Facebook's Creative Shop unveils program for high-growth markets

The Creative Accelerator program has been rolled out in several markets including India, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa and Kenya. In a blog post, Mark D’Arcy VP, chief creative officer at Facebook Creative Shop, said the aim of the program was to “establish best practices” in high-growth countries by “developing campaigns tailored to the people in each country and the devices they use to experience Facebook.”

Facebook said it had so far utilised the Creative Accelerator program with several global brands including Coca-Cola in Kenya, Durex in Indonesia and Nestle Everyday in India.

Facebook’s Creative Shop began operations in Singapore last year, and the social network hired former Ogilvy executive Riley Riley to lead creative output in the region. Riley told Campaign Asia-Pacific that the accelerator program was largely in response to the “staggering rates” that consumers are coming online, mostly on mobile devices. Riley added that in APAC, Facebook was currently focusing on India and Indonesia with the accelerator program.

“The program connects the explosive potential of mobile technology in high-growth countries with the ability for brands and agencies to build valuable creative for people,” Riley said.

With connectivity and bandwidth still unreliable in some emerging markets, D’Arcy emphasised the need for brands to customise their advertising for different markets. "If you're only building content that looks great on iPhones or high-end Android devices, you're excluding a huge portion of potenital audience," he wrote.

The Creative Accelerator, Riley added, is designed to help agencies and brands take into account geographic, linguistic, technological and cultural considerations.

Nestle Everyday campaign targeted mobile Facebook users in India.

“The team is working directly with brands and their local creative agencies to build meaningful creative and experiences across all mobile devices, regardless of device or bandwidth,” he said. “For example, network speeds in high-growth countries can vary, and infrastructure is constantly changing. Bandwidth targeting can help businesses think about how to tell a story across all devices at any connection speed. For example, develop videos for 4G connections, and images for 2G or 3G connections.”

In India, Nestle Everyday wanted to reach consumers in both metro and rural areas. Facebook worked with the brand and its agencies, Publicis Delhi and Media Alliance, to develop assets based on bandwidth strength. Users with weaker bandwidth received images in their News Feed, whereas users with more bandwidth received video.

Indonesia is major market for Facebook, with the country boasting the world’s fourth-largest Facebook population. Reckitt Benckiser in Indonesia worked with Creative Shop on a campaign for its condom brand Durex. As well as targeting users on different phone types, different content also went out to male and female Facebook users.

"Indonesia is a mobile-first market with many people spending time in traffic and out of home,” said Faraz A Shamsi, marketing director, Reckitt Benckiser Indonesia. “Durex is a high-priority brand for Reckitt Benckiser, and as most of our target audience spends time on social media vs watching TV, Facebook provides the brand an opportunity to target our consumers with personalised messaging for both males and females.”

In an interview with Campaign at the end of last year, Riley said agencies need not worry that Facebook is trying to come between them and their clients. “The demand for creativity is huge,” he said. “As we can never work with all brands, my goal is to work with creative agencies to scale what we do.”