Facebook and Instagram to test mid-roll video Ads

Call it a commercial break

What’s going on here

Ad age reports that Instagram is testing mid-roll video ads inside Stories. The recently launched section of the app built to take on snapchat’s own stories product. This news comes days after its parent company, Facebook announced it is testing mid-roll ads on videos that publishers post to the platform, which was first reported by Recode.

Mid-roll ads are video advertisements that are scattered in between sections of a piece of video content. Despite the ‘md’ in the name, they don’t necessarily need to be in the middle of a piece of video content. They are most widely used on TV.

What does this mean

This will be great news for brands and advertisers alike. Publishers will get a 55% cut of the ad revenue from the ads on their videos, while advertisers get more ad inventory on Facebook and Instagram (the number of advertisements, or amount of ad space, a publisher has available to sell to an advertiser). Instagram stories now has 150 million daily users and according to Facebook, its users watch 100 million hours of video on the platform daily.

Instagram reportedly decided to go with mid-roll ads over sponsored stories after internal debates as to which would perform better. Sponsored stories are regular Instagram stories by brands that are placed in the library of stories people see regardless of whether they follow that brand and labelled as ads (think native advertising). It is unclear if Instagram will release sponsored stories in future.

It is increasingly clear that in the digital sphere, mid-roll ads are becoming a trend rather than a fad. Before snapchat used mid-roll ads, it also experimented with sponsored stories and Facebook also allows advertisers to create sponsored videos that show up in users’ news feeds.

Why should I care?

For the industry

Instagram’s decision was probably driven by the fact that sponsored stories would be opt-in (users have to click on the story) as opposed to mid-roll ads that are opt-out in nature. People are less likely to watch an ad if they have to opt-in, thus decreasing the potential Ad reach for advertisers. In addition, mid-roll ads are also more familiar to users as it provides a more TV-like experience.

Lastly, mid-roll ads outperform both pre-roll (before) and post-roll (after) ads. With an average completion rate of 90%, as compared to pre-roll and post-roll which are 78% and 65% respectively according to Ooyala Video Index.

For your career

As the social media landscape matures and both established and up and coming social media networks polish their ad offerings. Marketers who work in the online paid ad landscape will have to become proficient in managing paid ad campaign on multiple platforms. Right now, the two biggest platforms for managing paid ad campaigns are google Adwords and Facebook ads (Twitter is lagging behind). In the future, this will change and marketers will have to adapt.

Bonus: Both Google Adwords and Facebook ads have online certifications you can do for free. I have one myself.

It’s definitely great to have on a resume. But don’t expect it to land you a job by itself.

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