Reels ad disclaimer: keep the bottom 40% clear at 1080x1920

If your Reels ad carries a disclaimer, Meta's help page says to leave the bottom 40% of the ad free of text, logos and other key creative elements. At 1080x1920 that is the bottom 768 pixels, so every burned-in caption has to sit inside the top 1152 pixels, and Sume's caption job lets you set that with one number.

What the Meta page actually says

The rule sits on Meta's page about text overlays and the safe zone for ads in Stories and Reels. It is a conditional: it applies if you are including disclaimers on your Reels ads. It is separate from the general safe-zone rule, which asks you to keep the top, bottom and sides of 9:16 ads free of key elements.

The same page adds a second warning. On phones taller than 9:16, Meta may zoom the creative to fill the screen, which crops material outside the safe zone, or it may show the 9:16 frame on a black background. Meta tells you to keep critical text comfortably inside the safe zone for both cases.

The arithmetic at 1080x1920

Take the frame height and multiply. The disclaimer band is 1920 x 0.40 = 768 px tall, starting at y = 1152. Anything you want the viewer to read must end above that line. If a caption line is 90 px tall (4.7% of the height), its center must be at or above y = 1152 - 45 = 1107, which is 1107 / 1920 = 0.577 of the frame height.

That is the ceiling, not the target. The general safe zone also wants the top edge free, so a center near 0.45 to 0.50 leaves room on both sides. Pick the number, then check it on real stills.

Set it with the caption job

Sume's caption surface is POST /v1/video-captions. A request can carry a design override, and the placement group has anchor_ratio, which is the center of the caption line as a fraction of the frame height. Use a style that accepts design overrides: the docs say punch and tiktok-green do not, so the example uses slam.

A number outside the documented range returns a 400, so a bad value fails before you pay. A standalone caption job reserves and captures $0.20 for clips up to 60 seconds under the current fixed estimate.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: reel-disclaimer-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/clean.mp4",
    "style": "slam",
    "design": { "placement": { "anchor_ratio": 0.48 } }
  }'

Check the result before you upload

Burned-in text is part of the pixels, so the only reliable test is to look at the output. Run the finished file through POST /v1/video-inspect with stills at the moments the longest caption is on screen, and look at where the text ends. The probe also returns width and height, so you can confirm the file really is 1080x1920 before you compute any band.

If a later edit adds a logo or end card, repeat the check on that frame too. The 40% rule covers logos as well as text.

What this does not cover

Meta does not say what the disclaimer itself must contain or how large it is. That depends on your category and on local rules, and it is outside Sume's scope. Sume does not write or place the legal line. It keeps your own captions out of the zone where the line goes.

Also note that Meta's page is about ads. For an organic Reel there is no disclaimer band to protect, only the ordinary interface overlays.