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Facebook announces four solutions for mobile advertisers at Cannes Lions
MUMBAI: Yesterday at the Cannes Lions, Facebook announced four new solutions that make it easier for advertisers to share their messages across mobile platforms. With more than 1.5 billion people accessing Facebook from mobile devices and more than 1 billion people using Facebook on mobile everyday, the Facebook family has more mobile engagement than any other platform.
Facebook’s announcements include:
The launch of a Creative Hub, where the creative community can learn and build on mobile. Facebook claims that this new, online interface will be a sandbox where agencies can play with different ad formats for online and mobile and experiment with what works best. Most ad creation happens on desktop but is experienced on mobile. The Creative Hub gives ad creators an easy way to preview their work in a dynamic mobile feed. They can also share these mock-ups with stakeholders through a preview URL. The Creative Hub will also provide inspiration with an easy-to-navigate repository of case studies and great content. The Creative Hub is now in testing and should be available to everyone in the next few months.
Introduction of an Audience Insights API in beta, to help businesses build better insights to fuel campaigns. Facebook says that it is currently working with the creative community on how to reach better insights through the Audience Insights API. As part of the beta program, Facebook has partnered with a small group of advertisers like Mondelez International and Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Updates to Canvas ads that make it easier for marketers to design, create, share and gain insights. Advertisers can now share their Canvases with stakeholders to simplify the review process. Coming toward the end of this month, Canvas will have a new feed unit to help entice people to engage. Plus, Canvas will be available for all Pages to use in a post (even when it’s not promoted as an ad). Also, marketers will be able to access detailed metrics such as dwell time per component and clicks per component to track Canvas performance.
Enhancements to Slideshow ads that make it easy for businesses to create videos from photos. Enhancements to Slideshow include audio and text overlay, an easy ‘video-to-slideshow’ creation tool, the ability to create slideshow from a mobile device and integration with Pages Photo Library and Shutterstock stock image library. This means small businesses without any production resources can create, edit and boost customised slideshows using existing photos from their Page or any of thousands of Facebook’s stock images. Facebook says that these tools are coming at the end of the month to all advertisers and can be used however they would use a video (across Facebook and Instagram).
Facebook also announced that there were now more than 500 million (50 crore) users on Instagram.
Also read:
Instagram crosses 500 million members
http://www.indiantelevision.com/iworld/social-media/instagram-crosses-500-million-members-160622
iWorld
Bill Ackman makes a $64bn bid for Universal Music Group
The hedge fund boss wants to list the world’s biggest record label in New York and thinks he knows exactly what ails it
NEW YORK: Bill Ackman wants to buy the world’s biggest record label. Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund run by the billionaire investor, submitted a non-binding proposal on Tuesday to acquire all outstanding shares of Universal Music Group in a business combination transaction worth roughly $64.4 billion (around 55.8 billion euros).
Under the terms of the offer, UMG shareholders would receive 9.4 billion euros in cash, equivalent to 5.05 euros per share, plus 0.77 shares of a newly created company, dubbed New UMG, for each share held. Pershing Square values the total package at 30.40 euros per share, a 78 per cent premium to UMG’s closing price on April 2.
The deal would see UMG merge with Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, with the combined entity incorporating as a Nevada corporation and listing on the New York Stock Exchange. New UMG would publish financial statements under US GAAP and become eligible for S&P 500 index inclusion. Pershing Square says the transaction is expected to close by year-end, with all equity financing backstopped by Ackman’s firm and its affiliates, and all debt financing committed at signing. The transaction would cancel 17 per cent of UMG’s outstanding shares, leaving New UMG with 1.541 billion shares outstanding.
Ackman has a long history with UMG. Pershing Square first bought approximately 10 per cent of the company from Vivendi in the summer of 2021 for around $4 billion, around the time of UMG’s listing on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange. He has since trimmed that position, raising around $1.4 billion from the sale of a 2.7 per cent stake in March 2025, and resigned from UMG’s board in May 2025, citing new executive and board obligations arising from recent investments.
His diagnosis of UMG’s troubles is blunt. The company’s stock has fallen around 33 per cent over the past twelve months on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange, and Ackman lays out six reasons why. These include uncertainty around the Bolloré Group’s 18 per cent stake in the company, the postponement of UMG’s US listing, the underutilisation of UMG’s balance sheet, the absence of a publicly disclosed capital allocation plan and earnings algorithm, a failure to reflect UMG’s 2.7 billion euro stake in Spotify in its valuation, and what Ackman calls suboptimal shareholder investor relations, communications and engagement.
The Bolloré stake has long cast a shadow over the company. Cyrille Bolloré stepped down from UMG’s board in July 2025 as the Bolloré Group battled the French financial markets regulator over its stake in Vivendi, which holds a further capital interest in UMG. UMG had confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2025 for a proposed secondary listing in America, but put those plans on hold in March 2026, citing market conditions.
Ackman has kind words for UMG’s management, at least. “Since UMG’s listing, Lucian Grainge and the company’s management have done an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance,” he said. But he made his diagnosis plain: “UMG’s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction.”
In other words, Ackman believes UMG is a great business trapped inside a broken structure. If the board agrees, he intends to fix that, loudly and in New York.
