Facebook Ads System Launched: Facebook Pages, Social Ads, & Beacon

Facebook has launched a new Facebook
Ads program offering three major products for advertisers: Facebook Pages, a
way for businesses to build branded pages on Facebook to connect with their
audiences; Facebook Social Ads, an ad system allowing Facebook users to be
targeted by demographic interest, and “friend activities,” and Facebook Beacons,
allowing activities at sites off Facebook to flow back in.

• Facebook Pages allow
  brands to have profile pages on Facebook in the same way that people have
  them. (see Coca-Cola’s
  screenshot from
  ZDNet) with marketing messages, games, video, etc. When users interact
  with those pages, add elements to their profiles or brands as “friends,” that
  information is spread virally through the Facebook newsfeeds, just as it is
  today with the Facebook apps. A related program,
  Insights, will offer
  very specific analytics and data to marketers, in the aggregate.
• Facebook Social Ads
  allow brands to use the full range of profile information to target people by
  age, gender, relationship status, location, and so on. MySpace launched a
  conceptually similar ad program “hypertargeting
  ads” Monday.
• Facebook Beacon is
  a widget-like system being adopted on 44 third party partner sites (e.g.,
  Blockbuster, Hotwire, The Knot, TripAdvisor, TypePad, Yelp, among numerous
  others). Activities on sites using Beacon will flow back into a Facebook user’s
  News Feed or Mini-Feed, allowing their friends to know some of what they did
  at that site. This effectively represents a way for individuals to “endorse”
  brands, products, or businesses on partner sites and broadcast that information
  back to their networks on Facebook.

On the one hand, this set of announcements represents a creative, clever, and
logical use of the Facebook demographic and profile information and the Facebook
platform. Beacon is sort of like Facebook apps in reverse. Both represent ways
for marketers to attempt to reach consumers through Facebook’s much touted
“social graph” (awful term).

Brand advertisers are hungry for effective ways into social networks and to
reach their generally young user bases. The potential problem here for Facebook
is that it may be moving a little quickly and may be pimping its users a bit too
aggressively. Those who feel they’re being watched, used, or manipulated somehow
by these ads may resent it. Privacy is a potential concern as well, though
Facebook has sought to address that by using anonymous, aggregated data for
targeting and reporting.

Facebook Platform was a stroke of genius, but I find that much of what now
goes on at Facebook (via the apps and their adoption) qualifies as a kind of
spam, even though it is pushed via my network. Clearly not all people share this
view. But in my opinion, while Facebook Ads may make the site engaging and safe
for brand marketers, it may start to become much less so for regular people.

For more, see the press
release from
Facebook and the Facebook blog
post. TechCrunch

live blogged the event, and there’s plenty of coverage on
Techmeme.