The social network today debuted a new type of ad, called Slideshow, for small businesses and multinational companies looking to reach consumers in emerging markets that have slow connection speeds. That’s crucial for Facebook to maintain its revenue growth as the established markets that account for its most lucrative advertising become saturated.
The ad, available starting today and rolling out over the next several weeks in Facebook’s ad management system, allows businesses to create up to a 15-second slideshow ad made up of three to seven still images they upload or get from Facebook’s stock image library. The ad unit allows people in India and other less developed countries in Southeast Asia and South America, where slow and inconsistent 2G connections are the norm, to view an ad quickly. They take up to five times less time to load than standard video ads.
The appeal for brands, and by extension for Facebook, is that these Slideshow ads sort of look like video ads. Those are booming because people tend to pay more attention to them than banner or text ads. That also means Facebook can charge more for them--though the company did say during a press event at its Menlo Park (Calif.) headquarters that the pilot Slideshow ads had a “significantly lower cost per view” than video ads.
Facebook has been testing the ad with a few advertisers, such as
The ad is the latest in a series of Facebook initiatives recently to come to grips with how to grow in a world in which some 3 billion people are online and more are streaming on everyday. “We’re pretty close to a world where most people have Internet access,” Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said at the press event. “The people we’re building for look less and less like us.”
Earlier this month, Facebook explained how it’s revamping its central news feed to work better on feature phones and poor connections. Last week, it began a program it called 2G Tuesdays where people at Facebook are encouraged every Tuesday to opt into a simulation of a slow connection for the day so they can experience what it’s like. Cox also said he’s mandating that his product team use Android devices, by far the most popular phones in emerging markets, instead of their usual iPhones.
The moves have big implications for brands and businesses that want to reach all these people. “People are concerned about clicking on content because data is expensive," said Kelly MacLean, Facebook’s product marketing manager for ads in emerging markets. “It’s a very different landscape that marketers need to think through.”
Although the Slideshow ad is aimed at emerging-market small businesses, it will be available for use anywhere. So it could also appeal to U.S. businesses that want a quick way to create an ad without having to go to the trouble to shoot a video. It may become available on Instagram later, according to Nikila Srinivasan, Facebook’s product manager for emerging markets.
India in particular has been a key focus for Facebook lately. CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited India this week partly to promote Facebook’s Internet.org wireless-for-the-world initiative, and he recently hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Menlo Park. If the company can provide millions of small businesses there, as well as large companies looking to reach people in India, a way to create more compelling ads, that could keep Facebook’s revenues worldwide growing along with its user base.
