Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox told executives at the Cannes Lions advertising festival that he has what they have been looking for: more creative tools for crafting more immersive ads. Over the past few years, Facebook’s growth has been fueled by two main factors: mobile and video, and the new ad format also revolves around these formats.
More for advertisers and users
Cox said they are working on a new mobile ad format that will help advertisers make ads more attractive to users, something that has not been done before. Cox informed executives at the festival that the new format will create rich media that blends easily with the videos most watched by users in their news feeds.
Giving a demonstration of Facebook’s vision, Cox used an ad for a Michael Kors watch. The new format mixes video with still images and moving images and information, allowing users to push their finger across a screen to turn a watch around or zoom in for more details, thus, making the ads more interactive. More importantly, Cox told listeners that Facebook is working to make load speeds faster.
Cox shared no details on when Facebook will make these tools available to advertisers or when users will start seeing interactive ads. But a report from CNBC citing an unnamed source said that by the end of this year, Facebook could launch its new ad formats.
Facebook focused on the “next billion people”
Presently, video ads are certainly designed for smartphones and tablets, but Cox noted that the company is focusing on “the next billion people,” who probably will be on 2G. Cox told listeners that Facebook is extracting these tools so marketers are able to translate their ads for feature phones, for instance, by putting their idea forward with the help of moving images instead of a video.
In the first quarter, the social network’s mobile ads accounted for 73% of its ad revenue, up from 59% from last year. Facebook presently has over .25 billion mobile monthly active users, which is an increase of 24% from the same quarter last year.
Over the past year, videos have grown in terms of popularity on Facebook with a rise of 75% in the number of video posts created per person. Video, which is also the most valuable ad format, holds the potential to poach more TV ad dollars for the social network.
