Check out Facebook’s recent announcement:
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Testing-a-New-Way-for-Marketers-to-Tell-Stories-in-News-Feed
We at Viddyad have learned three important lessons about the future of video advertising on Facebook.
Text is King
“Rather than having to click or tap on the content, videos will begin to play as they appear on screen — without sound”
As you can see from Facebook’s demo video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hf6iDkuE4o]
Every video ad will be automatically loaded into the newsfeed, but sound will be initially disabled. Therefore attention grabbing video and imagery is a must for your video ad. However, to get the best visibility for your message, your video is going to need strong bold text to grab the viewers attention. We’ve known this for a while, which is why we have been focusing our development on combining professionally produced stunning videos and images, with overlying text. Not only that, our editor make’s it simple to add custom text animations in a host of styles, colours and fonts. So if you want to make the best out of your video ad, be sure to grab (silently) your viewers attention with text.
Have a look at this quick tutorial showing how easy it is to add custom text to your video ad:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC1uPkWHEKo]
Video Aspect Ratio is 16:9
Again, taken from Facebook’s demo video, we can estimate that the default aspect ratio for their new video ad offering will be 16:9
Facebook Video Ad aspect ratio estimated to be 16:9
What does this mean? Put simply, an aspect ratio is the relationship between the height and width of a video. It’s a way of referring to how rectangular a video is. When we say it’s aspect ratio is 16:9, it means that if the width was 16cm, the height would be 9cm. Or in terms of videos playing on a screen, a video’s default size might be:
640 pixels in width, 360 pixels in height as standard,
or in HD – width of 1920 pixels, height of 1080 pixels
(Another way of looking at it is, if the aspect ratio of a video was 1:1, it would be a square, or if it was 2:1 it would be a rectangle twice as wide as it is tall.)
So what does this mean? If you want to maximize the coverage of your video ad, and ensure there are no black borders around it, you want to produce your video with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Again, at Viddyad, we take care of this for you. All video ads produced through our system, are 16:9 by default. When making Viddyad, we’ve tried to do the hard work for you, so that you don’t need to worry about things like aspect ratio. When you make a video ad with us, it just works!
Video ads are mobile
“On mobile devices, all videos that begin playing as they appear on the screen will have been downloaded in advance when the device was connected to WiFi”
Internet bandwidth is no longer a sticking issue for advertisers on mobile. With the prevalence of WIFI in our homes and offices, Facebook will harness these connections to pre-load videos so that they don’t eat up your mobile data plan. This is a huge step forward for the video advertising space. Previously, video advertising campaigns would need to focus on non mobile devices, missing out on huge number of potential views. Could this be a turning point for video advertising?
