Three interesting articles this weekend and in no particular order....
- Techcrunch goes into details about Facebook's new advertising plans that they will announce on Tuesday in ad:tech. Basically an expanded network on and off properties and the potential to combine purchases and actions off the Facebook platform and display them in your news feed. That's almost mind blowing to think your Amazon book purchases can appear on your news feed for your network to see.
- BusinessWeek looks at (surprise) declining click rates across the internet and it includes a quote from fellow internet Oldtimer Kevin Lee "Targeting will come in to rescue all forms of digital advertising."
- And Cnet writes about more of Facebooks advertising and targeting plans
That's certainly a lot of articles on Facebook who continues to rival Google for news and changes to their advertising platform. Notice the lack of any marketing buzz these days for MySpace which I've stated over and over again that it is nothing more than the Web 2.0 version of Geo Cities. I've pretty much stated (and did so at a conference on social marketing) that buying banner ads on a social network is almost a complete waste of marketing dollars. The vast majority of ads that I see in Facebook today are cheesy network buys that are probably worth at best a CPA; personally, I always asked to remove consumer generated content from any network buys. However, even without Project Beacon (from Techcrunch) there is hope in the Facebook ads when you use their flyers or get access to their targeting selects. I've seen better ads lately and unscientifically here's what I'm seeing tonight on 10 page refreshes
- Untargeted acne ad
- Potentially targeted pharma ad (drug for kids problems)
- Crappy untargeted MSN search ad
- Untargeted college intern ad
- Untargeted Vonage ad
- Untargeted JC Penny ad
- Untargeted acne ad
- Untargeted Vonage ad
- Facebook flyer partially targeted to 30+ singles (I'm married)
- Untargeted Monster.com ad
Clearly Facebook figured out that right now they are selling ugly wall paper which their users are most likely ignoring en masse. Using the available data in Facebook to work on targeting is definitely a welcome step. Project Beacon however "kicks it up a notch".
One
of the great parts of Facebook unlike Google, MySpace aka Geo Cities, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and all of the other pretenders is that Facebook makes it fun and easy to blast updates to your network. They import my blog and tagged articles, when I take an action on Facebook it is broadcast, when I meet a new friend my network is notified, and I can send a blast note out to the entire group.
Now off-Facebook actions like book and CD purchases can be broadcast. This provides powerful word of mouth marketing and testimonials without asking you the purchaser to write a post. It can be broadcast to your network giving the product owners and website owners free advertising. Couple that with Facebook demographics, movie ratings, etc and if Facebook can actually make sense of that data for the vast majority of stupid advertisers they have a real shot to solve the consumer generated content advertising challenge.
The other thing I like about Facebook's ad changes is that anyone, regardless of spend or importance can get access to demo targeting and ad construction. This makes it very Google-like and helps the small advertiser to get access to their user base. Clearly they are moving in the right direction.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Eric - it's very nice to see that some customers remember our conversations, and then to have your comments be so complementary is incredibly gratifying. Thanks so much for you kind words. And yeah - we did have something very cool back in the day, didn't we? ;)
Eric Picard
Director, Advertising Technology Strategy, Microsoft
Posted by: Eric Picard | March 19, 2008 at 03:43 PM