Apparently, some advertisers in the UK were cancelling their adspaces on Facebook, because they were appearing next to dubious content – in this case a page of the British National Party – as I found in this post at Techcrunch.
It seems that Facebook (and probably most other social networking sites) are not able to book campaigns on specific pages (or filter out unwanted pages). But, as Techcrunch rightly writes:
It seems a little strange in 2007 that advertisers would have been naive enough to believe that a run of site style advertising campaign on a site as large as Facebook would not have resulted in advertisements appearing next to dubious content to start with.
This problem is not only Facebooks‘ problem. Any social network – may be even many of the other sites with user generated sites with run-of-site advertising – will have the same problem. These sites will need context sensitive filters to deliver the right ads to the right user generated content pages. And while this works fine for text based pages (Google is offering that already for their AdSence ad placements), I am not sure how you would do the same with images, Sound and video?
The post is a little older, but nevertheless interesting. Thomas Baekdal lists 7 tipps for successful viral marketing. Since we were just talking about this in the agency, this reminds me of a certain serendipity effect. (Accidentally finding something when you’re in the right mindset.)
The 7 tipps are as follows:
1: Make people feel something
2: Do something unexpected
3: Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)
4: Make sequels
5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding
6: Connect with comments
7: Never restrict access!
Of course there is explanations and examples to each one of these, so click yourself through here and take a look. Summarising, he writes:
There is a common message in all of these tricks. It is that you need to make it right – or not do it at all. Only the best viral marketing campaigns make it – the rest literally sucks.
This is very true and it is most likely the point which is the most difficult to sell to clients…
This is a great idea showing how donating blood doesn’t take much more time than watching a clip on YouTube. You have to click on the image below, since (due to the effect, which I won’t give away here) the clip cannot be inserted into any other pages just like YouTube clips. Enjoy!
OK, I am echoeing others here, but this one I have to mention – let alone for my own records. You might have seen this video:
Joe Jaffe found it in 2006 already and I remember thinking back then: what kind of nonsense of „user generated content“ brands will have to deal with in the future. And I was thinking about how brands could properly respond to this kind of stuff. But I never thought about what they did now: it has apparently been sold to McDonalds by their agency Arnold. It just doesn’t say anywhere for how much. Now it constantly runs on US television, probably costing lots of media money…
Joe now feels a bit stale. For one, because he found it already such a long time ago, but also because of the tagline in the beginning which says: „user generated content“.
„Why Facebook, why now?“ Robert Scoble answers three questions: Why Facebook, why now? Why Facebooks advertising sucks, and how the friends definition and ties could be improved.
In the advertising part, he argues that the ads should somehow be connected to the people’s profiles. But: he says it should be tied to the friends profile, not my own. And I wonder: if my friends are into things that are of no particular interest to me, what is the added value for me? And subsequently you need to ask yourself: why would an advertiser put ads infron of my eyes that are not relevant to me?
Ad agencies are about to trade three-martini lunches, schmooze-fests and fast-talking account executives for programmers, custom software and anthropologists who can navigate MySpace.
One comment was aimed squarely at all those agencies that are desperately trying to acquire people who understand digital and „interactive“ advertising, which invites consumer participation via digital media — for example, voting on products online or sharing text messages as part of a viral marketing campaign.
„Digital anthropologists are going to be the next people you scramble to hire,“ DeCourcy said.
[…] agencies will need people who can use the tools of cultural anthropology to interpret the overwhelming amount of user-generated data, and come up with strategies for using social networks to sell stuff.
But this trend also won’t last much longer says this article. Two more years, and there will be enough young people ready to fill every remaining gap there ever was. So enjoy while it lasts.
Wo ich sonst so bin...