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 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.

We wanted to give brands and agencies a way to delight people and build great mobile ads. We also wanted to maintain the trust of people with a great user experience.

Early testing indicated a phenomenally positive response from users. Not only did people spend huge amounts of time with the ads, their comments and sentiment were extraordinarily positive. For some of the early canvases, we saw people spent an average of two and half minutes with the experiences.

The demand forced us to move incredibly fast to scale globally to our 3 million advertisers. At the same time, we had to maintain our performance goals.

We achieved some amazing results. 53% of users viewed more than half the content. Top performing ads see greater than 70 second view times. Brands are seeing metrics like 7% increase in campaign awareness and 13% in ad recall.

Canvas represents a new generation of mobile ad experiences. Conceived, designed, and built with the creative community, Canvas brings the targeting, scale and infrastructure of Facebook together with the hopes and dreams of the creative community. Marketers can now build full screen, interactive, multi-media experiences that live in the palm of anyone’s hand without writing a single line of code. We’ve made this available to every advertiser in the world, regardless of if you are a small coffee shop in Mexico or a multinational brand based in London, the tools and capabilities are the same. All for no additional cost.

Our strategy was simple. Work with the creative community to define the best mobile ad experience possible that works for people. We conducted in-person interviews in New York, London and San Francisco with the world best agencies. We tested numerous prototype with users and leveraged our data insights to create a product we could build quickly and test with customers.

We didn’t just want to create product, but rather a platform that could evolve and grow with the rapidly changing world of mobile advertising. It had to be global and support 3 million businesses from day 1. It was something we wanted to work for the most elite agencies and businesses of any size. In less than a year we’ve grown from just an idea to a product that ran over 20,000 ads in the first 2 months of its release.

People are spending more and more time on mobile consuming the content they love, but the ad experiences they see are not creatively keeping pace. For years the idea of building rich multi-media experiences meant some form of tradeoff. It was technically hard, limited in reach, slow and cumbersome, and always fell short of the creative vision. We knew we could do better.

We set out to create rich immersive mobile ad experiences, and also to make sure people have a great user experience. We began by talking with creative agencies about their needs, and then tested multiple ideas with users to find the right mix of creative capability and usability for our users.

These insights set our goal to develop a platform for creativity that could scale to our 1.44 billion monthly mobile users, load in under 2 seconds, and deliver value for businesses.