Last month Facebook announced it would create Facebook Studio, a community destination for advertisers and marketers looking for creative inspiration. Facebook-Studio.com officially launched Monday, April 18th. The site is designed to be a creative community where agencies and brand advertisers can showcase their best Facebook marketing campaigns.
Not limited to marketplace advertisements, the small text units with a 110×80 graphic, Facebook-Studio.com invites agencies to post any and all assets; Pages, Sponsored Stories, Places, Platforms tools, and the newly added Facebook Deals. The winners, submissions that have been ‘liked’ enough into the Spotlight section, will likely be examples of creative integration, leveraging every asset available.
In addition to the Gallery and Spotlight sections, Facebook Studio also includes the Learning Lab, a place to explore all of Facebook’s offerings. Learning Lab hosts videos and articles that delve into what each asset is and how it can help your brand, but much of this information is stock material usually found in a media kit. As Facebook Studio grows, the hope is that this section will offer more than a pitch, but real insight from agencies on what works and what doesn’t.
For a site that has amassed some of the most complete data profiles of its users, Facebook Studio is not about sharing data. As a spokesperson for Facebook recently told BNET.com, “We don’t require metrics for submissions, and the site has never and will never be about comparing metrics.” As a media planner with active campaigns on Facebook, I had high hopes for conversion data, but it seems this is a creative spotlight for now.
The question becomes, who is Facebook Studio really for? In an interview with ClickZ, Razorfish word of mouth director Cristina Lawrence wondered the same, “I think we definitely need to promote our great work in the social space and share our thinking with the community at large, we still need to be mindful of our intellectual capital,” Lawrence said. “How is [Facebook] going to leverage this collective agency thinking?”
The site is still new, but with over 70 submissions from top agencies in the first week, it’s safe to say that the site will be a wealth of interesting case studies. With the lack of success metrics and campaign data, Facebook Studio currently reads like a rich media vendor’s creative gallery, and even those usually include key performance indicators for the work. As it stands, the best use of Facebook Studio is really to illustrate how to use Facebook to build campaigns that go beyond the banner, or in this case, Marketplace ads.
The current top campaign is Coca Cola’s LIKE Machine, submitted by Publicis E-Dologic, with 517 Likes. The campaign utilizes a Facebook App and Facebook Platform, integrates offline activity and pushes to Facebook via tagged photos. For an advertiser searching for ways to increase conversions on their Marketplace Ads, the Coca Cola campaign doesn’t offer much insight, but a large brand with a sizable budget and enough ambition could flip through these case studies and find the inspiration do something big on Facebook.
