Facebook wants to make its ads more interactive
It's expanding the availability of its interactive ad formats.
While Facebook will likely never be ad-free, the social network is at least trying to make advertisements more entertaining -- or more annoying, depending on how you see it. The social network is making more interactive ad formats available to advertisers around the world, including video poll ads for the News Feed on mobile. Ever come across poll stickers in Instagram Stories ads? Facebook's is very similar, giving you options to choose from with a video background. E! used it to promote one of its priority TV shows, so you might have already seen one around.
Facebook is also making its playable ad format available worldwide. Playable ads are literally that -- advertisements that use games you can play to drive downloads and installations or to accomplish any other brand objective. Uber India used the format to invite people to play a game and win trips to the 2019 Cricket World Cup.
Finally, the company's augmented reality ads, which it started testing in mid-2018, is also entering open beta worldwide this fall. Advertisers can use the format to give potential customers a way to virtually try their products on, like lipsticks or sunglasses. Facebook says people use face filters and animation in Stories shared across its main platform, Instagram and WhatsApp all the time. People are used to seeing and interacting with AR elements, so ads that have them may have a better chance of getting noticed than those that don't.
