On Monday, CEO and Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled their new ad platform. Essentially it will allow advertisers to create a corporate profile. Facebook users will be able to become "friends" with the company and share their experience with other friends within the social network. In addition, the Beacon Project will allow user's to share their purchase and interaction behavior outside of Facebook on participating sites through feeds. Advertisers can then in turn serve up ads to people that have showed an affinity to a certain brand. There is apparently some form of behavioral/demographic targeting as well because I was just served up an ad for "SYNC" and I don't use any Blue Tooth devices nor do I own an iPod. I do happen to be male, between the ages of 25 and 34, so I expect that is why I got that ad. Anyway, I digress.

As with anything related to social networking, there is a lot of buzz about how revolutionary this idea is and that it will change the way that people market. I agree, there are certainly some interesting aspects, such as the ability to target to people that have expressed interest in a particular brand, but is that really going to help people that don't have a well established brand? Let's be real, there are only a handful of brands that are both widely known and appeal to a large enough market to make marketing worth while. We are talking about the iPod's and PS3's of the world here. I just don't see this as a viable marketing channel for companies that don't have a well established brand, even if people are looking for an buying their products online. As a result, I expect that the majority of ad space will be filled with demographically target ads, making Facebook's new ad platform not really all that unique and revolutionary after all.

One thing that all marketers can enjoy about Facebook is the quality and accuracy of the demographic data on their users. Because supplying real information is the only real way to connect with your friends, I think that the data people enter in their Facebook profile is likely to be far more accurate then what they might enter when signing up for a Hotmail or Yahoo Mail account.

I guess only time and testing will tell, but I am excited to start testing.

Labels: beacon, facebook, online marketing