Social Media > Banners Ads.

Display advertising and social media both represent ways that brands communicate with audiences, but there are several inherent differences to these communication channels that fundamentally impact the quality of the resulting relationship.

The goal of display advertising is often to drive a transaction, but social media is all about building relationships; and it’s working. 80% of users actively engage with brands via social media. Compare this to display advertising where roughly 30% of users in the US leverage some kind of ad blocking software to actively avoid display ads. Put simply: users much prefer to engage with brands via social media. This really isn’t all that surprising given the dichotomy outlined below:

Brands are catching on to the user’s preference for social media and are investing more in creating high-quality content for channels like Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. These platforms not only allow brands to engage with existing fans and followers, they also offer paid distribution to help brands build new relationships. Paid distribution is viewed as more authentic than display advertising because it delivers the same experience to new audiences and fans alike. Social validation (ie. likes, comments, etc.) supports the authenticity of the post as evidence that peers enjoy and identify with the content. It’s well understood that these elements increase the performance of paid distribution, so why aren’t they more commonly used via other paid media channels like display advertising? The answer is that, until now, these signals have been locked away within the walled gardens of the social platforms.

Enter Spaceback

Spaceback’s platform allows brands to convert any social media post into a dynamic ad unit that can be distributed anywhere brands buy media. Through integrations with the major social media platforms, Spaceback syncs all of the assets and metadata related to any post and rebuilds that post in standard ad units in a way that retains all of the elements that make it feel social in the first place. The user experience is more similar to encountering a social media post “in the wild” than seeing a display ad. As a result, users engage at significantly higher rates.

Brands have already started to repurpose social media assets for display advertising, but they do so in a very manual way. The process still involves human designers and as a result is slow and expensive. Spaceback is the only platform that programmatically builds display ads from social media posts without human intervention. This means that Spaceback can offer creative instantaneously and free of any development fees delivering significant cost savings in addition to performance gains. Take a look at the below Instagram post from Buick and compare the resulting ads using Spaceback vs a more traditional banner creative:

The best part about Spaceback is that it is risk free to test with any type of social media post. Get in touch with us to receive creative tags today!