Burned-in kinetic captions, timed word by word to the vocal

A song ad is built for sound-on, but a lot of the feed is watched with the sound down. Without captions, a muted viewer sees nice pictures with no message. With captions timed to the vocal, the hook reads as a line of text in the first second, and the brand name appears on screen as it is sung.

Meta's Reels ad specs call captions optional but recommended, and sound optional but strongly recommended. A singing ad with burned-in captions covers both.

The captions are timed to the words as they are sung, appearing word by word in short bursts, so the eye follows the singer instead of reading ahead. Because the captions are burned in, they show the same way on TikTok, Reels and Shorts, and they cannot be switched off by the platform player.

The words on screen are your lyrics, so the spelling you approve is the spelling people read.

• Avoid sound-alike words where the meaning flips (there and their is fine to the ear, wrong on screen).
• Keep lines short. Six to ten syllables reads cleanly in a few-word burst.
• Watch the brand name. If you gave it a sound-it-out spelling for the singer, check what shows on screen. See brand name pronunciation.
• Spell numbers the way you want them read. "Twelve hours" and "12 hours" land differently.

Feeds put buttons, names and ad text over your video. Meta suggests leaving about 14% at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% on each side free of text, logos and key creative. (More on safe zones.) Before you launch, open the ad preview on your phone and check that no caption sits under the call-to-action button or the profile name.

On TikTok, the ad text you type in Ads Manager is shown separately from your video, in white in a fixed font, with no clickable links, @ symbols or hashtags. That text is a second line of copy; do not just repeat the first lyric.

Kinetic captions do more than help accessibility. A word that appears exactly on the beat adds punch, and a short line that lands alone ("cold again") can be the strongest frame in the ad. When you edit lyrics, read them aloud and picture each burst on screen. If a line looks weak as text, it is probably weak as a lyric. More on writing lines that work both ways on the lyrics writer page.

Captions also help the ad survive the creative review in your own team. A client or a manager who watches it on mute in a meeting still gets the message, which saves a round of "what does it say?" before launch. See how they look on examples.