Black Friday video ads for phones: which Sume Formats are vertical

If most of your Black Friday buyers arrive on a phone, make the ad for a phone. Adobe's forecast, as reported on 2026-09-29, puts mobile at 57.4% of holiday-season online sales. In Sume, the way to get a vertical ad is to say so in instruction, and to start from a Format whose own description is already vertical.

Which catalog Formats say vertical?

Only some. The Format catalog and the first-party skill text give these signals; the rest are silent, so state the ratio yourself.

How to ask and how to verify

The docs say instruction is appended after the Format body, so a clear line such as "vertical 9:16, product centered in the top two thirds so buttons do not cover it" wins where it disagrees. Then check the artifact's height is larger than its width on the receipt. If it is not, rerun with a new Idempotency-Key, since an identical key with the same body just replays the old run.

For a single model call rather than a recipe, GET /v1/videos/models lists supported_aspect_ratios per model. For example, the catalog code lists Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 as 16:9 or 9:16 only, while Wan 3.0 also offers 1:1, 3:4 and 4:3.

A note on the number

The 57.4% figure is Adobe's forecast for the whole holiday season, not a measure of your store or of any ad format. Check your own analytics for the split before you decide how many horizontal cuts you still need, and keep one landscape version for desktop placements.

Make the phone version the master

Work backwards from the smallest screen. Write one instruction that names the ratio, the subject placement and the length you want, then reuse it across every product so the whole set looks like one campaign. Keep the product large and in the frame from the first second, since a shopper scrolling a feed gives an ad very little time.

Run a single item first and open the file on an actual phone. Only when the framing works should you send the rest of the catalog through a bulk run, where concurrency can be set from 1 to 16 and items from 1 to 100 per queue. Remember the queue reports completed even when some items failed, so read each item's result.

Finally, save the winning instruction text with the Format slug in your own notes. The next sale, you start from a tested recipe, not a blank page.