Facebook launches Creative Hub at Cannes Lions to help creative community build on mobile

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Screen Shot 2016-06-22 at 8.16.32 am.jpgToday at Cannes, Facebook is announcing four new solutions that make it easier for advertisers to share their messages across mobile platforms. With more than 1.5 billion people accessing Facebook from mobile devices and more than 1 billion people using Facebook on mobile everyday, the Facebook family has more mobile engagement than any other platform.

Facebook’s announcements include:

  • The launch of a Creative Hub, where the creative community can learn and build on mobile
  • Introduction of an Audience Insights API in beta, to help businesses build better insights to fuel campaigns
  • Updates to Canvas ads that make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights
  • Enhancements to Slideshow ads that make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos

Additionally, Instagram today announced that it now has more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide — and 300 million who use the app everyday. In fact, the Instagram community has more than doubled over the past two years.

Instagram’s communities of shared interests and passions are also more global than ever: more than 80% of users are from outside the US. And they continue to create amazing, inspiring content through photos and videos every day.

Creative Hub: An interface to learn and build on mobile

Creativity is a critical component of building successful mobile marketing, but it can be difficult for the creative community to stay up to date with quickly developing technology. Creative agencies need a way to understand the different tools and formats, preview and share mock-ups with stakeholders and collaborate on and experiment with content creation.

This is why Facebook is introducing the Creative Hub, which includes:

  • A new interface for creative agencies that inspires, educates, and enables businesses to design ad creative.
  • A collaborative area to experiment, preview, evaluate, and showcase ad creative.
  • Ads guide: Explore and select from the broad range of formats available on Facebook and Instagram
  • Ability to create and preview mocks on mobile: Easily upload a creative asset to the tool to see it as an ad format.
  • Preview URL: Share with all stakeholders and preview in a dynamic mobile feed
  • Creative Inspiration: Easy to navigate repository of case studies/inspiring content.

The Creative Hub is now in testing and should be available to everyone in the next few months.

Audience Insights API in beta: Helping businesses build better insights to fuel campaigns

In the ad industry, creative ideas are built on insights. Through Facebook Audience Insights API, currently in beta, Facebook is exploring ways it can provide more meaningful information to help businesses build better campaigns that are valuable for people.

As part of the beta program, Facebook has partnered with a small group of advertisers–like Mondelez and Anheuser-Busch InBev–to understand how to develop insights from aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. The teams have been able to use these insights to create effective campaigns. The Audience Insights API will be available to partners early next year.

Canvas: Now easier to create and learn from

Just one year ago at Cannes in 2015, Chris Cox introduced a vision Canvas and in February 2016 Facebook launched Canvas globally. Since then, in only 4 months, more than 100 years of time have been spent viewing Canvas since its global launch in February 2016 and people in more than 180 countries have experienced Canvas. Canvas loads 10X faster than mobile web. Average dwell time on a Canvas ad is 31 seconds.

We’re announcing updates to Canvas to make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights.

Advertisers can now share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process.

Canvas will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage and Canvas will 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 such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track Canvas performance.

New enhancements to slideshow ads

Slideshow ads make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos. People in every country have experiences Slideshows. Slideshows use 5x less data than the average video. More than 50% of advertisers using slideshow are new to video.

New slideshow features include:

  • The ability to create slideshow ads from mobile devices
  • An easy “video-to-slideshow” creation tool
  • Integration with our Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library
  • Audio and text overlay