By: Christopher Heine, Adweek
Facebook wants to give marketers more collaborative tools to build ads—specifically mobile ads—on its platforms.
So it announced a platform called Creative Hub, which is designed to help Facebook and Instagram ad creators more easily manage their multi-party workflow. In the coming months, ad agencies and their clients will be able to grind away on campaigns on the platform. They’ll even be able to watch video ads—in test mode—on their smartphones before they go live. Among other potential benefits, the system should allow marketers to cut down on their email, text message and Slack writing, saving valuable time.
After a press junket on Tuesday afternoon held at the Majestic Barrière hotel, Mark D’Arcy, CCO at Facebook’s Creative Shop, told Adweek that his social company would eventually like to allow a brand’s media agency and creative shop to communicate on the platform. Such a move would essentially create an end-to-end solution for Facebook advertising and ad buying.
Facebook sought the feedback of 11 agencies, such as BBDO, BBH, R/GA, Droga5, Grey, McCannn and Oglivy, to build Creative Shop.
“BBDO and R/GA have been testing for the last month or so,” D’Arcy explained. “Our goal is to [fully] launch it by end of the year, if not before.”
Additionally at Cannes Lions, D’Arcy and his team unveiled that an audience insights API (application programming interface) was in the works, currently in beta. They also debuted an intriguing update to its Slideshow ads product, making it simpler for marketers to generate video-like ads from photographs. The feature will be available on both Facebook and Instagram.
Also, the team revealed that the total time people spent watching video on Instagram has increased 150 percent over the last six months. Lastly, earlier Facebook said Instagram now has 500 million monthly users, an increase of 100 million since September 2015.
