Facebook Ads: Tempting Treat, or Forbidden Fruit?
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in the mediasphere. On the one hand, we’ve had Facebook asking advertisers to belly up to the buffet of targeting data made available through their new ad initiative. On the other, we’ve seen the behavioral targeting crowd launch a “Do Not Track List,” which would clearly take some of the tastier goodies off the online ad targeting table. So what’s it all mean? Should responsible advertisers start salivating over the pictures on the menu? Or should they re-commit to their diets just as the all-you-can-eat cruise ship leaves port?
First, some perspective. The main reason Madison Avenue is so interested in Facebook’s new ad targeting scheme is that it’s both revolutionary and reassuringly familiar. When you boil it down, Facebook is enabling advertisers to focus on individuals again, instead of just their online behavior. In a way, it brings us back to a gentler time of afternoon cocktails and Mad Men, when media planners focused on reach and frequency among a universally agreed upon set of demographic segments. Ahhh, the salad days. If you were Acme Car Wax, you ran a full page bleed in Popular Mechanics because you knew that suburban male teens tended to be dis-proportionally interested in your product.
Cable made life more complicated, and when the banner ad was born, all it really did was digitize The System – without adding much value. Not only was the reach on that early inventory unsatisfying, the targeting was pretty bland given both the homogeneity of online early adopters, and the practical challenge of gathering good demographic segment data from anonymous web site traffic. It was Google who brought something fresh and spicy to the table, creating an ad medium designed and built from scratch for a new, interactive medium. Now Acme Car Wax could target its message to people looking for “car wax,” without worrying too much about who those people were. “Search Ads” crushed “Display Ads” online; AdWords ate Yahoo’s lunch and never looked back.
Today’s “Behavioral Targeting” takes things to the next level, looking at behavior across web sites and trying to infer purchase intent based on the data stream. BT will have a learning curve, but it makes perfect sense to media buyers weaned on Google, who by now care more about what you want than who you are. Which brings us to today. Facebook’s ad approach is something very different from search advertising and BT, and in some ways brings online advertising full circle. Now you can target the person again, instead of (or in addition to) the behavior. As advertisers come to understand this, the likelihood it will catch fire is quite high.
Unless, that is, the people about whom all this data is being collected decide to clear the table. Conventional wisdom is that people under 35 don’t care much about privacy, though it’s never been clear whether that’s a generational or a life-stage phenomenon. To the extent that they aren’t concerned, it’s probably because they don’t think about what’s behind it too much. Kind of like a hot dog. So what’s an emergent ad medium to do? Well, you can either put a warning label on your hot dog, which is what the BT guys have done with “Do Not Track;” or you can put a Weinermobile on Main Street and ask users to join the parade, which is what Facebook is doing with SocialAds.
The long run winner of this bake-off, to the extent that there is one, will need to balance the need to give advertisers the information they want, with the need to give users control of the information they want to protect. The key may be empowering users to tell just enough about what they want so publishers can serve it to them, and just enough about who they are so advertisers will pick up the check.
Reader Comments.
Very smart analysis. Really puts things into perspective. It will be facinating to see how such a young man like MZ will impact the future of online advertising.
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