Facebook has wanted to get its hands on TV ad budgets for years. Now it’s taking another step closer, by selling ads that will actually appear on TVs.
Next week, Facebook will start delivering video ads on apps that run on set-top boxes like Apple TV and Roku through the company’s ad network.
Facebook is partnering with two publishers, A+E and Tubi TV, and will deliver ads to people who watch videos on those apps, on actual television sets.
Facebook says this is the beginning of a test, and that it hasn’t yet worked out many details, like ad formats and lengths.
But it has the broad idea sketched out: It will use its Audience Network ad network to deliver ads to “over the top” video apps, just like it does to other publishers’ apps and websites on desktop browsers and mobile devices.
“We are testing how to best deliver video ads through Audience Network to people watching content on connected TVs,” a company spokesperson said. “Our goal is to bring relevant ad experiences to people both on Facebook and off.”
Video apps on set-top boxes often include advertising, but Facebook’s experiment brings the promise of much more targeted ads than most apps have used in the past.
That’s because Facebook can use the same targeting data that powers the rest of its advertising network to the set-top boxes, even though those apps aren’t directly connected to Facebook.
