• by Sara Guaglione , July 22, 2016

Canvas is an interactive, customizable product created by Facebook, usually used by companies to tell their brand story to consumers. Canvas ad products generally feature an image with a tag that says “Tap to Open," which takes users to a full-screen ad that they can scroll through.

Clickable links take users to the company’s site or a call to action, like “click to shop now,” all native in the Facebook news feed.

But Thrillist is using Facebook Canvas to create campaigns for their advertisers, using the publisher’s own Facebook presence.

“We have been told this is very new, and we are the first that might be doing this,” Paul Josephsen, vice president of The CoLab, told Publishers Daily.

Josephsen said that The CoLab strongly believes in this distributed model, and is expanding the Thrillist brand beyond its Web site.

“The core focus for us is building out ad products that support that distributed model. We are more than just a Web site now. We want to lead the charge on the distributed platform model,” he said.

Josephsen believes this model has been successful due to the creation of content specifically for in-feed consumptions; in this case, creating branded content to be consumed directly in Facebook’s feed.

“We can provide in-depth story telling on behalf of brands in that format, and brands can take that asset and drive it to their pages," he said. "Our creative team takes an idea and says" ‘This is how you naturally tell that story in the news feed.’”

For example, Facebook users would come across Thrillist’s campaign for GE, called “Everything that happens to your body on hot sauce,” in their news feed. They can scroll through the content, then click “What else does hot sauce do?” which takes users to the full, mobile-first content series on the Thrillist site.

“What we have seen is that [content] that is native for the platform works best,” Josephsen said. “Canvas is an evolution of that for advertisers. You can do everything in-feed instead of clicking out. It’s more natural to have an in-feed ad.”

Canvas is a paid marketing tool. Thrillist works with its advertisers to create the ad, tells Facebook how much they are willing to spend on it through Canvas. Advertisers determine “how much they want going against that particular initiative,” Josephsen said.

The CoLab is also working on content made specifically for platforms like Facebook Instant, Facebook Live and custom audience segments on Pinterest.

Additionally, Josephsen said they are looking at in-feed measurement of video engagement.

“We think the idea that video is not measurable in feeds is a flaw. We want to solve that to show brand retention with our custom work,” he said.