Facebook has stepped up its offensive on TV ad dollars. The social media behemoth has today launched video ads in Australia and is talking about TARPs, brand dollars and changing the game.
Locally, media buyers agree it's a big deal and it could truly change the merit order within creative agencies, provided Facebook’s 12 million Australian users can swallow the ads without logging off permanently. That the platform has plumped for 15 second autoplay ads is arguably common sense, given the increasingly mobile nature of its operations. But it is also a direct challenge to the established order.
News of Facebook’s video plans broke 18 months ago. But founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly held back, fearful of going the way of the social media mastodons that botched aggressive monetisation attempts.
This year, the company rolled out video ads in phases across the US, before going full stream ahead in March. While Facebook execs may have hedged their bets by taking a few dollars out of the business ahead of launch, the sky has not yet fallen in.
But media buyers suspect there will be a backlash.
One senior buyer said that it could “seriously piss users off” and from that perspective it would be “interesting to see which brands and agencies go first.” Second mover advantage could become fourth or fifth for many.
Facebook hopes to minimise uproar by launching with selected partners and running ads past global creative head Mark D’Arcy, who has repeatedly echoed the company mantra that Facebook ads, ultimately, should be as good if not better than organic content.
Facebook is also no stranger to weathering user backlash, whether from changes to data policy or its front end. Engineering boss Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth remarked last year that “people offered to fight me in bars” when they found out he was the man behind News Feed. “Now it is the most popular feature on the site."
While ads in any format might not achieve that level of popularity, “people will get used to video ads over time”, said another media buyer “but the creative will need to be shit hot.”
If Facebook is policing the video ads, then repurposing TV ads, even 15 second versions, won’t cut it.
GroupM chief revenue and investment officer Danny Bass said that is what could force change upon creative agencies, where the TV ad has long reigned supreme.
“For now the TV ad is without doubt king. But I’d like to know at what point what point in the creative agency brief does the mind-set shift to ‘make this ad specific for mobile’?
“The difference now is that brands will be forced to think about the using the platform in a different way because a TV ad will not work.”
While Facebook is talking up a softly softly approach, Bass agreed that for media agencies and brands the launch of Facebook video ads was a genuine game changer.
“The potential influx of video [inventory] Facebook will bring will completely disrupt the market because theoretically we’re talking about millions if not billions of targeted streams being made available.”
Despite WPP being part of Facebook’s advisory board, Bass said that locally there remained many unknowns.
“What nobody yet understands is the pricing model, restrictions on length, frequency. A number of factors that we would work through on a video campaign are yet to be discussed. But the potential volume that it will add in terms of video inventory is a good thing for agencies and clients.”
That's because, while Facebook is talking about premium product, more video inventory will likely bring down prices.
But Bass agreed that Facebook was rightly wary.
“Facebook’s challenge is how to do it without over commercialising its product, which has been the downfall of pretty much every social media platform that has gone before it.”
That may be true, but Facebook has outlasted most one-time rivals and is becoming embedded in the daily lives of its users. It has a billion people’s photos, knows their friends, their thoughts, interests and through its widgets and log-ins on millions of websites, what they read, watch, listen to and share. When Facebook breaks down, we break down.
Whereas TV reach is educated guesswork, Facebook increasingly knows what people like and who’s seen what. And knowledge is money, truckloads of it. If Facebook can make the price and the return right for brands and agencies, it will exacerbate price pressure on traditional media owners if not change the merit order across the market.
That is, unless everyone just sets their phones to only play video automatically in wifi mode. That could scupper things.
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