Dive Brief:
- According to Facebook's user information, millennials can recall an advertising message more than twice as fast as baby boomers.
- The social network’s brand-awareness optimization tools can now measure scrolling speeds and viewer dwell times to target similar users.
- Advertisers' preferred minimum dwell times likely have little bearing on whether or not the content is effective.
Dive Insight:
Facebook has been studying how much time people spend on ads, Graham Mudd, director of the social net’s ad product marketing, said in an Advertising Week Q&A yesterday, finding that what constitutes an advertising impression varies according to scrolling speeds and dwell times. Younger mobile users can often recall a message in less than the advertiser standard of three seconds.
Facebook can measure when users spend more time on a particular ad than is typical for that person, Mudd said, and help brands target people with similar characteristics. For example, if mobile user X is a “slow-scroller” and spends five seconds in an ad space versus his usual three, Facebook considers the information significant and looks for similar users. Impressions matter, Mudd added, but value increases with time spent.
Having grown up with smartphones, millennials are fast scrollers, Mudd said. They can consume content 2.5 times as fast as people in their 60s, making minimum dwell times insignificant when measuring impressions. The implication for retailers? Don’t worry about stopping power when targeting young consumers—it's slowing power that matters.