Facebook targets ads on your gender and Internet speed

Facebook targets ads in India, Turkey and Indonesia based on your gender and Internet speed

 

In Indonesia, Facebook users who were updating their status updates came across an ad for Durex condoms. But not everyone saw the same ad.

Facebook worked with Durex to create an ad campaign tailored to the country's more traditional sensibilities, persuading Indonesians to think of condoms for more than just safety with a call to "make love pleasurable." The ads would load different content depending on whether the user was a man or a woman, and each message was conceived with regional gender roles in mind, said Nikila Srinivasan, Facebook's product manager of emerging markets monetization.

The campaign managed to boost ad recall by about 25% along with smaller bumps in plans to purchase and recommendation of the brand.

This is Facebook's answer to globalization, where emerging markets like India, Turkey, Kenya and Indonesia have millions of eager Internet users but lag in online infrastructure, with low-technology smartphones, spotty or slow service.

Facebook may boast a user base of 1.44 billion people, but there are still wide swathes of its own audience and millions of would-be Facebookers that the social network remains unable to effectively reach.
Facebook's answer — at least for now — is the Creative Accelerator program.

Based on technology that can read how fast or slow your most common connection is, the Creative Accelerator works with advertisers including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, condom-maker Durex and soapmaker Lifebuoy to craft ads targeted at emerging countries, crafted for every device from a basic smartphone to an advanced iPhone 6 Plus.

Now, three months in, Facebook says these specially tailored ads have returned encouraging results in countries like India, Indonesia, Kenya and Turkey where big brands have run campaigns.

Facebook is touting the success stories. An ad for Lifebuoy soap called on Indonesian moms to promote hand-washing in their families.

Facebook's solution: its technology could sense the users' Internet connection speeds so that on slow Internet, the ad appears as a photo, but at higher speeds, it renders a video. The result: mothers saw the ad, and the brand benefitted from Facebook reported that 9.4% more moms associated the brand with the phrase “protects effectively from germs” after the campaign ran.

There are also regional cultural considerations that must be accounted for, Srinivasan said. Striking a chord with users in, say, rural India calls for a different approach than reaching people in metropolitan Kenya. Facebook works with a brand's local offices in each country to calibrate ads to particular family structures or societal norms.

Mobile ads are now the lifeblood of Facebook's revenue growth: In the first quarter of this year, they accounted for 73% of the company's total advertising yields. Around 87% of the company's monthly users access it from a phone or other mobile device.

Mobile's dominance is even more pronounced in the emerging markets that Facebook has its eye on, where Internet users increasingly forgo desktops and laptops for smartphones and flip phones alike, oftentimes on slower 3G or even 2G access.

With such a patchwork of connection speeds and devices, one-size-fits-all ads risk losing out on thousands of valuable eyeballs when they fail to load, said Srinivasan. She says companies have to create campaigns that work across connection speeds.

The ads push is one of a raft of initiatives geared towards the emerging markets: In addition, Mark Zuckerberg-brainchild Internet.org aims to connect masses of new Internet users and bare-bones Android app Facebook Lite is meant to provide a more data-efficient experience for slower connections.

Treading far from controversey, however, Creative Accelerator is completely separate from Internet.org, which has been mired in controversy over criticism from net neutrality activists. The stripped-down web experience of the platform, which delivers access to a handful of sites, does not allow for photos or ads.

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Source : mashable