Facebook this week has announced the bold move to move into serious advertising
According to Bloomberg it is currently testing advertising video clips of 15 sec duration – see http://buswk.co/1i3NOJ4
This is very similar to the Vine video functionality which plays a looped video of 6 sec and existing You Tube and Yahoo! 15 second video clips that have been around for several years. It would appear this short period of time is enough to get a viewer (customer’s) attention, start to reinforce a brand’s awareness and leave them with a brand perception. It also fits in nicely with many other instant gratification, highly stimulating and effective apps like You Tube, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and Circles (on smartphones). Imagery, either pictures or video is fleeting but powerful
Whilst Facebook already offers brands and companies the ability to post video links on their pages the new form of video advertising will be appearing directly within users’ news feeds
The key difference here is that presumably this is where Facebook has a major advantage. Undoubtedly it will leverage off its huge database of all our personal information. It will use this to analyse to who certain video ads should be displayed and at what times (fine-tuned media scheduling). This will inevitably maximise the revenue earned by Facebook from advertising something which so far has eluded them. Perhaps too the move is to make the Facebook design and interface more multi-visual, even more varied in its content
What is interesting is that nearly all the major social media platforms now provide video clips. Facebook joins You Tube, Google Plus, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Pinterest and of course Snapchat, that are intended to have maximum impact on viewers in a minimum period of time
Another possibly related development behind all of this is Mark Zuckerberg’s stated intent to make Facebook the highly customised newspaper where we all go to get our (most) comprehensive news – see http://dthin.gs/19A6JmF
Imagine if every Facebook customer could receive all their news, current affairs, music videos and tailored advertising (with all revenue going to Facebook) and being updated 24/7 across time zones
This would have to be one of the most powerful positions for combined software and a content provider to be in, enabling them to maximise the advertising dollar return for advertisers by micro-customising every single Facebook account globally!
On one hand it is a shopper’s paradise, on the other a privacy advocate’s worse nightmare. Whatever the case Facebook is demonstrating a “winner takes all markets” stance in ramping up its product features, functionality and scope of content and media
It seemed for a while before and after Facebook’s IPO float that that investors feared Facebook has ceased to surprise by evolving and developing new platform features and functionalities
Having been in hiding for a while, no doubt in the depths of research laboratories and consumer analysis Facebook has shown it can be innovative and think outside the box. This will please both consumers, advertisers and shareholders alike and make Facebook a dominant social platform once again
Filed under: advertising, application development, social media Tagged: advertising, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, online news, Pinterest, Snapchat, social media, Yahoo, YouTube
