Facebook has launched an online creative hub to simplify the creation of ads on the platform by agencies, brands and anyone involved in the creation of ads on Facebook. It would also help the people involved in the ad creation process to share, review, test and create ads on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.
Facebook is billing it as an online space meant to foster collaboration.
The move is an effort to help creatives build ads more easily, said Mark D'Arcy, chief creative officer at Facebook's Creative Shop. "Before this, we didn't have a great interactive workspace," he said. "But building, experimenting and playing with form in mobile is really important. It's important for us as an industry to figure it out."
The Creative Hub will show the range of formats and that creatives can choose from, along with ad specs, including ones on both Facebook and Instagram. It will also serve as a platform where creatives can scan case studies and best practices, look for tips on various targeting techniques, work simultaneously in real time on campaigns with colleagues and clients in other parts of the world, and get tips on design and how to grab attention in a news feed-based environment. Another feature will let people to create and test mock mobile ads.
Creative Hub "is really a manifestation around the enormous growth of mobile," said Mr. D'Arcy. "There's this accelerating growth of engagement in mobile, with the ability to reach people for different times for different reasons. But creativity helps you reach those people."
Recent mobile-minded ad formats include Canvas, an immersive ad format that goes beyond the standard video format, introduced at last year's Cannes festival. And in an effort to reach its "next billion" users, Facebook last year began focusing on ad formats for developing markets, locales where people often don't have the latest smartphone and where they are often jumping on the internet through those phones with a 2G connection. Its Sideshow ad format is a series of images of the marketers' choosing -- they can be photographs or stills from a video ad -- designed to render well when video can't.
As clients and agencies seek to reach people in more international markets, and as the agencies and clients themselves may be in all parts of the world, different possibilities for creative requires a centralized site where anyone working on the campaigns could easily access the work, according to Facebook.