Yesterday Facebook unveiled its online ad plan to New York advertisers hither and yon. Here’s the scheme prematurely hearkened as a contender to AdWords: advertisers can make their own branded pages!
For free!
And that’s not all.
You can also buy banner ads — LINKING TO YOUR PROFILE PAGE!
Overwhelming? Something like that. But it would be wrong to say Facebook disappointed its masses. It did toss in an analytics feature, after all, and friends can actually endorse stuff they recently bought, which then appears in news feeds.
That last part might be the most meaningful aspect of the announcement. If there’s anything the inception of WOMMA taught us, it’s that word of mouth has been a wildly underrated resource that fuels the success of any company. Our industry has been hard-pressed to generate WOM in a way that doesn’t alienate buyers — or worse, ring inauthentic.
So kudos to the Facebook team for thinking outside the box. We’ll see how this simple idea affects the online ad mix.
