Facebook's new glossy mobile ads are ready for their close up

The dream for digital platforms like Facebook is to attain what magazines Vogue and Glamour made famous -- make ads an integral and desirable part of the experience.

So far, for social media sites, that's been more pipe dream than reality. 

That hasn't stopped Facebook from giving it a shot. The company on Thursday launched its new mobile ad format that aims to provide just about any advertiser -- from the big brand to the corner pizza store -- with a way to make mobile ads that don't suck.

The new ad format, called Canvas, provides a way for companies to make glossy, mobile-native and interactive ads that load fast.

Via Giphy

"Canvas helps advertisers achieve any objective by giving businesses a fully customizable digital space on which to build multimedia stories," Facebook noted in a press release.

Canvas ads share a lot of similar traits as Instant Articles, Facebook's attempt to provide publishers with a way to put content within the social network so that it loads faster. 

Like Instant Articles, the new ads appear in the News Feed much like a regular sponsored post. The experience starts once a user clicks and is taken to the new ad unit.

Facebook is already a giant in the mobile advertising market, grabbing about 20% of every ad dollar spent reaching people on smartphones. 

But if some money is good, more is better. Canvas gives Facebook a way to pitch to bigger brands that may have felt underwhelmed by the previous ad experience. 

It also means that Facebook keeps people with its increasingly large and diverse "walled garden." Instead of linking out to Burberry's website, a user stays within Facebook to look at Burberry's custom ad.

The new ads are mobile only and available on iOS and Android. 

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