Facebook further firms up its mobile advertising offering

To accelerate the shift to mobile in advertising, Facebook has announced four new solutions at the ongoing Cannes Lions 2016, which will help businesses connect with people in more insightful and meaningful ways. Facebook is introducing new ways to gain insights, new storytelling formats and a new tool to help creative agencies create powerful content.

With more than 1.5 billion people accessing Facebook from mobile devices and more than 1 billion people using Facebook on mobile everyday, the Facebook family has more mobile engagement than any other platform.

Facebook’s announcements include:

• The launch of a Creative Hub, where the creative community can learn and build on mobile
• Introduction of an Audience Insights API in beta, to help businesses build better insights to fuel campaigns
• Updates to Canvas ads that make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights
• Enhancements to Slideshow ads that make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos

Additionally, Instagram has announced that it now has more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide – and 300 million who use the app everyday. In fact, the Instagram community has more than doubled over the past two years.

Instagram’s communities of shared interests and passions are also more global than ever: more than 80 per cent of users are from outside the US. And they continue to create amazing, inspiring content through photos and videos every day.

Helping advertisers reach better insights

To help advertisers best connect with people, Facebook is currently working with the creative community on how to reach better insights through an Audience Insights API, now in beta. As part of the beta programme, Facebook has partnered with a small group of advertisers – like Mondelez International and Anheuser-Busch InBev – to understand how to develop insights from aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. The teams have been able to use these insights to create effective campaigns. The Audience Insights API will be available to partners early next year.

Introducing the Creative Hub

The use of mobile devices is increasing. People consume content on mobile in fundamentally different ways than they do on other channels. Creativity is a critical component of building successful mobile marketing, but it can be difficult for the creative community to stay up to date with quickly developing technology. Creative agencies need a way to understand the different tools and formats, preview and share mock-ups with stakeholders and collaborate on and experiment with content creation. Keeping this in mind, Facebook is launching the Creative Hub.

This new online interface will be a sandbox where agencies can play with different ad formats for online and mobile and experiment with what works best. Most ad creation happens on desktop but is experienced on mobile. The Creative Hub gives ad creators an easy way to preview their work in a dynamic mobile feed. They can also share these mock-ups with stakeholders through a preview URL. The Creative Hub will also provide inspiration with an easy-to-navigate repository of case studies and great content.

The Creative Hub is now in testing and is expected to be available to everyone in the next few months.

New enhancements to slideshow ads

Slideshow ads make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos. By giving advertisers the ability to create, edit and promote video ads in seconds, slideshow extends the power of Facebook video to more businesses, like those without existing video creative. Slideshows are five times lighter than the average video file, which means they’re ideal to reach people on slow connections.

The enhancements to Slideshow include audio and text overlay, an easy ‘video-to-slideshow’ creation tool, the ability to create slideshow from a mobile device and integration with Facebook’s Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library. This means small businesses without any production resources can create, edit and boost customised slideshows using existing photos from their Page or any of thousands of Facebook’s stock images. These tools are coming at the end of the month to all advertisers and can be used however they would use a video (across Facebook and Instagram).

Canvas now easier to create and learn from

Since its introduction at Cannes Lions last year, advertisers have been using Canvas, a storytelling tool, to bring an immersive experience to mobile audiences. Canvases can include elements such as photos, carousels, videos, text boxes, buttons and product sets. Plus, photos and videos can be ‘tilt to pan’, providing an interactive experience.

Facebook has announced updates to Canvas to make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights. Advertisers can now share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process. Coming toward the end of this month, Canvas will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage. Plus, Canvas will be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it is not promoted as an ad). Also, marketers will be able to access detailed metrics such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track Canvas performance.