People around the world connect to Facebook on different connection speeds and device types, and we’re committed to making everyone’s experience seamless and interactive no matter how or where they connect. Right now, as more video consumption moves online and to mobile, people around the world report wanting to engage with more video content on mobile, including ads. In fact, a recent report suggests that in countries like Nigeria and the Philippines where connectivity can be slow, expensive or both and where feature phones are prevalent, people are even more receptive to video ads.¹

But video poses some challenges to advertisers, especially for small businesses and businesses reaching people in emerging and high-growth countries around the world, where connectivity and the prevalence of basic devices make it difficult for advertisers to deliver video to their entire audience. Additionally, the investment required to shoot and edit a video is often beyond the reach of advertising budgets.

To make video ads easier to create and possible to watch on every device and connection speed, today we’re launching slideshow, a new type of lightweight video ad created from a series of still images. Slideshow is easy for advertisers to use and engaging for people. Here are the details.

Slideshow makes it easy for advertisers to create video ads from still images. Simply upload three to seven still images—they can be from an existing video, a photo shoot or even stock imagery from our library—and choose the length of your slideshow, from 5 to 15 seconds.

Slideshow reduces the need for video production time and resources, and because of its smaller file size, it extends eye-catching ads to people on basic devices or with poor connectivity. In early testing, we found that a 15-second slideshow can be up to 5x smaller in file size than a video of the same length.² Slideshow uses video-like motion and no sound, giving advertisers a new way to tell brand stories to people everywhere.

We created slideshow to help businesses reach the people in emerging and high-growth markets who want to watch more video content, but businesses everywhere are adopting slideshow as a way to overcome the challenges of creating videos, or simply to try a new and engaging ad format.

Coca-Cola in Kenya and Nigeria ran a video ad to raise awareness of the new season of their show, Coke Studio Africa. To extend the reach of their ad to people within their target audience who were on slow connections or features phones, they took high-resolution screenshots from the video, uploaded them in sequence along with some basic text and ran the story as a slideshow on Facebook. And the results were encouraging: they reached 2 million people—twice their goal—and raised ad awareness by 10 points in Kenya.

“We are pleased with how the Facebook slideshow campaign performed across our key markets in Africa, particularly in Nigeria and Kenya. The campaign over-delivered on reach by one million and had a 10 point increase in ad awareness in Kenya. We recognize that our consumers may have constraints when accessing video content, hence the slideshow option by Facebook is spot on in enabling us to still deliver impactful and quality content. As such, we are excited to use the slideshow feature to deliver high quality content from Coke Studio Africa to our consumers on the continent.” - Ahmed Rady, Marketing Director, Coca-Cola Central, East and West Africa

“Slideshow has the effectiveness of a video but it is much faster and cost effective [to create].” - Sabela Souto, Media Planner, Elogia Media S.L., Spain

Slideshow is rolling out to Power Editor and Ads Manager over the coming weeks. If you’re interested in setting up slideshow campaigns today, reach out to your Facebook account manager.

We are committed to building the best mobile advertising platform for marketers everywhere and of every size. As we continue to test and build tools that help advertisers tell their stories across any device and connectivity level, look for updates here.