Facebook launches suite of interactive ad solutions ahead of festive season in India

Facebook is rolling out a suite of new interactive ad solutions including Poll ads, Augmented Reality (AR) ads, Instagram poll stickers for Stories ads, and Brand Playables. 

The new ad solutions released are built on people’s natural desire to interact, engage, and touch. Interactive ads enable instant two-way communication and get people involved, which is a natural fit for how people, especially the youth, engage on mobile phones.

With the festive season coming up in India, this suite of interactive ads can help advertisers engage with their consumers in new and interesting ways. 

Facebook is now bringing video poll ads to Facebook mobile Feed, globally available this month. Poll ads allow advertisers to insert polls to video ads and enable an interactive, personalised advertising experience. Facebook is launching three variants of poll ads, and each will support the reach, brand awareness objective (BAO), traffic, and app install objectives:

• Poll Only: enable advertisers to interact with their target audience to drive brand lift.
• Poll plus Watch and Browse: enable advertisers to capture peoples' preference for personalized journeys on their websites.
• Poll plus Watch and Install: enable advertisers to interact with people and drive them toward an app install.

Advertisers can insert a poll question and two corresponding response options to a video ad campaign in the Facebook mobile News Feed. “In early findings, we’re seeing poll ads in Feed drive increased brand awareness and conversions. For example, in five out of nine brand lift studies, we observed poll ads increased brand awareness compared to video ads,” Seow said.

In addition to interactive questions, people use face filters and fun animation in the 1 billion stories shared every day across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. For businesses, the augmented reality opportunity is clear. For WeMakeUp, a US-based cosmetics brand, AR ads on Facebook enabled customers to try on its latest shade of lipstick, and as a result, the brand drove a 27.6 point lift in purchases with the average person spending 38 seconds interacting with the ad unit. Facebook is now expanding this AR opportunity to more advertisers, entering open beta for AR Ads globally over the next few months.

Lastly, Facebook is also expanding its playable ad format that allows people to play a game to drive downloads, conversations, and brand objectives. Uber India used the Playable format for a campaign during the 2019 Cricket World Cup and saw a 3X higher ad recall lift rate and 10% higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to other brand awareness campaigns.

The expansion of playables is now available for all advertisers globally.

"At Facebook, we build for people first. This means our products, services, and ad solutions have evolved to meet people’s growing desire to engage and participate in ideas. This is also a key reason why they have delivered consistent business results for our advertisers, large and small. In the age of reducing attention spans, interactive ads are one of the most effective ways of holding the attention of the consumer. They are also easy to execute - a poll ad can be created in just five seconds. The new ad bundle will especially add value to brands looking at high-engagement festive campaigns,” said Sandeep Bhushan, Director and Head of Global Marketing Solutions (GMS), at Facebook India. 

Increasingly people want to participate in a brand’s big idea and they’re using innovative ways of doing so - fewer words, more GIFs, Lives, Reactions, emojis, face filters, and stickers. In turn, brands and people are becoming more intertwined and it’s changing digital advertising from a one-way push communication to an ongoing dialogue powered by creativity. 

“This behaviour is unfolding across our family of apps. Already, 60% of businesses on Instagram use an interactive element such as @mention, hashtag or poll sticker, in Stories every month. What started with exploring new things on mobile has morphed into vast and varied conversations that welcome people’s participation and will eventually immerse them into shared experiences. To help brands further embrace this trend, we are announcing new ad solutions that encourage a playful experience between people and businesses, and deliver results,” said May Seow, APAC Creative Strategy Lead, The Creative Shop at Facebook.

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