LAS VEGAS — Facebook is working with publishers to develop a new style of social video ad format that will look and scale like TV.
That’s according to the head of one of the publishers involved in the process, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget.
“Facebook is now designing new units for social video,” Blodget told Beet.TV in this video interview at the Consumer Electronics Show. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy, so I can’t reveal some of what they’re coming up with – but they’re coming up with some very smart ways which are much more integrated in to the storytelling, in the same way it is in television.
“I think that will unlock a huge opportunity for brands, and it will get the control and scale that they’d love from television.”
Already at CES, we heard how Facebook is expanding a test of video advertising inside its Facebook Live broadcast streams.
Video could be big business for Facebook, which, together with Google, is already gobbling up the lion’s share of new digital ad dollars.
And publishers now stand to gain, having learned the particular recipe for deploying video in a social media environment, Blodget says.
“A few years ago … we put our stuff on Facebook – it didn’t work at all, nobody watched it,” he tells Beet.TV.
“We realised, through experimenting, it’s a new kind of story, you have to tell the story differently, build the distribution differently.
“Sometimes, they’re vertical or square; sometimes they’re sound-optional … once you do that, it unlocks this incredible new opportunity of people who are going through their social feed.”
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
