Cannes day 2: Facebook’s creative push, viewability and why M&S is sacking customers
Cannes Lions: Day 2 at Cannes saw Facebook trying to encourage brands to spend more money with it and the issue of viewability rear its ugly head.
Facebook makes a big push to attract more advertisers
Facebook is making a big push to attract more brands and advertisers to the platform with a suite of new tools and products aimed at making it easier and more efficient to create and buy ads on the platform.
First up is a new insight accelerator tool which combines Facebook’s demographics and psychographics with topic data to inform creative insights. In testing, Cadbury had a hypothesis that chocolate has an ability to trigger a positive association but actually found that during week days chocolate is an antidote while at the weekend it is an amplifier. This informed its ‘Taste like this feels’ campaign, showing people daily moments of joy on Facebook.
Facebook is also expanding its Canvas format to make it easier to build, offer more creative possibilities and offer more ways for consumers to discover Canvas. The social network claimed users spend an average of 30 seconds with the ad unit, with that rising to one minute for most successful campaigns such as a Tesco Valentine’s campaign aimed at men.
Facebook is also launching a creative hub, one place where advertisers can find all the specifications about its different ad units as well as the ability to browse and see example of them in action.
“We want to be close partners to the marketing and creative industries but we want to do more. The new tools and products will help people collaborate and share to realise the potential,” says Mark D’Arcy, Facebook’s chief creative officer for its creative shop.
Sacking customers on social
Marks & Spencer has been giving consumers some tough love on social media. The brand’s global director of loyalty, insight and customer analytics Nathan Ansell believes too many brands are trying to get everyone to love them rather than focusing on their actual customers.
Speaking at a Mail Online panel, he said there is a danger in endlessly chasing ‘likes’ and that brands must remain clear on what they stand for.
He explained: “It becomes a vanity project. M&S food isn’t built on everyone loving us a bit, it’s a number of people loving us a lot. If you’re not interested in paying a bit more for quality food, then thank you very much and Asda is also available.
“Brands have to be confident enough to sack some customers.”
Nathan Ansell, global director of loyalty, insight and customer analytics, M&S
Thomas Crampton, global managing director of Social@Ogilvy, agrees, saying that brands must ensure they are aligning their social media activity with their broader marketing strategy. “One of the challenges in the past was ensuring that social media was fully integrated and not stand alone. But brands are realising now that they have to have not a social media strategy but social media within their strategy.
Setting your own ad viewability standards
Ad viewability remains a contentious topic within the industry. Some marketers believe that the IAB’s industry standard, where 50% of an advertisement in view for two seconds is considered an ad view, is short-changing them. As a result, some brands are now looking to set their own standards when it comes to ad viewability.
Speaking at an event hosted by Exchange Lab in Cannes today, Craig Hepburn, who left his role as global director of consumer engagement at Microsoft last year to become VP digital marketing at TATA Communications, explained how Microsoft defined its own viewability standards.
“We looked at the usual consumer journeys and identified specific actions that would happen, like [where consumers would view] a video for more than 30 seconds or would scroll 70% down a page. We then set that up as a target,” he explained.
“Instead of being told what we should measure, we decided what we needed to measure based on insight and then we got the media to drive that. It turned out to be a very successful model that Microsoft has now rolled out globally.”
Ben Jankowski, group head of global media at MasterCard, added that if marketers had a “magic wand” everyone would be guaranteed 100% viewability, but that the IAB’s standard is an “arbitrary” figure.
He explained: “I think that the 50% is an arbitrary bullshit number people have made up. Setting random goals of 50% is haphazard. There’s no reason for us to accept anything but 100%.”