Expert Takeaways from Facebook Cannes Lions 2016
Facebook Cannes Lions 2016 Announcements
Last week, marketers, creators and innovators from around the world gathered at Facebook Cannes Lions 2016 to recognize advancements in the marketing industry.
This year, Facebook will introduce new solutions to make it easier for advertisers to share their messages across mobile platforms.
According to Facebook,”To accelerate the shift to mobile in advertising, we’re announcing four new solutions that will help businesses connect with people in more insightful and meaningful ways. We’re introducing new ways to gain insights, new storytelling formats and a new tool to help creative agencies create powerful content.”
We spoke with Sarah Rogers, Senior Social Strategist at CPC Strategy to gather her analysis of Facebook Cannes Lions 2016 and how each of the four new announcements will directly impact advertisers.
1. Facebook Cannes Lions: Audience Insights API
To help advertisers reach better insights Facebook is currently working through a new Audience Insights API (in beta). They’ve partnered with 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 goal is to use these insights to create effective campaigns.
“With Facebook building out their Audience Insights API, advertisers will have additional tools to identify key audiences for their clients,” Rogers said.
“Greater depth to audience identification will lead to richer user experiences and finely-tuned creative tailored for maximum results. Through the Audience Insights API, brands will discover their social followers’ true identity, and will be able to gear campaigns and content creation to best serve their audience.”
The Audience Insights API will be available to partners early next year.
2. Facebook Cannes Lions: Canvas
Canvas, a Facebook feature announced last year uses storytelling to immersive experiences to mobile audiences.
According to the announcement, “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.”
This year Facebook plans to update Canvas to make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights.
The Canvas updates include:
- Advertisers can also share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process.
- Canvas will introduce a new feed unit to help entice people to engage.
- Canvas will also be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it’s not promoted as an ad).
- Marketers will be able to access detailed metrics (including dwell time per component and clicks per component) to track Canvas performance.
“Initially rolled out as a highly processed and time-intensive ad unit, Canvas is becoming more accessible to a wide variety of brands and advertisers. With Canvas now available for organic posts, brands can tinker with the unit before putting spend behind an unproven tactic.”
“Adding detailed metrics will help brands and advertisers quantify what is working, as the time spent within a unit was previously a black box. Moving forward, Canvas will become a staple ad unit for brands looking to tell a rich story.”
3. Facebook Cannes Lions: 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.
According to Facebook, slideshows are five times lighter than the average video file, which means they’re ideal to reach people on slow connections.
Facebook announced several updates to Slideshow including:
- Audio and text overlay, an easy “video-to-slideshow” creation tool
- The ability to create slideshow from a mobile device
- Integration with our Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library
This means small businesses without any production resources can create, edit and boost customized slideshow using existing photos from their Page or any of thousands of Facebook’s stock images.
“The enhancements to Facebook slideshow ads open up story-telling possibilities to brands with smaller creative budgets,” Rogers said.
“Since Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm skews to heavily favor videos, making slideshows a more accessible and budget-conscious choice can help brands achieve greater reach and engagement without breaking the bank.”
4. Facebook Cannes Lions: Creative Hub
Creative Hub is a new, online interface that will serve as a sandbox where agencies can play with different ad formats for online and mobile.
According to Facebook, “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.”
“Creative collaboration for content creation has been a pain point for brands, creative agencies, and advertisers alike,” Rogers said.
“The Creative Hub will serve as a platform to streamline the process and allow every voice to feed into the process. As the majority of Facebook’s ad spend is generated on mobile devices, content should be conceptualized with a mobile-first mindset.”
“The Creative Hub will allow content to be visualized and built in a test mobile environment, working towards creating an elevated mobile newsfeed experience.”
The Creative Hub is now in testing and should be available to everyone in the next few months.
You Might Be Interested In
