Dubbed Facebook’s biggest B2B campaign ever, the company will start working on selling their mid-roll ad spaces in videos through a collaborative initiative designed by their in-house marketing team, Hello Design, and The Guild. The main goal of the campaign is to urge marketers to respond and give feedback, both positive and negative.
Facebook emphasized that the campaign’s goal is not solely focused on enticing clients to buy premium ad spaces, rather, the company wants marketers to learn more and be inspired by the opportunities their product presents.
In an interview with AdWeek at South by Southwest, Facebook U.S. group director for entertainment, connectivity, multicultural, and technology Bob Gruters said, “It’s going to be online, it’s going to be print, it’s going to be out of home, and we’ll use our platforms, which we think are really effective for B-to-B messaging.” There is no word on how much they will be spending on this campaign, only that it will be the company’s biggest investment in B2B collaboration.
The campaign wants to emphasize the use of video through its mobile platform, which boasts a total of 1.055 billion monthly active users. Apart from that 56.5% of Facebook users are connected through the mobile app only.
Marketers can then study how video ads on Facebook will be received and how they can improve their own campaigns to maximize the 1.86 billion users watching videos on the mobile application. Facebook wants marketers to direct their stories to this audience, and push them to think of better mobile-friendly ways to keep users watching.
By innovating the marketer’s capabilities through video, Facebook opened doors and minds to more ideation strategies that can power their brands. In return, Facebook can gauge whether their product can push their media-focused initiative forward.
Unlike Youtube and Twitter, Facebook will focus more on mid-roll ads because it seems to be an untapped form of video advertising. From past reports, Facebook plans to only show ads on videos that last for 90 seconds or longer.
If the campaign works the way Facebook wants it to, users will experience better ad content and product experiences. The other side of this is marketers will finally understand that it takes more than just a good campaign to sell products. Their ideas and goals must match both the product provider’s, i.e. Facebook, and that of their consumers.
