Facebook's Flagship "Canvas" Brings Brands, Products Live on Mobile

It's fairly well understood now that of the time people spend online, they're spending it on mobile and in just a handful of apps, including Facebook.

What's remained top of mind for advertisers is how challenging it is for them to tell compelling brand and product stories on mobile in ways that are enjoyable for people and effective for their business.

The data tells them people are discovering content, brands and products in mobile apps, so advertisers are looking for new and creative ways to share information with people there.

Facebook said they are committed to building great mobile experiences for people and doing so also opens up new creative possibilities for advertisers.

"We've invested in engaging experiences like video and the carousel format to empower advertisers with more creative space to share their brand and products on mobile. But the website that opens after someone clicks on an ad is often slow to load and not always optimized for mobile, creating a disjointed and frustrating experience for people.

"And website pages are only growing in file size. In 2015, the average website page was three times bigger than it was in 2011, and slow load times are a top reason people abandon a website," the team said.

These trends tell that advertisers need a better way to share information after people click on their ad, and the information offered after someone clicks needs to load quickly, look beautiful on mobile and allow people to take action easily.

The Facebook's new product, Canvas—a post-click, full-screen, immersive mobile ad experience on Facebook, loads nearly instantaneously—to solve this problem.

Canvas was designed with input from the creative community at every step and is designed to help businesses tell stories and show products on mobile devices in a beautiful way. Canvas is available to advertisers around the world starting today.

Canvas: a better way to tell brand story and promote products on mobile

Canvas helps advertisers achieve any objective by giving businesses a fully customizable digital space on which to build multimedia stories.

Canvases open from Facebook ads in News Feed to reveal a full-screen experience where advertisers can use a mix of video, still images, text and call-to-action buttons to build beautiful and effective brand and product experiences on mobile.

Within a Canvas, people enjoy moving through digital stories easily.

They can swipe through a carousel of images, tilt to view panoramic images and zoom in to view images in detail, making the Canvas experience immersive and engaging in a way that mobile sites aren't.

And Canvas uses the same technology that makes photos and videos load quickly on Facebook, so it loads as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web.

Burberry used Canvas to build a mobile-friendly and interactive holiday gift lookbook.

"We made the the creative community a priority when we designed and built Canvas. It's a product that represents our commitment to creative craft and delivering the best mobile experience for businesses and people,” - Chris Jones, Head of Creative Technology, Facebook Creative Shop

Canvas is a mobile-only experience and works on both Android and iOS. Advertisers with access to Power Editor can start creating Canvases now. Learn how to create a Canvas.


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