Facebook rolls out new ad tools, targets TV dollars

Facebook has introduced a fresh suite of advertising products in a bid to attract television advertisers onto its platform. These products include television rating point (TRP) buying, brand awareness optimisation, mobile polling and video capabilities for carousel ads.Hoping to capitalise its strengths on mobile, Facebook continues to encourage marketers to boost TV campaigns with Facebook video ads via TRP buying - a way for advertisers to plan, buy and measure Facebook video ads using TRP as the metric.According to Facebook, marketers can plan a campaign across TV and Facebook with a total TRP target in mind, and buying a share of those TRPs directly with Facebook. Working with Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) measurement system, DAR can verify Facebook’s in-target TRP delivery while Nielsen’s Total Ad Ratings system can verify the TRP delivery for Facebook and television combined.Meanwhile, its new brand awareness optimisation tool is designed to help advertisers find the audiences most likely to recall their ads by taking two primary factors into account: attention and reach. “We’ve found that, when it comes to brand awareness, it’s not just how many people you reach that matters—it’s also crucial to break through and earn people’s attention. By analysing hundreds of brand campaigns we found that the longer someone spends with an ad, the more likely they are to remember what they’ve seen,” Facebook said in a statement.Brand awareness optimisation will be available when buying in the Ads auction, as well as through the Reach and Frequency tool in Power Editor. It will be available on Facebook and Instagram this October as a limited release, with full availability in the coming months.In addition, Facebook’s mobile polling was launched earlier this year in collaboration with Nielsen. The tool is targeted to help brand advertisers understand the impact of their mobile campaigns. In a newer version of the tool, Facebook has also partnered with Millward Brown Digital on brand lift insights for Facebook and Instagram, allowing advertisers to conduct mobile polling on both platforms.Mobile polls for mobile campaigns are aimed at allowing advertisers to measure campaign effectiveness in the same place the campaign’s messages are being delivered. Polling also relies on experimental design methodology, to enable marketers to observe the changes in brand metrics caused by their campaigns.Lastly, Facebook has added video capabilities to its carousel ads. By pairing video with the carousel format, Facebook hopes to give marketers more options for compelling storytelling in News Feed. For instance, a retailer can show a video promoting a new line of sportswear followed by images of featured products, Facebook said. Video in the Carousel format will begin rolling out this week in Power Editor, and will expand to the Ads Create Tool in the coming weeks.(Photo courtesy: Shutterstock)