Facebook have officially confirmed they’re about to launch their video advertising product. Since September, the social giant has been testing how to make videos more engaging on Facebook, and now the company is beginning to test a similar video viewing format for advertisers.
A ‘small number of people’ will see video ads for the new film ‘Divergent’ this week. Facebook explained how the new formats will work in a blog post:
- Rather than having to click or tap to play, videos will begin to play as they appear onscreen – without sound – similar to how they behave when shared by friends or verified Pages. If you don’t want to watch the video, you can simply scroll or swipe past it.
- If the video is clicked or tapped and played in full screen, the sound for that video will play as well.
- At the end of the video a carousel of two additional videos will appear, making it easy to continue to discover content from the same marketers.
- On mobile devices, all videos that begin playing as they appear on the screen will have been downloaded in advance when the device was connected to WiFi – meaning this content will not consume data plans, even if you’re not connected to WiFi at the time of playback.
