Facebook reveals ‘Creative Hub’ to help agencies make better ads
Facebook has revealed an online Creative Hub which it hopes will educate creatives within agencies on how to get the most out of the suite of ad formats now available on the platform.
Facebook Creative Hub
The social network has been on a charm offensive for the past few years to get client-side marketers to send ad budgets its way, investing heavily on new formats, targeting and measurement tools.
But Facebook’s chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy admitted today it has neglected to ensure the creative agencies are being given enough guidance on what works (and doesn’t).
“Within just 36 months we’ve gone from having very few creative experiences to having a lot,” he said at the Cannes Lions festival in France today (21 June). “We need to provide better tools to the creative community itself.”
Last year, Heineken’s media manager Elizabeth Hodson complained that her creative agency was still grappling with mediums like Facebook Video and was not making content that was fit for the channel’s purpose. For example, creating a video that relied on sound even though video ads play automatically in silent.
This tool should go some way to solving that problem.
Now, agencies will be able to look at the different specifications for all of its ad units – across both Facebook and Instagram – as well as delve into case studies and best practices.
Within the Hub they can also create and test mock mobile ads and share it easily with clients.
It’s been in a testing phase with major agencies in both London and New York, including BBDO and RGA, and will look to work directly with more agencies in the coming months to continue to improve the functionality before a full launch at the end of the year.
During the press briefing Facebook also revealed updates to its Canvas format to make it easier for creatives to build ads and more compelling for users to engage with it thanks to an integration with its Carousel format.
Finally, it detailed an Audience Insights API which pulls both demographic data and topic data which can be used to inform creative insights.
Budweiser’s Brazilian division was one of the first to use it. It was under the assumption that people in Brazil were fans of NBA because of the sport itself, but analysis of the Audience Insights data showed people were more interested because of the lifestyle around the players. Budweiser was then able to identify the off court lifestyles people wanted to emulate and used that insight to inform future campaigns in the region.
A full roll out of that tool will come in the first quarter of 2017.