Facebook video ads – the future will not stand still

Your Facebook newsfeed is about to become home for a rash of new video advertising.

Mark Zuckerberg has acted swiftly after he realised that budgets for video advertising on YouTube were increasing around the globe and were a potentially lucrative new income stream his swollen bank balance was missing out on.

But it’s not all doom and gloom – firstly, each video ad (due to appear on our timeline sometime this year) only last 15 seconds. And there’s no sound on the videos unless you activate it.

Zuckerberg clearly wants to tap into the massive money-pot that goes into TV advertising. Currently the online video ad market is worth just a tenth of the annual TV ad value.

As a massive percentage of the online world checks into Facebook at least once or twice a day, it seems a logical place for advertisers to want to host their advertising. And, as we all know, static ads can be much more easily ignored than their video equivalent.

Facebook is taking its first steps into video advertising tentatively, though. The breakout of video advertising on the social network was supposed to roll out earlier this summer but, following overwhelmingly negative press, Zuckerberg has delayed the roll out to iron out some of the perceived issues and consumer negativity. Word has it, for instance, that Facebook plans are said to include limiting the video ads users see to those from a single advertiser per day – not too much of an intrusion on our daily Facebook feasting ritual then.

And social network bosses have high hopes for the project with global monsters like Coca Cola, Ford and Nestle expected to be among the first to use the facility.

In PR terms, the move will open up yet another channel of communication for forward-thinking agencies and their social network-savvy clients.

With the news that video ads are definitely coming, static ads already feel somewhat ‘dinosaur’ and, now, there is literally no reward for standing still.

The only surprise is that it’s taken this long for Facebook to act.

As it stands Facebook video ads will first roll out later this year in the USA and remain an American-only feature through much of 2014. Europe and the UK is expected to join the video ads party in late 2014, Asia in 2015 and the rest of the world’s markets by the end of 2016

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