Dive Brief:
- Facebook announce several new features at the Cannes Lions awards festival, including Audience Insights API and slideshow ad enhancements.
- Facebook’s Audience Insights API is in beta with a small group of advertisers including Mondelez International and Anheuser-Busch InBev. Its purpose is to develop insights from aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. It is expected to roll out officially in early 2017.
- Although news about its Creative Hub came out before the formal announcement, Facebook also released more details about its new online interface that allows marketers to see how ads translate from the desktop to mobile experience.
Dive Insight:
Facebook's moves comes as the social media platform is looking to help advertisers and marketers understand how to better reach its users, especially on mobile. Over 50% of all digital advertising revenue last year came from mobile,according to the latest Pew Research data, but marketers are still trying to figure out the best way to deliver ads in the format. Facebook said that 82% of its revenue is derived from mobile ads in its most recent quarterly report.
Before the formal announcement at Cannes, Facebook said last week it planned to introduce the Creative Hub, an ad platform that allows marketers to create, test, share and review ads on Facebook and Instagram.
"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," Facebook said in a blog post. "Most ad creation happens on desktop but is experienced on mobile."
Other updates include enhancements to slideshow ads. Slideshow ads are an easy way for Facebook marketers to create videos from photos. According to Facebook, slideshow ads are five times lighter than the average video file, meaning they don’t take up as much end-user data and provide a better user experience for people on slow connections. The enhancements to Slideshow include audio and text overlay, a “video-to-slideshow” creation tool, the ability to create ads with mobile devices, and integration with Facebook’s Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock image library. These enhancements will roll out at the end of the month to all Facebook advertisers.
The feature within Slideshow that allows for the creation of campaigns using a mobile device is part of the Creative Hub, which also will allow marketers to create Canvas ads with mobile devices.
“No one has been able to crack mobile advertising," Mark D’Arcy, Facebook’s chief creative officer, told Bloomberg last week. "We’re still just in the beginning of the creative stages of mobile ads.”
