Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Facebook’s mobile video strategy – opportunity for digital marketers

Facebook reported Q4 2016 earnings today – Q4 2016 revenue was $8.81 billion and 84% of that ad revenue was from mobile. Reading the earnings report and details of the earnings call, I found several interesting bits of information from digital marketing perspective

Facebook got rid of desktop advertising platform FBX in May 2016 in order to focus on mobile advertising. Which indicates that digital marketers and the digital marketing trends are seeing more opportunity in mobile and less in desktop.

Mobile video and mobile video advertising are going to be the biggest priorities for Facebook in 2017. Facebook will focus on shorter-form content which indicates that Facebook is going after YouTube. It would be interesting to see how Facebook implements video. As popular as YouTube is, nobody wants to watch ads on YouTube and everyone skips the ad as soon as the skip option is enabled. So far digital marketers have not adopted to short-form video advertising in a big way; most ads are still cross platform and tend to be longer in length; I often wonder about the ROI on them, if the users are skipping the ad before the product is even displayed. It will be interesting to see if Facebook will change that.  


Short-form video consumption is exploding and it looks like digital marketing is on the verge of another change. The companies and marketing agencies that can quickly adapt will win.

No comments: