The central idea was to create ad experiences that are as good as organic content. The quality of the ads should be as valuable to people as the pictures of their kids, posts about their vacations, and the latest news from around the world.

We wanted this to a be a creative first product that was simple for people and marketers to use. It had to be flexible and allow for a limitless combinations of photos, videos, text, carousels, links and other interactive elements.

We knew there was a huge opportunity for brands to tell their story and market their products, but it had to be seamless with News Feed and feel natural.

To achieve our goal, we pushed Facebook’s global infrastructure to a new level of performance. We needed to be able to deliver video files of up to 2GB anywhere on the globe almost instantly. For users it needed to be instantaneous and load in under 2 seconds.

We also needed to make the user experience for marketers and creatives to be as simple as possible. This meant a solution that required no code and did all the hard work of hosting, transcoding , load balancing, caching and CDN optimization all behind the scenes.

To achieve this, we built a team across the globe made up of the best and brightest designers and engineers from our ads, insights, measurement, iOS, Android, video and infrastructure product teams.

In the end, we built a product that gives creative agencies unlimited control and users fast immersive experiences they love.

Supports 3million advertisers

Load time in under 2 seconds

No code required

On average 53% people view more than ½ the canvas

Top performing ads see greater than 70 second view times

In the first 3 months, over 25 years of content viewed

Press reaction:

“Canvas has the Potential to Be a Game-Change for Mobile.” – Ad Age

“Facebook might be the first platform to create an ad format for the digital, mobile world.” –Altimeter Group

“A watershed moment for mobile” – The Drum