Facebook announces four new solutions at Cannes

New solutions

• The launch of a Creative Hub, where the creative community can learn and build on mobile
  
• Introduction of an Audience Insights API in beta, to help businesses build better insights to fuel campaigns
  
• Updates to Canvas ads that make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights
  
• Enhancements to Slideshow ads that make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos

Creative Hub: an interface to learn and build on mobile

Creativity is a critical component of building successful mobile marketing, but it can be difficult for the creative community to stay up-to-date with quickly developing technology. Creative agencies need a way to understand the different tools and formats, preview and share mock-ups with stakeholders, collaborate on and experiment with content creation.

Creative Hub includes:

• new interface for creative agencies that inspires, educates and enables businesses to design ad creative
  
• collaborative area to experiment, preview, evaluate, and showcase ad creative
  

• Ads guide: Explore and select from the broad range of formats available on Facebook and Instagram
  
• Ability to create and preview mocks on mobile: Easily upload a creative asset to the tool to see it as an ad format
  
• Preview URL: Share with all stakeholders and preview in a dynamic mobile feed
  
• Creative Inspiration: Easy to navigate repository of case studies/inspiring content

The Creative Hub is now in testing and should be available to everyone in the next few months.

Audience Insights API

In the ad industry, creative ideas are built on insights. Through Facebook Audience Insights API, currently in beta, we are exploring ways we can provide more meaningful information to help businesses build better campaigns that are valuable for people.

As part of the beta program, we have collaborated with a small group of advertisers - such as Mondelēz and Anheuser-Busch InBev - to understand how to develop insights from aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. The teams have been able to use these insights to create effective campaigns. The Audience Insights API will be available to partners early next year.

Canvas

Just one year ago at Cannes in 2015, Chris Cox introduced a vision Canvas and, in February 2016, we launched Canvas globally. Since then, in only four months, more than 100 years of time has been spent viewing Canvas since its global launch in February 2016 and people in more than 180 countries have experienced Canvas. Canvas loads ten times faster than mobile web. Average dwell time on a Canvas ad is 31 seconds.

We are announcing updates to Canvas to make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights.

• Advertisers can now share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process
  
• Canvas will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage and Canvas will be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it is not promoted as an ad)
  
• Marketers will be able to access detailed metrics such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track Canvas performance

New enhancements to slideshow ads

Slideshow ads make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos. People in every country have experienced Slideshows. Slideshows use five times less data than the average video. More than 50% of advertisers using slideshow are new to video. New slideshow features include:

• The ability to create slideshow ads from mobile devices
  
• An easy “video-to-slideshow” creation tool
  
• Integration with our Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library
  
• Audio and text overlay