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Facebook is now using bus stops and luggage carousels to convince people to use its livestreaming video product, Facebook Live.
The company launched a major marketing campaign Friday that includes TV commercials, bus wraps and billboards in an effort to push people to broadcast from their phones. Facebook won’t say how much it’s spending, but all the ads were created in-house.
Facebook obviously thinks everyone should create live video, and says the number of people broadcasting has quadrupled since May. But Facebook rarely advertises, and this kind of push makes me think Live is still not very popular overall — at least not by Facebook standards.
The problem is that a lot of livestreaming video is not very good — it turns out that making good live content is hard, which explains why Facebook pays most of its biggest live video creators (including Vox Media, which owns this site). That's not a Facebook problem. Meerkat, one of the earliest livestreaming apps, shut down its app because it couldn't get people livestreaming regularly.
Facebook’s TV ads show off examples of Facebook live videos, including an explanation for how to use the product. The bus and billboard ads also offer step-by-step directions for using Facebook Live.
The ads will run in major cities in the U.S. and U.K.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
