According to Facebook’s Chief Creative Officer, Mark D’Arcy, we have stepped into the new era of advertising.
This means that ads are becoming even more engaging, relevant, rewarding and interesting.
However, there are a few challenges that advertisers face nowadays. The competition is growing, the audience’s attention span is dropping, and what is worse, they develop ad aversion.
There is so much “noise” in social media that it becomes harder to fight for the advertising space.
You are competing not just with your immediate competitors but with everyone who is appearing in the feed.
Moreover, the overload of information reduces people’s attention span. On average they spend 1.7 seconds with a piece of content on mobile and 2.5 seconds on desktop [Source: Facebook].
In addition to that, consumers take any opportunity to skip the ad.
Bringing the Interactivity to Facebook and Instagram ads helps to solve those problems.
Besides, our experience shows that using the latest practices for your creative improves ad performance many-fold.
The main reason is that these ad formats invite people to interact with the ad. This brings them closer to the brand and drives a higher impact on purchasing intent.
Why Interactive ads?
The simple answer is the old ways are not working anymore.
People’s behaviors online are evolving. Therefore, the approaches to reach them should evolve as well.
Whether your goal is to draw more awareness or to increase conversions and sales, Interactive ads are the way to go.
We all know by now the power of storytelling.
If your story is not engaging, you are not going to grab the potential customer’s attention.
Interactive ads do not only help brands to tell their stories, but to do it in a very engaging and personalized way.
Its simple math. The more you personalise, the more people spend time with you. The more people invest their time to interact with your brand, the more they are likely to buy from you.
According to MAGNA, the intelligence, investment, and innovation unit within IPG Mediabrands, the interactive ads increase consumer attention by 47% .
Their report has concluded that this is a unique opportunity for businesses.
You can triple your time spent with the customers and increase the potential of people interacting and remembering your brand by 35%.
Moreover, “these figures remained consistent across gender and age demographics, along with industry verticals”.
Source: [magnaglobal.com]
Types of Interactive ads
Video Poll Ads
Using Video polls is one way to increase engagement with your brand.
You can learn about your customers’ preferences and optimize your marketing accordingly.
This way you are changing the rules of the game for your business, from one-sided monologue to an ongoing dialogue with your audience.
In Facebook’s early findings “… poll ads in Feed drive increased brand awareness and conversions. For example, in 5 out of 9 brand lift studies, we observed poll ads increased brand awareness compared to video ads”.
Depending on your goals, you can use any of three types of Video Polls: Poll only, Poll + Watch & Browse and Poll + Watch & Install.
The examples of such ads you can find below:
Image source: [Facebook.com]
One thing you should remember. Your poll should always be consistent with your marketing strategy and your messaging.
That way it compliments your actions rather than interrupting them.
You can use it for new product promotion, sales, or even asking for help on your product features and design.
Isn’t it great?
Playable Ads
In its essence, it’s just mini HTML5 game experience. Yet, it enables a full marketing funnel communication.
It can drive people from awareness all the way to purchase much quicker. No wonder that the popularity of this ad format is growing amongst brands as well as their consumers.
With Playable ads, the consumer can start playing straight away. They do not need to download the game, thus their experience is not disrupted.
This allows brands to capture the audience’s undivided attention.
You can prolong the time of interaction with them and develop the relationships better. This way you can drive downloads, conversations, brand awareness or other brand objectives.
The limit is only your imagination.
If you doubt that playable ads can be used for other than gaming companies, see the creative examples from Uber, Amazon and McDonalds.
As you can see these ads instantly grab attention and deliver value propositions to the person playing.
Augmented Reality Ads
Augmented Reality ads bring emotional experience with the customers to completely another level.
These ads allow consumers to interact with the brand by being a part of the ad itself.
It can be face or other filters and animations which allow potential clients to “try on” different products.
One of the examples is WeMakeUp. By using different filters, the consumer could try the lipstick colours on them.
Another great example is IKEA. You could choose the furniture and see how it looks like in your apartment.
These ads reduce the steps between your product and the consumer in the marketing funnel.
Summary
The Interactive ad formats are just the beginning of the changing landscape of advertising.
Considering how effective are these ads, it will be the fastest-growing ad format in the next few years.
Because it is relatively new it is better to jump on a bandwagon now and utilise the benefits of the not-so-much touched market of Interactive ads.
