It’s Black Friday. Social media is going crazy, mothers are fighting other mothers in the supermarkets, website servers are exploding, and your local shopping centre looks like the apocalypse.
On a day filled with so much noise, you might feel some slight relief from the fact that Facebook ads continue to auto-play on mute. However, Facebook did a study that found 41% of videos to be meaningless without sound, and we don’t want this to happen to you.
With information falling into and out of every online space available, nothing can ever quite satisfy our animalistic need for updates. As this nature of ours influences the way we search for and absorb content, marketers are under increasing pressure to do the right thing for their brand. The first few seconds of an advert are the most crucial in the battle for retaining a viewer, so you don’t want to blow it all with a terrible intro because, with so many consumer options in 2016, your audience will forget you in a heartbeat.
Mobile accounted for 50% of all purchases last Black Friday, so you really do want to be tailoring your marketing strategy for the small screen. And if your website isn’t mobile optimised, you’ve just dug your own grave. Facebook did some internal research recently into mobile-based environments and the impact of sound on video content. They concluded that “when feed-based mobile video ads play loudly when people aren’t expecting it, 80% react negatively, both toward the platform and the advertiser” – nobody wants to accidentally unleash dirty fashion hip-hop on a quiet train. So right from the brainstorming stage, you need to be thinking about making a video that can still communicate in silence. A great example of a brand embracing this trend is Hotels.com, and their piano-playing ‘Captain Obvious’, whose terrible musical skills are only revealed if you enable sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izERaM-WOmk
While 85% of Facebook videos are played in silence, this still means that there are 15% out there who are happy to turn up the volume. We recommend that you create your advert with a backing track, giving your audience the power to choose for themselves whether they want to hear your advert or not. The single rule here is to make sure that your video still has impact without sound – don’t base your intro around the music, base it around the picture. Use text, animation, captions, explosions, anything you can think of to visually get your message across in a creative way.
For help creating your own Facebook advertising campaign, get in touch with us and we will be happy to create a bespoke video content plan.
