High-impact advertising, as the name suggests, is designed to capture user interest by means of interactivity, or just sheer size. Facebook got in on the mobile act, launching Canvas and Undertone recently announced a partnership with them to introduce cross-device retargeting capabilities for the ad format. ExchangeWire speak exclusively with Rob Garber (pictured below), MD EMEA, Undertone about what value the partnership will bring to Canvas and how cross-device retargeting will actually work.

ExchangeWire: What is Facebook Canvas?

Rob Garber: Canvas is Facebook’s first high-impact advertising format designed specifically for mobile devices – a response to the social platform’s steadily growing mobile user base. Launched in Cannes last year, the technology enables an ad to sit within the news feed and, when a user interacts with it, will provide a full-screen interactive experience. That could include images, video, and other rich media, providing brands the scope to bring creative campaigns to an entirely different platform than they could before, to Facebook’s biggest-ever mobile audience.

How does the Undertone partnership with Facebook work for advertisers?

Undertone already offer our clients high-impact formats across screens – for example, some sit within the page content, some expand out, some rely on gyroscopes within a mobile device for interaction, etc. We now offer a high-impact solution across platforms. With our social platform MakeMeReach, a Facebook Marketing Partner, we are now able to help brands extend their high-impact ad activity into social environments. It’s rare for advertisers to have the chance to lead a campaign with high-impact advertising and extend the same creative format to social media, too – but it’s now set to become a regular part of our work with advertisers.

Does that mean marketers will have to supply two sets of creative – one for the publisher unit and another for Canvas?

For the best results, we aim for Canvas ad creative to be consistent with the original high-impact unit within the publisher’s website. This is a huge user experience point, and is key to making these campaigns successful: if the experience is consistent, users will interact consistently across the units too. To make sure that Canvas ads work as well as possible, our in-house creative team, PIXL, takes care of adapting the original creative to create the Canvas format. They’re a team of designers, art workers, and developers who have the expertise marketers need to build and execute powerful creative, which can maximise the impact of a campaigns across all the platforms it lives on.

How will cross-device retargeting work through the Undertone and Canvas partnership?

Traditional retargeting uses site visits to create audience segments. While this has proven to be very effective for direct response advertising, to date the brand advertising applications have been limited. With our new capabilities, we will be able to retarget a consumer who has been exposed to, or interacted with, a high-impact ad on the web into social environments, thus, creating new valuable audience segments for brand advertisers.

What does your partnership with Facebook Canvas signal for the growth of high-impact advertising?

Facebook is one of the largest media players in the world, and for them to recognise the role of creative high-impact advertising is a huge step for Undertone, and the industry alike. High-impact adverts can result in click-through rates of up to 50 times more than standard advertisements, and users are far more likely to recall the brand advertised through these new formats, compared with standard display adverts. Their effects include greater social media engagement as well – 61% of consumers were more likely to share high-impact adverts and brands with their peers via social media.

That last stat is perhaps the most relevant for the likes of Facebook: why shouldn’t exciting, creative advertising be as shareable for audiences as content shared by your other connections? At Undertone, we believe that high-impact will be the future of advertising, as long as companies continue to explore and expand its capabilities with creative work. Our work with Facebook is the start of the next big leap for digital marketing.