Well, it was only a matter of time before Facebook started planning to tap into one of the only forms of advertising that they have left unturned so far. It has seen success in display advertising, great success in social post advertising, created great results in mobile advertising, and has even created a measure which digital marketers use to analyze their success in marketing, known universally as the Like. Now, seeing that video advertising has grown substantially in popularity among both consumers and marketers, Facebook has decided to give it a go. According to an article from AdAge, Facebook is preparing to start featuring video ads in Facebook users’ news feeds, but differently than the way videos already appear in the news feed.
From the AdAge article:
Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers, according to several industry executives who have been briefed on the company’s plans over the past few weeks.
Facebook is still debating several product features, but has decided on this much to date, these executives said: By April at the latest, it will offer video advertisers the chance to target video ads to large numbers of Facebook users in their news feeds on both the desktop version of Facebook as well as on Facebook apps on mobile phones and tablets.
What’s more is that these video ads will be most likely be autoplay ads, meaning that Facebook users will be shown the video upon scrolling to it, or something similar to that. Also, according to a few of the executives that AdAge spoke with, advertisers will be able to present the same video to any given Facebook user at most three times per day.
It is still unclear exactly how these video advertisements will be targeted or what kind of methods advertisers will be able to use with these video ads. Whether the video ads will be like Page posts, only being targeted to a business’s fans, or whether they will be able to be spread about Facebook like Sponsored Stories, they will be a huge hit with Facebook marketers.
“The assumption is that these would be widespread campaigns. They are looking to grab big chunks of money … millions of dollars.”
These ads will perform with similar results that are seen with today’s TV ads, as they will be able to be targeted demographically and they will use the gross ratings point currency, which are both things that are seen with television ads.
Regardless of the excitement that these ads may produce, the executives that AdAge spoke with were not as enthusiastic. More so, they were nervous about how these news feed video ads will stand with marketers as well as consumers. Autoplay ads are those that consumers get sick of most often, and they also present inaccurate results. Whether the ad is viewed or not, an autoplay counts toward a view.
One executive was quoted in saying, “There could be serious outrage.”
