ad has to carry the rest. For a loan, Regulation Z then requires the down payment, the terms of repayment and the annual percentage rate, using that term. For a lease, Regulation M requires that the ad say it is a lease, the total due at signing, the number, amount and timing of the payments, whether a security deposit is required, and that an extra charge may apply at the end of the lease.

In a 30 second vertical video that is a lot of text, and it has to be readable. Both regulations have an alternative for television and radio advertising that lets a dealer point to a toll-free number or a printed ad for the full terms, but those provisions are written for television and radio. Whether they cover a social video is a question for your counsel, not something to assume. Many dealers keep the payment in the lead form or on the landing page and keep the video about the vehicle.

It depends on what the ad promotes. An ad for a vehicle, a test drive or a service special is a normal ad. An ad that promotes financing, a loan or a credit offer generally falls under Meta's Financial products and services special ad category, which replaced the old Credit category.

Meta's Marketing API documentation sets out what the category changes. "Starting January 14, 2025, using this category is required for financial products and services campaigns for advertisers based in the United States or showing ads to audiences in the United States." Age is "generally fixed to include ages 18 through 65+". "Specific gender cannot be chosen." Location "must include all areas equal or larger than 15 mile or 25 kilometer radius for the US and Canada", ZIP codes are not supported, behavior and demographic targeting are not permitted, and "Lookalike audiences are unavailable for housing, employment, and financial products and services ads."

That is another reason to keep the financing message out of the main video. A walkaround of a used truck can target the way any local business can, and you can run the financing offer as a separate ad under the special category, with its full disclosures, where the reduced targeting matters less.

Dealer licensing and advertising are also regulated state by state, and the rules are specific. California's Vehicle Code 11713.1 is a good example of how specific, and we read it at its source.

Other states have their own versions, and the FTC still polices deceptive pricing under its general authority. The safest script for a weekly inventory video names the vehicle precisely and leaves price out, which is also the version that ages best in an ad account.

Everything that would otherwise be decided on the lot by whoever is holding the phone. This is what a dealer video brief should cover, including the rows you add yourself.

If you are planning the copy as well as the video, the video ad script page walks through the structure, and UGC for Meta ads covers the placements and safe zones in detail.

Fifteen to thirty seconds for a walkaround or a salesperson intro. That is enough for one vehicle, three features and one ask, and short enough that people finish it in the feed and in Reels. A customer delivery story can run to 45 or 60 seconds when the buyer is good on camera.

Shoot vertical. Meta's guide for Instagram Reels ads recommends 9:16 and asks you to keep the top 14 percent and the bottom 35 percent of the frame clear of key text, so the stock number and any disclosure need to sit in the middle of the frame where the interface does not cover them. The generator's Meta spec asks for a 1:1, a 4:5 and a 9:16 cut of the same footage.

Two costs, and they are separate. The media is what you pay Meta, and you set that budget yourself. The creative and management are what you pay an agency or your dealer platform, and that range is wide, from a small monthly add-on to a website package to several thousand dollars a month for a full-service automotive agency. We put the published prices of dealer marketing agencies on one basis in car dealer marketing agency pricing.

The video is cheaper than most stores assume, because the best-performing dealer videos are filmed on a phone by people who already work there. What takes time is deciding what each one says. A script takes about a minute here, and Pro is $49 a month for unlimited briefs.