Making ads resonate on Facebook’s silent screen
More firms tailoring pitches to be seen and not heard
The Geico commercial that made its premiere this summer seemed like a standard 30-second television ad. It features two men building sand castles on a pristine beach with their children. “Guess what I just did?” one of the men asks. “Built a sand castle?” the other responds. “Ha — no. I switched to Geico and got more,” the first man says.
But another version of that ad was created by the Martin Agency, which worked on the commercial for Geico. This one was half as long, with text that popped up as the men spoke, and the word “Geico” appeared after six seconds.
The goal: to make the ad understandable to people who viewed it on Facebook without sound.
In the last year, Facebook has been vocal about its plan to put videos at the centre of the social network. But to bring advertisers on board, it has had to convince them that their commercials can work in a News Feed where videos autoplay in silence.
“For a lot of our clients, Facebook is a very important platform, so thinking about how it’s going to play out there without sound is coming into the discussion earlier and earlier in the process,” said Neel Williams, creative director at the Martin Agency.
Facebook executives are already being hit by criticism over how it gauges the success of video ads, after the company was forced to apologize this month for a miscalculation that greatly overstated how much time, on average, its users spent watching videos.
Facebook says more than 500 million people watch videos on it every day and viewers have the sound on 50 per cent of the time. But the Martin Agency said its data showed that 94 per cent of its video ads on Facebook were viewed in silence. Omnicom’s BBDO, which tracks Facebook video views across more than 18 advertising clients, said that, on average, 82 per cent of users watched without sound.
Even as such ads have been shortened or created anew for the web, particularly for mobile devices, where Facebook says 75 per cent of its video views occur, sound has remained on in apps such as YouTube and Snapchat.
It is difficult to tell brands they need to tailor their ads for each platform — not to mention pay TV-like dollars to place them there — without proof of their effectiveness, so “Facebook and Twitter are doing a ton of research in that space to combat the advertiser hesitation,” said Kellie Judge, senior vice-president of global media partnerships at Amplifi.