Nintendo, 20th Century Fox boost results with social display ads on publisher sites

Brief:

Nintendo, Norwegian Cruise Line and 20th Century Fox are among the brands that boosted campaign results with social display ads, a new format that ad platform Polar unveils to the public today after previously making it available to 120 publisher clients in late 2018. The format aims to simplify how brands place creative developed specifically for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter on publisher websites, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
Video game maker Nintendo saw a 77% surge in users' likeliness to interact with the brand on social media, 55% jump in action intent and 33% gain in likeliness to visit its website from the social display ads. Norwegian Cruise Line boosted brand awareness 45% and generated a 0.6% engagement rate, while movie studio 20th Century Fox saw a 67% lift in brand value and 14 seconds in-view time from the ad format, per Ipsos and Moat data cited by Polar.
Adweek, Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, LADbible, NBCUniversal, News Corp, Verizon Media and Vox Media are among the 120 publishers that have offered Polar's social display ad format to brands on a direct-sold basis, according to Polar. Going forward, it will also be available to media buyers at agencies.

Insight:

Polar today is making its social display format available to media buyers, aiming to bring together the best creative from social media ads and publisher sites where audiences spend time consuming content. The format could help marketers streamline their marketing processes and budgets by enabling them to port creative developed for social media over to publisher websites so they can target different audiences. The ad format was originally developed with Verizon Media and News Corp through a 2017 partnership with Polar.

Major marketers including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Samsung, Nestlé, McDonald's and Audi have used social display ads for more than 100 campaigns in early testing. Polar last year offered the format to 120 publishers, and more than 1,500 brands have adopted the format for 3,000 campaigns since then, suggesting that social display is resonating with users and driving engagement.

As Polar notes, social display ads aim to remedy banner blindness, news feed fatigue and higher production costs. The company said the format has demonstrated an average engagement rate of 0.6%, or 10 times greater than the average click-through rate for banners that adhere to IAB standards.

Social display ads have an average in-view time of 9 seconds, as measured by ad-tracking firm Moat, or 5 times the 1.7-second average for Facebook ads, pointing to new ways ad-tech companies are looking to innovate on social ads. Polar's One-Click Creative tools let marketers transform their existing social media ads into a format specifically for publisher sites, helping to save on production costs, per Polar.