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Starting my Sprinternship on Monday. Any advice?
Industry-wide layoffs tomorrow or nah?
How is Day One agency?
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Happy to do something for Facebook. But give us budget. As soon as it's digital the production budget shrinks by a few 000s. Reason people like TV is you actually get budget to make interesting stuff
You shouldn't be adapting TV spots for FB. The minute you say that I want to throw up. There should be an overarching idea or campaign and executions and tactics that work in each channel. It will all hold together. Let the broadcast do its thing and get us a budget and the support to do some great content for social. If social is that important and that's where people are, assets should not be repurposed. Look at brands who do it right.
Because most of this business is still obsessed with TV spots as being the gold standard of creative production. They came up in a time when TV mattered and won't fucking let go of worshipping a dead idol to save their lives or careers.
Because Facebook "best practices" (i.e. 1:1) kill the art form.
You can hit 152m people on FB with your video ad in ONE DAY on Facebook. How is that not a broadcast channel?
So I'm hearing:
- Convince the client to give us specific Facebook production budget
- Don't tell us how to adapt the TV ad (best practice)
Genuinely want to help fix this problem. So much wasted budget on ads totally inappropriate for the platform
The problem is the format of TV (16x9) is not the same as FB (1x1). If we shoot 16x9, we lose a lot of the picture moving it to 1x1. and 1x1 looks silly on TV (with the exception of Jeeps Super Bowl ad last year). The two specs don't work well together. So the options are to shoot the spot twice, or make creative sacrifices in edit. After years of having HD tvs, some of us are finally able to ignore the incredibly outdated 4x3 safe zone, and really capture beautiful footage. 1x1 brings us back to the small picture 4x3 days. Also, I feel like social and tv have two different call to actions, no? Wouldn't you want to taylor messaging to the online crowd?
FB is not broadcast and because people think it is, we ended up with shitty ads there. There are 2bn people on fb but they're not all consuming the content uniformly. The bulk of the content that people go to on fb is from other real people. The bulk of the content on TV is from entertainment companies. That means that when I go on fb I expect to see something that I'm able to interact with because I usually go there to interact with other people. While when I put my TV on, I expect to get a message broadcasted to me that's either a TV show, a series, or an ad. That explains why when you adapt a TV commercial to FB you usually end up with very low engagement. Views don't matter on FB. You just have to look at a muted video for 3 seconds and it will count as a view (making the point o whoever said that their metrics are flawed)
Because no creative person appreciates being told how to change their idea by a media person either if we are honest.
It's not a broadcast channel. Just because it has video doesn't mean it is broadcast. I don't understand how or why you think that. The solution is to understand what the hell you're talking about, study behaviors, understand the media buy, what are you being measured by, what's your strategy, etc. In the end you need to great idea to reach your target and make some sort of an impact. Calling FB a broadcast channel means you're getting it wrong right out of the gate.
Yes. Converting 16:9 to 1:1 you are losing 43% of the visible picture. So to take it into consideration in the same shoot you end up with all the action happening in a really tight part of space, then huge empty areas for set either side. Add in vertical and you can just forget about it, it's too constraining. And that is just one solely technical part of the whole problem. Narrative structure is different, as people consume the media differently. So you shouldn't even be adapting TV to FB. Would you convert FB to TV? No. They should be separate campaigns with separate and equally large budgets. But because it's video clients just want an adapt job, when really they should be doubling their budget.
Also, their metrics are incredibly flawed.
Because you can shove a TV spot down people's throats. You can't do it for Facebook. People will ad block you. So you have to make something that has shareable value which you don't have to do for TV
Budgetsssssssssssss
It doesn't matter if it's 1:1 or 16:9. Because the platforms are different, the CTA is different and the creative should be different. A TV spot or any piece of content isn't a Lego car that you can break and assemble into something else. This is why it is crucial for both account and media to fight the battle for all of us. We need more production budget for social so that the ads don't suck and don't end up an adaption of something that feels out of place
I also call bullshit on 1:1. The high end content I see in fb never is. 1:1 is usually a giveaway to me to keep scrolling. We are shooting original fb content 16x9 and it's working, so there's that!
And the other thing is that I don't really trust the "best practices" idea. One media person told us the best practice was to make the unit shorter which the team did and get what fewer people watched the shorter one than the longer one. Makes me think they don't really know what best practices really are - or perhaps it depends. Just like in tv and print a non-best practice (knock out type , long headlines) might still be an amazingly effective and creative ad.
OP, if the FB media buy is a colossal waste of your client's money, why are you recommending/purchasing that media every month? Shouldn't you be working with creatives to strategically buy media that makes sense to campaign, budget, and audience?
Partially ego, I bet: seeing something on a big screen TV versus an iPhone screen makes it seem less significant
@CD Right that's what I always thought creatives believed! But with 2bn users it's basically a broadcast channel now no? The problem is it's really hard to broadcast ads not made for the platform!
What could be a solution?