This week, we’ve been getting excited about the launch of Canvas – Facebook’s immersive ad feature that allows brands to tell “more compelling stories” and improve engagement with consumers.
Canvas allows marketers to create immersive, full-screen adverts in users’ timelines which combine images, video, text and call-to-action buttons in a single mobile ad experience. Although the ads display in full screen on desktop platforms, the new ad product launch shows Facebook’s commitment to enhancing their mobile experience. According to Marketing Week, “figures released by the company show that mobile advertising represented approximately 80% of its total advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2015, up from 69% a year previously. Meanwhile, mobile daily active users were 934 million on average for December 2015, an increase of 25% year-on-year.”
Burberry ad using Canvas on Facebook from Digital Team on Vimeo.
Monika, our Paid Search Consultant, thinks this is a particularly interesting opportunity for premium and luxury brands and said “Facebook has been investing heavily in its ad products. The latest is Canvas, a full-screen ad experience that’s optimised for mobile. From a technical point of view, this is a welcome development. From load speed to user experience, mobile presents a variety of challenges to marketers – to some extent Canvas solves these problems by giving them a ready-made framework.
Canvas allows brands to tell stories as well as showcasing their products and it can be used for any objective – whether you want to promote certain products, or drive customer acquisition or brand awareness. It’s great to see brands such as Burberry roll out ads and we can’t wait to take this exciting innovation to our clients!”
This new platform opens up a wealth of new opportunities for marketers, but to really utilise them to their potential, they will need to display interactive, innovative ads that integrate consumer insights.
Leapfrogg’s Senior Social Media & Content Consultant, Hannah, said “At Leapfrogg, we’re very much looking forward to seeing what creative ideas brands come up with for Canvas. Content that tells a story performs very well on the platform – Canvas supports this type of content as it takes users on a journey. However, we predict that the most successful adverts will be the ones by brands that really understand their customers.
The most creative advert in the world is useless if served to people who have no interest in the brand or its products. By understanding customers, their interests, buying habits and how they like brands to interact with them, retailers can create adverts that not only look good but get the desired result.