INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables
If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it going to end up with commercials
And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day
But there no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear
on our screens.
We&re on the cusp of the shift to Stories
Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to Stories will surpass sharing through feeds some time in 2019
One big reason is they don''t take a ton of thought to create
Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video and you&ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content
And you never had to think.
Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in
2019
Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot
They don''t even require a caption
Sure, if you&re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity
They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world
But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update
That helped Stories rocket to more than 1.3 billion daily users across Facebook apps and Snapchat.
The problem, at least for Facebook, is
that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward
Those ads, which have fueled Facebook ascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly
Text, tiny photo and a link
Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice
Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads
And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or
tempting a click.
Stories, and Stories ads, are fundamentally different
They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to 15 seconds
That a huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small businesses that&ll have trouble shooting that polished content
Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click
through.
And Stories are inherently skippable
Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends& Stories, especially when racing through those with too many
posts or that come from more distant acquaintances
People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they&re bored, especially if it with an ad.
A new type of ad blindness has emerged
Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn''t worth our time
A brand name, &sponsored& label, stilted product shot or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past.
This is why Facebook
COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the brutal earnings call when she admitted about Stories that, &The question is,
will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed And we honestly don''t know.& It a radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt
Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it&d never
stressed the danger as what it was: Stories
That contributed to its record-breaking $120 billion share price drop.
Facebook loses $120 billion in market cap after awful Q2
earnings
The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook
Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing
Stories ads are an entirely new beast.
Stories ads are a bigger shift than web to mobile
There is one familiar format Stories ads are
reminiscent of: television commercials
Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content
I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook.
Snapchat is cornered by Facebook
competition and desperate to avoid missing revenue estimates again
So this week, it rolled out unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls &Commercials& to 100 more advertisers, and they&ll soon be
Snap first debuted them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not
A Snap spokesperson said they couldn''t comment on future plans
But I&d expect its stance will inevitably change
Friends& Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platform could make us watch.
Snapchat is
desperate, and that why it already working on unskippable ads.If Facebook apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with
Snapchat, I think we&d see more brinkmanship here
Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed-off users.
But Facebook has largely
vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly
Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400
million and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million
Most people friends around the world aren''t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn''t risk pushing users there with overly
aggressive ads, except perhaps amongst United States teens.
Instagram three-slide Stories carousel ads
That why I expect we&ll quickly see
Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads
They&ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user
Facebook took a similar approach to slowly rolling out auto-play video News Feed ads back in 2014
And Facebook apps will probably only show them after a friend story before your next pal&s, in-between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls
Instagram already offers carousel Stories ads with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them.
An
Instagram spokesperson told me they had &no plans to share right now& about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said &We don''t
have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.& But plans can change
A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full 30-second TV spot, Snapchat Commercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging
industry trend for mobile video ads
Budweiser recently made some six-second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the format reuseability that could speed up adoption
For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression.
By making some Stories ads unskippable,
Facebook apps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers
It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won''t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people
Employing unskippable ads could also create an incentive for people to pay for a hypothetical ad-free Facebook Premium subscription in the
future.
If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share
Facebook has more than 5X more(duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat
The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized.
Stories are about to surpass feed sharing
