Facebook has revealed that numerous brands throughout Africa are using Slideshow, a lightweight video ad format, to tell their stories to people who wouldn’t usually watch online videos because of their local bandwidth constraints.
South Africa is one of the top ten emerging markets for usage of this innovative advertising format from Facebook, with momentum also growing in other markets like Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, India, Malaysia, Turkey, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia. To date, people from 200 countries have viewed Slideshow advertisements.
Slideshow makes it easy for advertisers to create video ads from still images. All they need to do is upload three to seven still images—they can be from an existing video, a photo shoot or even stock imagery—and choose the length of the slideshow, from 5 to 15 seconds. In addition to providing users with rich, interactive content—irrespective of the device and internet access medium they use—Slideshow reduces the need for video production time and resources. That means small businesses, too, can use video to engage with their audiences without needing a massive budget, equipping them to drive real business results.
Due to Slideshows being 5X lighter than the average video file, it extends eye-catching ads to people on basic devices or with poor connectivity. It can be used by nearly any African business to accomplish a variety of advertising objectives namely:
· Build a video easily and quickly: Create videos on Facebook using photos or Facebook’s stock image database
· Use an eye-catching new format: Use images in succession to capture attention and tell a story with photos
· Display products or tutorials: Upload product photos or display a tutorial, recipe, or how to using photos
· Recycle existing creative: Reuse old creative assets in a new and eye catching way
· Reach people on slow connections: Take your video ad to people on 2G and slow connections
“We aim to make it easy for advertisers to tell rich, compelling brand stories to people, no matter which connection speeds and devices they use to connect with Facebook,” says Nunu Ntshingila, Head of Africa at Facebook. Ntshingila went on to say, “Even in sub-Saharan African countries – where connectivity can be slow and expensive and feature phones are common – people want to engage with more video content on mobile, including ads. Slideshow is easy for advertisers to use and engaging for people.”
Slideshow has already proven its worth in a range of campaigns in Africa. For example, Coca-Cola in Kenya and Nigeria ran a video ad to raise awareness of the new season of its show, Coke Studio Africa.
To extend the reach of the ad to people within its target audience who were on slow connections or features phones, Coca-Cola took high-resolution screenshots from the video, uploaded them in sequence along with some basic text and ran the story as a slideshow on Facebook. And the results were
encouraging: the campaign reached 2 million people—twice their goal—and raised ad awareness by 10 points in Kenya.