Cannes Lions is where marketers, creators and innovators from around the world come together to recognize great work in the marketing industry. Facebook is at this celebration of creativity and connection announcing new solutions that make it easier for advertisers to share their messages across mobile platforms. With 1.6 billion people on Facebook¹ and, announced today, 500 million users on Instagram, we offer powerful platforms for businesses to reach people no matter where they are and no matter what device they’re on.

To accelerate the shift to mobile in advertising, today we’re announcing four new solutions that will help businesses connect with people in more insightful and meaningful ways. We’re introducing new ways to gain insights, new storytelling formats and a new tool to help creative agencies create powerful content.

To help advertisers best connect with people, we’re currently working with the creative community on how to reach better insights through an Audience Insights API, now in beta. As part of the beta program, we have partnered with a small group of advertisers—like Mondelez International and Anheuser-Busch InBev—to understand how to develop insights from aggregated and anonymous demographics, psychographics, topic data and reports from Facebook IQ. The teams have been able to use these insights to create effective campaigns. The Audience Insights API will be available to partners early next year.

Today we’re announcing updates to Canvas to make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights. Advertisers can now share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process. Coming toward the end of this month, Canvas will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage. Plus, Canvas will be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it’s not promoted as an ad). Also, marketers will be able to access detailed metrics such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track Canvas performance.

Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Slideshow including audio and text overlay, an easy “video-to-slideshow” creation tool, the ability to create slideshow from a mobile device and integration with our Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library. This means small businesses without any production resources can create, edit and boost customized slideshow using existing photos from their Page or any of thousands of Facebook’s stock images. These tools are coming at the end of the month to all advertisers and can be used however they would use a video (across Facebook and Instagram). To learn more, join our upcoming webinar on June 29th.

The use of mobile devices is increasing. People consume content on mobile in fundamentally different ways than they do on other channels. Creativity is a critical component of building successful mobile marketing, but it can be difficult for the creative community to stay up to date with quickly developing technology. Creative agencies need a way to understand the different tools and formats, preview and share mock-ups with stakeholders and collaborate on and experiment with content creation. That’s why we’re launching the Creative Hub.

This new, online interface will be a sandbox where agencies can play with different ad formats for online and mobile and experiment with what works best. Most ad creation happens on desktop but is experienced on mobile. The Creative Hub gives ad creators an easy way to preview their work in a dynamic mobile feed. They can also share these mock-ups with stakeholders through a preview URL. The Creative Hub will also provide inspiration with an easy-to-navigate repository of case studies and great content.

The Creative Hub is now in testing and should be available to everyone in the next few months. Learn more and sign up for the Creative Hub.

“R/GA’s DNA is rich in collaboration: whether that be working alongside brands, our global network, start-ups or media and tech partners. As such we are delighted to be one of the inaugural partners working with Facebook, providing feedback to help co-create Creative Hub. We always look to create and innovate on work that goes beyond ticking the boxes of a media plan and contextually relevant from the POV of the customer. So to be able to use this tool to build ads in situ on Facebook and Instagram makes it much easy for us to present ideas in the way people experience them, and ultimately helps enable our clients’ brands to connect to their audience." — James Temple, EVP MD Executive Creative Director EMEA

“As part of our ongoing partnership with Facebook, we are delighted to be involved in helping to shape the new Creative Hub tool and giving our creative teams access to this hugely helpful resource. As new opportunities to tell stories and engage audiences through mobile emerge, having a way to easily present and showcase creative ideas in the context they'll appear to our audience is incredibly important. The Creative Hub is already proving to help inspire new types of storytelling through mobile, save time bringing these ideas to life and making it easier for our clients to see how mobile creative formats will appear in the hands of their consumers." — Jonny Spindler, Chief Innovation Officer, BBDO

These tools and updates are just part of what Facebook is celebrating this year at Cannes Lions. If you’re at Cannes this week, be sure to check out our list of Facebook Cannes 2016 events.