How ads cope with Facebook’s silent timeline
NEW YORK: The Geico commercial that made its premiere this summerseemedlikeastandard30-second television ad. It features two men building sand castles on a pristinebeachwiththeirchildren. “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 get the ad to communicatewithpeoplewhoview 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 workinaNewsFeedwherevideos autoplay in silence, nestled between engagement photos and birthday wishes.
“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 in the process,” said Neel Williams, a creative director at the Martin Agency.
Advertising is a medium that has long relied on the hummable jingle, the memorable catchphraseandthefamiliarvoice-over to connect with its audience. Now, as technology companies like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat hustle for a bigger cut of television marketing dollars by adding videos, they have been working to show advertisers that their videos can be just as effective, even if they are played on mute or are viewed forjustafewseconds.Thechallenges of presenting ads on platforms that are not one size fits all are sure to be much discussed at Advertising Week, a top industry gathering that begins Monday in Manhattan.
Facebook executives will probably also have to field questions about how it gauges the success of video ads, after the company was forcedtoapologiselastweekforan error in the way it measured video viewership.
Even before Facebook drew criticism for that metric, advertisers were charting new territory with sound on Facebook. Facebook has visited the Martin Agency “several times” to share tips on how to tailor ads effectively, Williams said, and it has emphasized the importance of catching a user’s attention in the first three seconds of a video, at which point it officially counts as aview.
Facebook says more than 500 million people watch videos on it every day. Martin Agency said its data showed that 94% 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% 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% of its video views occur, sound has remained on in apps like YouTube and Snapchat.
“The distinction we’ve been talking more and more about is notjustcreatingfortelevisionversus in-feed, but how it’s so different from other video,” said Kellie Judge, senior vice-president at Amplifi, the central investment division of the ad agency Dentsu Aegis Network.
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,” Judge said. NYT