Facebook Debuts New Video Ad-Buying Product Aimed At TV Budgets

Facebook is seeking to pull in more marketing dollars from the television industry. The social media site and online video giant has announced the new TRP Buying product to help television marketers more easily raise awareness of a campaign through video ads.

TRP stands for target rating point, which is a metric used by the TV industry to refer to specific audiences within a larger, impressions-based campaign measurement (known as a gross rating point). Facebook’s new product allows advertisers to use TRPs to plan and buy video ads and integrate the ads with their linear television campaigns. Facebook wrote in a blog post marketers will then be able to verify their TRP delivery within Facebook and across both the site and TV outlets via Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings system.

Facebook’s justification for this specific new ad product stems from supporting research conducted by Nielsen and commissioned by the social site. For instance, Nielsen found that when TV and Facebook were combined across 42 different campaigns, advertisers saw a 19% increase in reach versus just TV alone. Additionally, in these same campaigns, Facebook impressions were twice as likely to reach the target audience than TV impressions.

“TV ad campaigns supplemented by Facebook advertising provide an ideal combination for marketers to both reach large audiences and build their brands,” said Graham Mudd, Facebook’s Director of Ads Product Marketing, to AdWeek. “Now we’re making it even easier to extend and augment TV campaigns through the introduction of TRP Buying, so advertisers can plan, buy and measure Facebook ads using the same guarantees and Nielsen verification they’re used to with TV.”

In addition to TRP Buying, Facebook announced three other ad-related updates. First, its new brand awareness optimization tool, available as limited release in October, will help marketers buying or bidding on ads to “find the audiences most likely to recall their ads.” Second, Facebook partnered with Millward Brown Digital to deliver more mobile polling options to advertisers. Finally, the social media site now lets advertisers add video to its carousel ad format.

You can read more about Facebook’s TRP Buying and other ad announcements on its company blog post. The site currently claims four billion video views per day.