Facebook’s slideshow is redefining how brand stories are told in the third world nation

Facebook is determined with its Internet.org campaign though it has received more criticism than acceptance in India. It stands firm on its mission to make internet accessible to the remotest villages. Hence, it introduced a new feature by which videos can be streamed with low data usage.

slideshow, a new lightweight video ad made from a series of still images, is giving advertisers a new way to tell brand stories to people everywhere. This also helps them to engage a larger audience through video story telling. Here’s how.

What is it?

slideshow is both a video creation tool and a new ad format which helps advertisers tell brand stories in emerging and high-growth countries and can be used by small businesses who do not have the resources to create videos.

1. Gives all businesses the ability to create video assets: slideshow reduces the need for video production time and resources.

2. Reach more people with video on all devices: the smaller file size helps advertisers reach more people with eye catching video ads regardless of device or connection.

3. Takes up less data: a 15-second slideshow can be up to 5x smaller in file size than a video of the same length.

“In early testing, we found that a 15-second slideshow can be up to 5x smaller in file size than a video of the same length. Slideshow uses video-like motion and no sound,” wrote Facebook in its blog.

Recent slideshow tests

• Coca Cola in Kenya and Nigeria ran a video ad to raise awareness of the new season of their show, Coke Studio Africa.

“We are pleased with how the Facebook slideshow campaign performed across our key markets in Africa, particularly in Nigeria and Kenya. The campaign over-delivered on reach by one million and had a 10 point increase in ad awareness in Kenya. We recognize that our consumers may have constraints when accessing video content, hence the slideshow option by Facebook is spot on in enabling us to still deliver impactful and quality content. As such, we are excited to use the slideshow feature to deliver high quality content from Coke Studio Africa to our consumers on the continent.” - Ahmed Rady, Marketing Director, Coca-Cola Central, East and West Africa, said in the blog.

• To extend the reach of their ad to people within their target audience who were on slow connections or features phones, they 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.

• The results were encouraging: they reached 2 million people, twice their goal, and raised ad awareness by 10 points in Kenya.

(Image credits: Indiatimes)