The Facebook team made their way out to France last week to showcase their new advances in advertising technology at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The festival, which celebrates the biggest names in advertising, was headlined by Facebook, as they set up shop along the beach in Cannes with a prominent base of operations.
The biggest news to come out of the Facebook camp was the announcement that they’d be integrating four new advertising formats – specifically designed for mobile – to make their debut on the social networking website. With over one billion daily mobile users, Facebook reigns supreme over all websites as the leader in mobile traffic. This puts Facebook in a position that makes them one of the most appealing advertising platforms. While Google earns more in advertising, Facebook offers its users easy-to-use tools to advertise, allowing marketing novices to get their voices heard without needing a massive advertising budget or expert technological skills.
One of their new ad formats will be the Creative Hub interface, which provides users with a number of different features that will help marketers preview their advertisements on both desktop and mobile before publishing them. The second format will be revamped slideshow ads that gives users the ability to turn photo ads into a multi-layered slideshow or video advertisement. While Facebook already uses certain slideshow ads, these new ads will be much quicker and more interactive, allowing users to overlay text with audio.
Facebook will also be updating their canvas ads, which, to the average Facebook user, will likely be the more visible of these updated formats. Two weeks ago, in relation to Google’s new ads for AMP pages, we discussed flying carpet ads and how immersive they were to users. Facebook’s new canvas ads won’t be quite as annoying as flying carpet ads, however, they will upset certain users who aren’t interested in being redirected into a full-page advertisement. With canvas ads, companies can display an advertisement in the form of a typical facebook post, but upon clicking on the ad, will redirect users to a full-screen ad. This is intended to increase view time and will allow advertisers to embed videos onto these advertisements.
The last format isn’t so much a new advertisement type, but a tool that will give companies better insight into their user base to optimize their ads. The updated Audience Insights API will provide marketers will more metrics such as psychographics and topic data to decipher when, to whom, and where businesses should advertise.