The company is hoping that the more attractive advertising options for spotty connections will allow smaller local businesses around the world to buy more cost-effective ads and entice big multinational companies to tailor more of their ads to the developing world.
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It’s the ease of use that Facebook is counting on to make Slideshow a success, however, both from the point of businesses who don’t have the skills or finance to produce slick campaigns themselves and multinationals who want to be able to deploy marketing materials globally.
And for small businesses, the unit offers a vivid ad format that’s much cheaper to create than a video.
Facebook has an engineering team based in London that is focused on making the social network a useable product for those using slower, less reliable connections.
Facebook, which is scheduled to release its third-quarter earnings next week, declined to say how many ad dollars the new tool could generate but noted that most of the company’s sales come from outside the United States.
“We really need to do everything we can to get most people using what most of the world is doing so they can be reporting bugs and living with the same experiences”, he said. Facebook has created a tool to help advertisers assemble them out of stock images, further reducing the bar to entry.
At the event, Facebook said that more than half of its revenue comes from non-North American markets and that the next two billion users will come from places where the dominant form of internet access is mobile but on slow connections.
While Facebook is undoubtedly popular in lower and mid income countries, it’s not a given that Facebook ads are the most effective way of reaching potential customers either.
The ads make use of Facebook’s ability to read what connection speed a user tends to log in to the site from most and adjusts the type of ads it serves accordingly. Of course it has its Internet.org initiative, which Zuckerberg recently said has helped give web access to 15 million people worldwide.
The company has been tweaking its services so it works with 2G connections and launched an app called “Facebook Lite” this year that uses less data.
Things that Facebook has assumed everyone knows, it’s now reassessing.
The strategy is an important one for Facebook, which estimates 62 percent of its future growth will come from emerging markets.
Earlier this month, the company detailed ways it has improved the Facebook experience for all users around the world, starting with the News Feed. Facebook will detect the user’s connection speed and then show the appropriate ad.
People are coming online at a fast rate in emerging markets. So it began to build functionality designed with that in mind.
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Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1.39 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students.
