Facebook Social Ads Launched

Earlier today at the ad:tech conference in New York City, social networking giant Facebook announced its new (and long awaited) targeted advertising model. Social Ads will allow advertisers to target users based on their age, gender, interests, location, and other profile information. In addition, the news feed features would potentially allow the actions of friends in a network to be tagged to specific retailers or companies. For example, friends in your network might see an inline “ad” like the one below that mentions a friend who just purchased a book on Amazon, rated a Blockbuster movie, or downloaded a particular song from iTunes, etc. Today’s Facebook Blog posting gives the full run down of how Social Ads will work and the various features included at launch.

When the news broke, our President Hollis Thomases was at ad:tech so we thought we’d get her quick perspective from the frontlines.

Facebook’s announcement is all the buzz up here at ad:tech. Much of what people are talking about involves respecting the consumer’s privacy and permission, the FTC possibly cracking down on user tracking methods altogether (think a “Do Not Track” list similar to the “Do Not Call” registry), and what all this means. Beth Comstock, President, Integrated Media, NBC Universal expressed an opinion I wrote about in one of my earliest articles (Success Magazine, late 90’s) in which I said that I wasn’t sure I liked all of the predictive technology because it might wipe out the “aspiration and emotional side” (i.e. impulse action) of decision-making processes. Just because past behavior might be a good indication of future action doesn’t mean that the future should be so regulated and controlled by marketers.

We also solicited some opinions from our staff and our media buyer raised a good point:

Social Ads may end up eroding some of the “genuineness” of Facebook profiles, or otherwise impact the way that users present their information. For example, will a user start to enter fake info or limit their info, and if so, won’t that ruin the fun and purpose of social networking sites altogether? (It could be argued that some folks already enter fake details, but we’re thinking about those who want to use these sites to honestly communicate with friends.)

Possible privacy infringement and the concern that users will reject the use of their information in this manner are definitely things that Facebook will need to consider as they roll out this new advertising model. How will Facebook keep their users from bailing when they know that advertisers are accessing their profile information? This might be where an opt-out option comes into play, but will this snuff out the hopes of advertisers if people start heavily rejecting targeted ads? How will advertisers and retailers entice users to sign up or opt into the newsfeeds that would broadcast user purchases to friends?

For those who want to follow the Facebook Social Ads backlash check out the TechCrunch Blog to see how the community is responding. Here’s a quick preview of what people are saying, from technology writer Nick Carr’s blog:

It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.

You can check out the aforementioned Sprite Sips profile on the Facebook site.

Sidenote:

Not to be outdone, MySpace has also integrated some targeted ad features into their advertising model. The Washington Post covers the quieter announcement earlier this week of MySpace’s advertising update as well as the Facebook news.

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