Not a religious thing, but that greater than ever ability to spot you and sell to you that you've been waiting for (ah hem).
Hmmm.
Our pension fund holders are really going to pile into Facebook based on last-century's ad model?
Let's review for a moment.
Facebook is not an audience. It is an aggregation of small groups of people who care about each other (mostly) and a few that circulate around brands (mostly as a badging excercise or in hope of being thrown a fish or two).
I don't know of any groups that formed to be marketed to (either on Facebook or elsewhere). Facebook could test this by setting up the 'I signed up in order to be better targeted by advertising' group and counting the likes...
The broader point is this: targeted advertising - no matter how clever - remains advertising - a broadcast bodge job being unsatisfactorily applied to a networked medium.
I'm reminded of this, from ex-Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."
It's a shame that Facebook's share of the big brains can't be refocused, that Facebook can't take the opportunity to build new relationships between brands and their customers, to help shape alternatives that do fit the networked model.
Where is Facebook's product suite for innovating with customers - for making customers partners with brands in pursuit of things they both care about, for example?
I thought we'd all established we don't want to be targeted, we don't want to be marketed to, we want to join in, we want to market with.
We don't want better messages - we want better things.
Of course, we've said all this before (see below). I guess it wasn't a £100bn question last time.
Seriously, Facebook, try harder. You've got an opportunity to change the future for the better, not simply hone the past.
I know where you're coming from, but....
ReplyDeleteI don't think that the product suite is Facebook's responsibility. Facebook is part of the set of tools freely available for marketers to create innovative stuff. You'd expect if that stuff is going to succeed in a networked world then it'd be based on network economics rather than linear. And probably mean that brands start thinking about their role in culture and communities based on how things spread through culture and community.
But that'll be a slow process, and one that we're all trying to speed up. The value that insitutional investors see in Facebook is in monetising all the brands that don't move quickly. There's a risk to Facebook that the targeted messages pollute what they have built under increasing pressure for short term returns, but for the brands and marketers that are building for the long term Facebook is just one of a suite of tools, that can be used for as long as it is useful.
Good points. But I do think in order to justify their valuation they need to offer more to speed up the process you suggest is happening. After all, there's way more value in it. As such a big player in the media landscape I suggest they have a duty to lead by example rather than take the money and run.
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