Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Social Advertising
Facebook announced new advertising initiatives in Nov. 2007 which attempt to introduce the next evolution in online advertising. In the 1990's Yahoo, Doubleclick and others ushered in a new era of online advertising by creating scaled systems to deliver and record online banner exposures. In the early 2000's Google became the market maker for performance based advertising tied to viewer context. Since then, companies have been trying to place themselves into a position to take advantage of the next best thing in advertising which was assumed to be behavior based predictive advertising.
Facebook and MySpace may have leap-frogged behavioral advertising with their social advertising concepts which unite advertisers with social network members such that the members themselves are promoting the products. Traditionally, this is called "word of month" advertising. Word of mouth advertising, by most accounts, is the most influential form of advertising as it involves a personal recommendation. The problem with WOM is that its not predictable and difficult to scale. The social networks may have solved the scaling problem and could therefore introduce a valuable new form of online advertising.
Although privacy advocates suggest there are significant issues, "Pandora's box" is open and it will be difficult to keep social advertising contained if this is truly a new advertising model.
Facebook and MySpace may have leap-frogged behavioral advertising with their social advertising concepts which unite advertisers with social network members such that the members themselves are promoting the products. Traditionally, this is called "word of month" advertising. Word of mouth advertising, by most accounts, is the most influential form of advertising as it involves a personal recommendation. The problem with WOM is that its not predictable and difficult to scale. The social networks may have solved the scaling problem and could therefore introduce a valuable new form of online advertising.
Although privacy advocates suggest there are significant issues, "Pandora's box" is open and it will be difficult to keep social advertising contained if this is truly a new advertising model.
Labels: advertising 2.0, Internet Secured Application Technology, ISAT, online advertising, Online Marketing, Performance Communications Group, predictive advertising, social advertising
