Facebook Just Bolstered Its Retail-Focused Dynamic Ads With Video And Merchandising Overlays

Holiday retailers typically buy their media in August, yet Facebook held a press junket at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York this morning—a week before the Fourth of July—to get the word out about a handful of new, merchant-focused advertising features. Anything to get a yuletide head start on rival Google while angling for bigger ad budgets. Chiefly, the social media platform debuted video for Dynamic Ads, which had previously only facilitated static images. Marketers can upload a catalog’s worth of product videos on the Facebook Ads API to get their campaigns rolling. “Video is not just about storytelling anymore,” said Martin Barthel, global head of retail and e-commerce at Facebook. “It can drive branding and sales.” Graham Mudd, product marketing director at Facebook, added, “Video works really well for direct-response advertising.” Also, overlays can now be used on static Dynamic Ads, giving more options for copy, such as an item’s price or a discount. Marketers can test different shapes—circles, triangles, rectangles, squares—and colors on the ads, which could inspire a wave of multivariate testing most commonly associated with email marketers. (For example, they may test to see if blue triangles in ads produce more sales than red rectangles.) Read more at Adweek.