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Canvas: Facebook’s Immersive Mobile Ad Experience Launches Internationally

Facebook has launched Canvas, giving marketers the ability to improve the mobile advertising experience with native immersive ads.

Tamar Weinberg on February 25, 2016 at 2:16 pm

Today, Facebook announced the international launch of Canvas, an immersive full-screen ad player that lives and breathes on Facebook’s mobile interface.

In a partnership with multiple brands and agencies, Facebook wanted to give users the ability to build a brand story on a “canvas,” which likely was the rationale behind its name. Canvas loads directly in a user’s mobile news feed up to 10 times faster than the standard mobile web. This native ad experience is fully customizable for advertisers and creative teams and is available internationally. Facebook began testing the new ad experience last year with a small group of major brands.

One of the other reasons behind Canvas, quite simply, was to empower brands and agencies to tell the full story and to share more information without being confined to restrictive spaces. Of course, since mobile typically means slow, Facebook was mindful of creating an experience that also loaded without delays.

Canvas supports all standard multimedia, including video, graphics, text and call-to-action buttons. It does not require any code or software and works on Android and iOS.

It’s not surprising that Facebook, which initially catered to publishers through its Instant Articles rollout, is now expanding the same courtesy of leveraging the mobile experience for best results to advertisers, which control 73 percent of its ad revenue. Improving upon the ad experience on Facebook within the mobile space was an important part of the company’s long-term growth strategy.

With immersive ads that take over the screen, this digital space can be transformed to give marketers a platform to tell a real story, all while making it fun and engaging for users to enjoy. Current launch partners for the Canvas experience include Lowe’s, Coca Cola, L’Occitane, ASUS and Burberry.

For more information and to see some Canvases in action, visit Facebook’s official announcement.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg is a professional hustler and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on The Social Web. She blogs about all things tech, productivity, and social media customer success at Techipedia. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among other sites.