1.5 Million Square Foot Baselworld 2014 Goes Native; In-Stream Ads on the Rise

We have seen numerous ads in our Facebook News Feed promoting the world’s largest watch and jewelry trade show, which opened today.  Baselworld’s ads were hard to miss because of the frequency and creative, which employed a compelling image that spanned the entire width of the News Feed.

These type of native ads on the major social nets, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. are growing quickly.  According to a report by BIA/Kelsey, native-social ad revenues are up 77% year-over-year (2013 vs. 2012), and they are “growing at a significantly faster pace than social display, the predominant social ad category.”

We are not surprised at the growth of these in-stream ads considering the KPIs we have seen firsthand from campaigns for our clients’ exhibitions and events, including much higher CTRs than standard display campaigns, with lower CPCs.  As such, we are integrating native-social ads into the impression portfolios for our clients’ shows as much as possible.

Here are three benefits to note about the specific social media venue in which Baselworld ran their ads…

Facebook News Feed ads enable you to leverage prime screen real estate with ads that have a similar “look and feel” to organic content.

Social overlays i.e. likes, comments and shares, which are part of Facebook News Feed ads, provide additional exposure at no extra cost.  For example, one of the Baselworld ads we saw had 610 combined social actions. This is on top of the standard click-thru engagement. You don’t get that with traditional banner ads!

You can leverage your own 1st party data so for example you can retarget people in the Facebook News Feed that have visited your show web site with a customized target-relevant message.

If you are not currently using native-social ads, the growth curve here would suggest the time has come to go native!

Posted on March 27, 2014