Facebook’s Exchange is in full swing outside the U.S. Speaking at the AppNexus Summit in New York this week, Facebook VP global partnerships Blake Chandlee noted FBX buyers can now access audiences in the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
A spokesperson later confirmed the expansion and said Facebook is actively reaching out to media trading platforms:
“The initial Beta was U.S. only. As we scale we’re now actively in the market in EMEA, doing training and education sessions with agency trading desks and DSPs. We are seeing strong initial results out of the EU… Early doors are opening in APAC as well.”
Jennifer Wehrmaker, senior manager of eBay’s social business unit, said a recent acquisition campaign achieved 23% greater reach and 56% better ROI than standard display. The September campaign did not reallocate RTB budget but was accretive to previous programmatic media spend.
If she has a criticism of Facebook Exchange, it would be the restrictions on serving dynamic creative. “For eBay dynamic creative is the real win. We have dynamic inventory and millions of [products] across categories.” Because of Facebook’s restrictive creative upload requirements, that level of creative automation is simply not possible.
Asked for a piece of advice for marketers dabbling in FBX, Wehrmaker said, “You have to be thoughtful about measurement and creative, but it’s not a big stretch from what we’ve already been doing in the ad exchange space.
Meanwhile Mercedes-Benz hooked up with BannerConnect and startup Mediasynced for a European campaign that was a little different from the typical FBX buy. Which is to say, it didn’t use retargeting.
Mediasynced offers technology that can trigger bids based on what’s on television at the moment. Mercedes-Benz used it to trigger Facebook ads in real time while its ads aired – taking advantage of real time advertising’s ability to turn ad executions on and off quickly.
Sebastiaan Schepers, COO of BannerConnect, said measuring the campaign’s effectiveness was hard (“Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t yet allow us to measure conversion rates,” he said) but the client was happy to be able to extend its TV advertising to the second screen.
Facebook’s Chandlee replied, “We launched FBX with no view tag, so attribution was almost impossible. I remember the conversation with the product guys. Because that’s data, there’s the potential for leakage.”
