The tech giant has put together five different graphs designed to illustrate how long people watch ads for in different formats before they tune out — whether that entails skipping an ad, scrolling ahead, closing whatever app they are using or simply looking at their phones instead of their screens while watching TV.
The formats include TV ads, video ads in feeds, skippable and non-skippable video ads and ads in Stories formats like on Instagram and Snapchat. The x-axis represents the watch time and the y-axis represents the percentage of video sessions.
According to Facebook no two formats are equal in terms of effectiveness. Getting millennials to watch 10 seconds of an ad on Stories, for example, is harder than getting an older audience to watch a 10-second ad in a non-skippable environment.
"These days people talk a lot about the second screen, but it’s not clear anymore which screen we’re talking about," said Mark Rabkin, Facebook's vice president of ads and business platform. "If you saw how your family watched over the holidays, for a lot of people TV ads might as well be radio."
Here are some of the key takeaways:
People are ok with pre-roll and mid-roll ads – to a point
As for unskippable ads, people have become accustomed on tapping on the skip-button as soon as it pops us and zapping through the creative. So, advertisers should consider the first five seconds, what Facebook calls the "pre-skip portion" as an independent high-reach ad placement, and focus on the rest to provide more information to people who have demonstrated their interest.
Facebook, for its part, is urging advertisers to rethink mobile advertising, by pushing out shorter, more attention-grabbing ads in a variety of different creative formats.
