Facebook Invites People and Businesses to Play

We’re seeing this behavior across our family of apps. Already, 60% of businesses on Instagram use an interactive element like @mention, hashtag or poll sticker, in Stories every month.¹ What started with exploring new things on mobile has morphed into vast and varied conversations that welcome people’s participation and will eventually immerse them into shared experiences powered by augmented and virtual reality.

To help brands further embrace this trend, today we are announcing new ad solutions that encourage a playful experience between people and businesses, and deliver results.

Following the adoption of poll sticker for Instagram Stories ads that rolled out earlier this year, we are now bringing video poll ads to Facebook mobile Feed, globally available this month. In our early findings, we’re seeing poll ads in Feed drive increased brand awareness and conversions. For example, in 5 out of 9 brand lift studies, we observed poll ads increased brand awareness compared to video ads.²

In addition to interactive questions, people use face filters and fun animation in the 1 billion stories shared every day across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. For businesses, the augmented reality opportunity is clear: in the US, 63% of internet users surveyed say they’ve tried an AR experience created by a brand.³ For WeMakeUp, AR Ads on Facebook enabled customers to try on its latest shade of lipstick, and as a result the brand drove a 27.6 point lift in purchases with the average person spending 38 seconds interacting with the ad unit. Now we’re expanding the AR opportunity to more advertisers, entering open beta for AR Ads globally this fall.

These playful formats are serious business, which is why we’re also expanding our playable ad format that allows people to play a game to drive downloads, conversations and brand objectives. To complement its holiday game Vans developed for its website, the brand worked with Facebook’s Creative Shop to build a Playable game that lets people guide Vans legend Steve Van Doren down a mountain, collecting gifts along the way. The experience drove a 4.4 point lift in ad recall and a 2.4 point lift in favorability.

The expansion of playables is now available for all advertisers globally.

These collaborative formats are built to connect with people and draw them in to participate. Over the past few months, we’ve learned that effective collaborative creative follows two principles: invite and reward.

Invite people to express or challenge themselves and be a part of something fun and worth their time.

Reward the people who've interacted with meaningful content that surprises, delights, challenge or discovers something new.