Less than a month after it allowed branded content, Facebook has updated its terms and conditions and now will not allow any banner ads in videos including overlays. The changes came into effect shortly after media company Mic started testing a new ad unit for AirBnB and Hulu, as indicated by this Wall Street Journal report. Mic was testing the new ad format where an overlay image promoting Hulu appeared over a portion of the bottom of the video screen for five seconds. The report added that Facebook alerted Mic about the policy change, and Mic removed the ads from its Facebook videos. The Mic ad formats showed the image promotion three seconds into the video. Facebook's rules said it was fine if publishers posted videos featuring products from paying advertisers. But they weren't allowed to run any sort of banner ad in a sponsored text post or photo. Yet technically they could run a banner-type ad on top of a video, as long as this banner didn’t appear during the first three seconds of that video. Facebook has been tightening its norms for images used in posts. Last week, MediaNama had recieved a warning from that Facebook a post from our page did not comply with Facebook's branded content policy. Facebook said that the image used in the post promoted third party brand (it was a news story and the image used was a screen grab, by the way). The company added that no action was taken against the post but asked to comply with the…
