It has only been a week since Facebook released its Poke app, a competitor to Snapchat, but at least one company has already tried to put the app to use for marketing purposes.
The ad agency Grey Group used Facebook Poke to film and distribute a short video advertisement for Delta, a lingerie company in Israel. The 10-second video shows a model getting dressed with Delta’s lingerie and features a promotional message at the end for a sale on Delta’s website.
Daniel Barak, who developed the ad with Grey Group, told Mashable that the prompt for the video was to advertise a “one-time sale” on Delta’s lingerie. That made it a good fit for Poke because messages can only be viewed once and are then automatically deleted.
Since the video was filmed and distributed using Poke, there were several limitations. For starters, the company could not show the video to any and all customers — it needed to be friends with the viewers on Facebook. So the agency decided to send it to the model’s Facebook friends instead.
The agency ran into another obstacle as well. Barak found out that Poke only lets users send messages to a maximum of 40 people at once, so the agency had to shoot multiple versions of the video in order to reach additional people.
Given all that, it seems unlikely that Facebook Poke will catch on as an advertising tool anytime soon.
Image courtesy of Grey Group, thumbnail image courtesy Flickr, jetheriot
