Facebook Has A New Type Of Video… Ads

How good of an idea it really is though?

Do you know that warships play a whole diverse set of roles — ships, rescue vessels, museums, offshore data centers, and at the end of their floating lives, they are sometime sunk to become homes for fish and to encourage coral growth!

Thing is, they make a great platform for all forms of activities — most of which aren’t in any way related to the warship’s original raison d’être. A platform by the very definition of the term, implies a vessel/asset that has multiple uses and applications.

Facebook is one of the world’s greatest IT platforms, and it’s turning the screws on something new — in yet another attempt to coalesce into our daily lives even more ubiquity, Facebook is doing something it does best — enable internet engagement by zapping technology out of sight, leaving you with a sexy looking container that draws you in.

Facebook is now using a new type of video to advertise products, that is designed to draw customers in and help them shop easier.

Called Collections, Facebook’s new ad format aims to make e-commerce easier, for both, the retailers and the consumers. Considering that over a billion users actively prowl Facebook, why not bring them stuff they’d like to buy, showcase it beautifully and make it immensely easy to seal the deal?

Facebook’s video ads have the ad sitting on the top half of the screen, while the bottom half carries the recommendations for the products.
When the customer clicks on the recommendations below, it takes them to a fast loading landing page, where people can browse through up to 50 products. From there when a person selects a product, they are taken to the retailer’s website, or a third party entity, from where the product can be bought.

To gain popularity with the retailers, Facebook allows the retailer to either manually choose the products to be featured, or Facebook can pull popular products from a retailer’s site.

What Facebook here seems to be doing is simply appealing to the visual aesthetics of people, with the idea that more interactive content might elicit a strong buyer-response.
That said, an ad could also be an image (and not necessarily a video), however it is quite clear that Facebook considers this to be a video service.

“Three in four consumers say that watching videos on social media influences their purchasing decisions, which is why we designed collection”, a Facebook spokesperson said.

Reportedly, Adidas, Lowe’s, Tommy Hilfiger, Sport Chek and Michael Kors are amongst the first to test out the format. Being the big brands they are, they should be crowd-pullers.
But how successful the format will actually be, can’t yet be estimated.

There’s a reason for this pessimism.

Back in 2009, when Facebook first considered itself as a possible retailing store, 1–800-Flowers, a brand synonymous to sending flowers and gifts, got onto Facebook and established it’s online store on the fast-growing platform — assuming it was going to be another success.
1–800-Flowers had been successful almost everywhere else that it’d set up shop. They had pioneered new ways of retailing — a toll-free number, direct sales via the internet and immensely well supported service channels. But they soon discovered that it was going to be a tough sell on Facebook.
“We were one of the first to actually have a Facebook store, and we did have big expectations, but it turned out to be not very successful”, recalled Jon Mandell, Vice President of Marketing at the flower and gift seller.

That, in short, seems to be the story of e-commerce on Facebook, so far. For all the predictions and aspirations, Facebook has never really been able to even get close to becoming the e-commerce behemoth, that market gurus once predicted.

Yet, it sure has not been for the lack of trying.

Facebook has been trying to get people to shop off of their News Feed for years now. It started out with their Buy Button, then went ahead on to in-platform stores and chatbots. They even managed to launch a Craigslist competitor, which also didn’t go quite so well for them.

Well, Facebook now seems to be bringing e-commerce across their social media presence — Instagram too, not too long ago received a new feature that lets apparel, jewelry and beauty brands tag their posts with shoppable links.
This again is an encouragement to the users to buy things then and there, right from within their Social feed.

There’s more — Facebook is also testing is a new metric for Collection and Canvas campaigns — they call it Outbound Clicks. It provides Facebook’s advertisers stats on how many people clicked through to the brand’s website or app. These are in addition to the stats that measure how many clicked on an ad from the News Feed — which are already provided to the advertisers.
With these new reports, advertisers will now also be able to track how many people looked at the interstitial page and then clicked again to visit the retailer’s own site. This should give them better insight into what is appealing to the end audience, and what is not appealing enough.

Like someone said, the most intelligent minds in the world today are thinking how to make you click on ads and buy things.

The question, however, stays: how successful will this be? Will Facebook be able to get it’s readers to finally make the jump between surfing to shopping?

Let’s just wait and see! If you’re a business though, you might want to give this a try — 1 billion plus people, is a good, rife-with-potential market, no?

Originally published at Chip-Monks.