Facebook Introduces New Interview Series Analyzing Shifts in Advertising Approaches

Facebook has released a new series of expert interviews to help advertisers better understand how to react to major industry changes and what has been making progress now in terms of creating impactful Facebook ad campaigns.

According to Facebook:

"Across several chapters, we will explore how the marriage of data and creativity is helping drive best in class advertising and powering better return on investment for brands."

Due to the current heightened emphasis on data privacy, Facebook, like all digital platforms, is in the middle of a massive advertising transition, that has also led to both Apple and Google finding innovative methods to deliver more capacity for users to block apps from monitoring their activities.

As a result, advertisers have little information to base their campaign planning on, and marketers are being pressured to create new ways of obtaining response data and developing ad campaigns premised on broader sources and factors.

Andy Ford, Facebook's ANZ Head of Marketing Science, spoke with Jen Rhodes of BMF and James Greaney of CHE Proximity in the first of the series' interviews to get their perspectives on how they're dealing with these changes.

Both Rhodes and Greaney delve into the growing trend of combining data and creativity, as well as how brands are adapting their operations in this regard.

Despite recent changes, Ford emphasizes the importance of great creative, citing recent studies from Facebook, Analytic Partners, and The Lab, which found that 70 percent of the prospective return on investment for video advertising stems from the creative itself.

Needless to say, data insights are still influencing this, and the group also mentions how they use response data to analyze their creative approaches and guarantee that their creative aspects correspond with audience interaction.

Which is also emerging as a result of changing data collection methods, particularly a shift toward collecting and processing first-party data, which many brands are unfamiliar with. This opens up new avenues for engagement, while the ability to own that insight rather than relying on third-party platforms gives you more authority and a more direct audience connection.

The group also explains Facebook's progressing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to inform ad targeting, as well as how this is affecting strategic approaches.

Greaney points out:

“By using the tools and technologies we have at our disposal, the advertising industry can create great entertainment and experiences that are genuinely valuable. And since we have the ability to measure its effectiveness, we need to lean in and make sure that we’re understanding it properly."

That's a primary concern: delivering interactive, valuable ad experiences that correspond with audience demand and can still be evaluated using alternate response tracking and refinement, regardless of adjustments in how data is gathered.

There are some useful takeaways here, and Facebook plans to share more from other industry leaders in the following weeks.

The full session overview from Facebook can be found here.