Facebook to Use Profile Determined Ads
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Attempting to match specific ads to specific, personal tastes and demographics has long been the holy grail of the ad men. Targeting the long tail might be the simple encapsulation of this strategy.
Retailers have been doing this for years by using data collected on rewards cards to feed targeted promotions and ads to customers. Google has been experimenting with serving personalised ads based on search behaviour. Now it’s the turn of the social networking sites to tap into this ad man’s dream.
According to Wall Street Journal, Facebook is planning to utilise personal profiles to offer up targeted ad delivery. This is surely where it’s at for social networking monetisation.
The WSJ reports says:
“The new system will let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves, predicting what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.”
Maybe a Minority Report future isn’t as far away as we think!
Current financial returns for Facebook are apparently showing around the $10 CPM. A shaped system of serving targeted ads should dramatically improve upon that.
Techcrunch say “There will be some who will question Facebook’s moves. Google has previously come under fire for delivering contextual advertising in Gmail based on the content of emails a user had received.”
Whilst I get a little bit jittery about the use of personal data I also accept that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There are so many widgets, services, software offered for free on the web that this has now become the expectation. I have to ask why this should be? Companies and individuals have to survive if they want to produce ever more wonderful products and quite frankly we should be thankful that they are only offering up some ads based on some spurious personal data entered into Facebook. Quite frankly, in the offline world we tend to reward good service or pay over the odds for products we enjoy, why shouldn’t we do the same in the online world or at least except the limited measures a company like Facebook is implementing to make their business viable.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The sooner the online nay sayers get a handle on that concept, the better!!
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