Adweek: Advertisers Are Creating Sound Strategies For Social Media Platforms Like Facebook And Snapchat

For the past year or so, Facebook has conditioned advertisers and publishers to create video that can be understood without sound, as more clips that play automatically (and silently) when users scroll fill news feeds.

With 100 million hours of video viewed every day and the explosion of autoplay and live video outside of Facebook, the push for muted clips has been widely pitched by social platforms and ad-tech companies alike. So, it is a bit surprising that Snapchat claimed earlier this month that two-thirds of its 10 billion daily video views are viewed with the sound on, the app's default setting.

Droga5, for one, says that up to 95 percent of its ads are viewed without audio, so like other agencies, it's experimenting with captions, voiceovers and plugging brands' messages into the first three seconds of clips. Still, change is always hard, particularly when it comes to changing the creative process behind long-form ads with big, overarching story arcs.

"We're seeing as little as 5 percent video views with sound, prompting some of our more social-leaning clients to mandate that we adopt the practice of producing videos without sound," said Brian Nguyen, group communications strategy director at Droga5. "However, there is still some resistance, especially when promoting longer-form content. Facebook is one of the few platforms outside of YouTube where we can promote long-form content with paid support and people will watch."