Facebook upgrades Collection ads with full-screen displays

Dive Brief:

Facebook, the social network with 1.28 billion daily active users worldwide, released its Canvas full-screen ads on Wednesday in its Collection format, where ads typically appear in people’s news feed with a large photo or video above a gallery of product images. Facebook’s mobile app has three new Canvas templates to harness new customers, sell products and showcase a business, according to a blog post by the company.
BarkBox, Michael Kors and Dollar Shave Club are testing the new format, which shows a photo or video that comes from the Canvas post. When people tap on the first image, a landing page opens with full-screen photo galleries, videos, product descriptions or additional links.
Facebook also updated its Creative Hub so that ad designers can create Canvas mockups to share with colleagues and clients before rolling out a campaign.

Dive Insight:

As Facebook transitioned from a desktop service to a mobile-first platform, the company has introduced new ways to make advertising more compelling on a smartphone screen. It added the Collection format in March to expand its original Canvas format, and the following month updated its marketing application programming interface (API) to help brands automate the production of Canvas ads.

The latest move to bring a full-screen more immersive experience to Collection could help further drive product discovery, which is what Collection was designed to do by showing shoppable image tiles. The news comes as Google continues to ramp up its Shopping and Product Listing ads. Both companies are looking to monetize the growing interest in combing content and commerce on mobile, reflecting how young consumers are shopping these days.

Facebook marketing videos are helping to drive sales, according a study this week. Animoto Productions, a cloud-based video creation service, published the study, which found that 64% of consumers reported making a purchase after watching a marketing video on Facebook in the past month. The report also found that social media videos bolster brand engagement and sales, with 83% of marketers saying they're confident Facebook video content drives purchases.

Marketers are trying out branded social video with 47% of those surveyed publishing four or more marketing videos in an average month, Animoto found. To meet that demand for more video content, 92% of marketers are repurposing assets they already have for fresh video creation. With 60% of consumers saying they watch branded videos on Facebook every day, the social network has ample opportunity to get more marketers on board with its Canvas and Collection ad formats.