It’s hard to talk about Internet marketing these days without talking about video marketing. Videos are everywhere, and brands are using the power of visual communication to create engaging content that attracts user attention. With new technologies emerging every day, it’s easier than ever to create professional videos without a massive digital marketing budget. Facebook’s unveiling of Facebook Video Ads is an attempt to compete with Youtube, which has largely captured the majority of video marketers in the past few years.
But Facebook might just be a viable free classifieds in pakistan contender for advertisers. Facebook boasts about 645 million hits per day, while Youtube gets about 200 million. Facebook has more than one billion account holders-although you don’t need an account to view content on Youtube, only to post content. The idea of some advertisers is simply to target video advertising where the most people are, noting that Facebook’s 645 million hits per day makes for an impressive audience.
It’s not a huge surprise that soon after Facebook-owned Instagram introduced a 15-second video feature that the social network would attempt to capitalize on that functionality by creating a video advertising opportunity. While it’s not yet available to advertisers, Facebook is making its plans known as well as a bit about how it would work.
Advertisers would create 15-second video ads-so those using Instagram Video for brand awareness campaigns already have the dirty work done. The ads would be placed on users’ timelines. The costs, however, are predicted to be a bit intrusive at up to $2. 5 million per day. Clearly, the move is targeted at big-budget brands.
When you compare this to the $3. 8 million advertisers spent on a single, 30-second spot during the Super Bowl last year, it doesn’t seem out of reach for major brand advertisers. Still, with the wide array in budgets among brands using Internet advertising-including Google PPC, Youtube, and other platforms-it’s a bold move that may or may not see success depending on how well big-budget brands adopt the new opportunity.
The move is likely an attempt to take a bigger slice of the advertising revenue pie. Currently, Google holds the largest portion of revenue-claiming 33 percent, while Facebook takes just 5 percent of global digital ad revenue. And U. S. digital video advertising is expected to grow exponentially by 2017 from $2. 39 billion to $9 billion, according to estimates by eMarketer.
So while the move makes sense from a revenue standpoint-how will it really pan out? It seems logical to target TV advertisers in an effort to move them from the television platform (which is still the overall advertising giant across multiple forms of media) to the digital sphere. But how will users take to having advertisements planted in their news feeds? Will there be an option to opt-out? And how many users will do so?
The other risk is that Facebook stands to alienate its widespread audience. Currently, Facebook Ads are non-invasive and users can click or not click. Turning the Facebook platform into a television-esque format where users have no choice but to sit through commercials could be a major turnoff for its user base.
Still, some experts believe that bridging the television format with the second-screen phenomenon is inevitable. And Facebook isn’t the only social networking platform doing so. Twitter is already offering Tweet Ads that coincide with television programming.
Facebook’s major advantage-which just may be the ticket to getting big-budget brands to take notice-is its in-depth understanding of real-time user behavior. With Graph Search, Facebook takes the power of search to a new level, allowing for various parameters to provide super-refined search results. Combined with a real-time understanding of what users are doing in their news feeds in real-time, the result is a quite-impressive targeting ability that’s nearly unmatched.
It’s a real toss-up, but what is clear is that Facebook’s video advertising platform isn’t reachable by the average PPC advertiser. This is something you’ll see the likes of Doritos and Budweiser capitalizing on. And because digital ads have built-in capabilities for instant response, advertisers just might take advantage of the ability to have users click directly on an ad from within their Facebook news feeds, taking advantage of discount coupons, contests and other offers.