Matt Marshall wrote a story today over at VentureBeat talking about how Facebook is developing its own ad targeting technology.

Advertisers placing ads on your profile page will have access not only to your age, gender and location, as they do now, but also on details such as favorite activities and preferred music, according to the piece. They wouldn’t have access to your name however — and thereby have no way to target you as as an individual. Rather, Facebook would let advertisers target groups with similar characteristics.

Personally, I like this a lot. We’ve heard leading new media gurus talk about targeting through all different methodologies (behavioral, contextual, etc) and the ideal ad-server targets on multiple data points… Also note that the data points that Facebook has are all consumer generated so there is no assumptions. This is a goldmine of data that Facebook could monetize and effectively create on of the most efficient media buys available and the wastage factor will be less than most.

The VentureBeat article penned this as negative. The term “bombshell” was used. Are we scared of our own abilities to target?

But the biggest bombshell of the piece is this line: “In addition, the ads would show up on Facebook pages that feature services provided by other companies, one person says.” If true, this suggests Facebook wants to advertise on pages controlled by third-party developers on Facebook’s “platform.”

In the quote above, Marshall talks about how Facebook will show ads on pages that feature service providers (Facebook apps). You didn’t think that Facebook would remain to give total access to developers for no gatekeeping fee, did you? Is this 1999? Facebook has a ginormous footprint on the web with tons of new people subscribing each day - there is no reason why Facebook shouldn’t monetize their platform.

Personally, I see Facebook as my startpage. My desktop. Ideally, that’s what it really is. It’s a social platform and now more than ever, I understand it. Like I said in previous entries on this blog, Facebook’s name is totally “wrong” from a brand identity perspective, but when push comes to shove, that shouldn’t make or break the company.

Facebook has many ways to monetize their platform but the two ways that they are leaning are probably going to be the most lucrative for them.

If we go back to the ad-serving technology that they are building, I’d love to know if they plan on licensing out the information so that other networks canutilize it for targeting capabilities? Also, I’d love to know if they are basing their ad-serving technology on an existing platform like Dart, Accipiter, Atlas, Zedo, etc, or building from scratch? Will it be automated like Google Adwords?

Any media planner knows that the more granular you get with targeting, the less reach you’ll have to that specific audience. Facebook is a site that has a tremendous reach to begin with and could probably substantiate a fairly granular buy with advertisers.

I like where they are going.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.