On Thursday, Facebook announced its intention to provide more interactive advertising on its platform. That means advertisers will soon be able to push their marketing messages through various interactive mediums like augmented reality, games, and playful polls.
Interactive advertising is a promotional technique that involves an element of feedback from the target. Using this feedback, advertisers can generate analytical data that can help improve the advertising method.
Billions of people access Facebook through their smartphones. Interactive advertising takes advantage of these devices’ features to create colorful, fun ads rather than pitching to the target audience.
For example, advertisers can place ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger services that’ll invite people to play games, or ask for opinions. The target audience can also take advantage of their smartphone cameras to catch a virtual glimpse of how they might look in a particular dress or lipstick.
In a statement, Facebook’s vice president of global business marketing and chief creative officer, Mark D’Arcy, said:
“Advertising needs to work harder than ever to be more relevant and rewarding for the people we’re making it for. Creativity, as always, is the key and our new polling, AR, and Playable Ads are great examples of more interactive and playful ways to surprise, delight, inform, and connect with the audiences and communities we all serve.”
The Rise of Interactive Advertising
Back in 2016, Pokemon Go launched to a record-smashing success. It got over 130 million downloads and nearly $210 million in sales within its first month.
Marketers noticed the game’s interactive content and started working on ways to apply a similar appeal in advertising. Thanks in part to Pokemon Go’s success at the time, the digital marketing landscape is already evolving.
Advertisers now seek to engage directly with the audience through technologies like augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. A recent survey reported that 88 percent of marketers believe that interactive advertising could help their brand stand out.
According to D’Arcy, interactive advertising on social media is not surprising in this era of smartphones. Internet users have become part of the creative process online and expect engagement from advertisers, he said.
Instagram Stories already feature polls or fielding questions. In the coming months, marketers will be able to apply similar tools to video ads on the leading social network’s mobile app, according to Facebook.
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