allfacebook shares Facebook will be launching their new ad system. This will be the next step after the improvement made with Facebook Flyers which has been argued by ReadWriteWeb that it might not be something Google should be too worried about. Valleywag talks about Google’s ad system being about servicing expressed intent, while Facebook’s is to service latent intent if not create intent.
What would Facebook’s new ad system look like? These are my thoughts.
1. They target you based on your preferences.
With the information entered onto your profile page, they already know a fair bit
about you. Advertisers can already use Facebook Flyers for what looks like highly
targeted advertising based on preferences which could be revealing latent intent..
2. They know your relationships.
How does the social graph help in advertising? It can be used to infer behavior,
intentions and preferences. How?
Say I have a friend who puts that his interest is rock climbing. He is connected to
a lot of people whose interests are also rock climbing. One of his friends has not
put rock climbing as an interest. Basically, this friend has not bothered with
putting much information on the profile page. Now, this friend and the one who
likes rock climbing have common friends where a significant percentage of them are a
subset of those who do like rock climbing. Facebook could infer that this friend
also is into rock climbing.
How about behavior? This can be inferred by the events you get invited to. Say
friend A gets invited for lots of events. They fall into two categories - tech
conferences and clubbing. But my friend only invites me for clubbing events. My
friend probably would do so because he as a friend knows I find tech conferences
boring with the lack of hot babes (although I am going to try to score brownie
points by saying Singapore females geeks are HOT ). So this relationship and how
my friend and I interact using Facebook has revealed important information that can
be used for targeting.
So maybe on a Wednesday morning I might not have any plans yet. But Facebook knows from the invites that I have been accepting from my friends that I tend to go for clubbing on Fridays but not on a Wednesday. But what if there is a really good deal for a Wednesday clubbing event? Or say that it is a Friday morning. The intent to go clubbing that night is already there. Why not target it? Facebook would have the information to allow advertisers to do so.
3. They already know who the influencers are.
Who are the ones who pass on messages? Who are the ones who consistently invite
people? Who are the ones who share stuff? Facebook already knows that. More
critically, who are the ones who get their invites accepted? Who are the ones who
get clickthrus on what they share? Also, who are the ones who share new stuff as opposed to who are the ones that just pass on stuff. Now based on relationships and interaction between people, Facebook might be able to deduce who are the innovators or early adopters.
It won’t be too hard to imagine that targeting the influencers and innovators/early adopters with a well constructed message will probably help advertisers achieve better results.
Well, Facebook’s social graph can help provide that information for that extra edge in targeting.
4. They already know the statistics about the different demographics.
Granted not the whole world is on Facebook, but the number on it is pretty big. I don’t think it would be too presumptuous to say that major political decisions have probably been made polling less people. So Facebook is able to establish profiles of different demographics. What could they possible do with that information?
a.
Sell the aggregated information without revealing individual details to marketing people.
b.
Use that information to target ads off Facebook. Put a code on your website and tell Facebook what your website is about. Facebook could use information on your website to deduce the possible profiles of your visitors. Based on the demographic of the visitors to your site, Facebook could use the aggregated information about the different demographics to know what sort of ads your visitors might most likely be interested in. They serve relevant ads based on that information.
5. They know what people are currently interested in.
Related to what people currently put on their profiles, the events they go to, the groups they join and what people share, Facebook will also be able to understand what is the currently hot trend or topic.
Possibly more interesting is when individuals change their profiles. What is removed? What is added? Does this change happen just at the individual level or is it happening across groups of friends? Across networks? Across demographics?
Facebook is a data miner’s dream.