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Facebook,
MySpace Launch New Targeted Ads |
Posted:
11.07.07
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MySpace and Facebook have created tools that allow advertisers
to target users based on their interests and personal information,
a shift that concerns some privacy experts.
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Facebook announced Tuesday that a new tool, called "Facebook
ads," will allow companies to build special "pages"
on the site. If a user visits the page and interacts with it -
by uploading a picture or checking out a product - that information
will be communicated to the users' friends, along with a company
logo.
 Company
executives think this will excite advertisers.
"Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from
a trusted friend," said Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old
Facebook founder. "A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of
advertising."
The company launched 10,000 "Facebook ad" pages Tuesday
night.
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Targeted
advertising |
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This follows a similar move by rival networking site MySpace,
which said on Monday that it was expanding the "HyperTargeting"
system it launched in July to target 100 consumer categories including:
music, movies, personal finance, sport and travel.
 MySpace
said more than 50 advertisers, including Procter & Gamble,
Ford and Sony Electronics, have joined the program, which goes
through the information member pages - the process is called data
mining -- to determine their main interests and what kind of commercial
messages they might respond to.
"It's looking at what they say, what they do and what they
say they do," said Adam Bain at Fox Interactive Media, the
parent company of MySpace within Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
"It's not keyword-based, so they don't have to mention Tom
Cruise for us to know they're a fan," Bain told Reuters.
"We're smart enough to understand the movies they list have
Tom Cruise in them."
MySpace also unveiled a self-service advertising tool allowing
groups like small businesses, musicians and politicians to post
an ad and choose who sees it. "Let's say you're a reggae
band, and you want to reach people who like reggae music, you
want to reach people who are a certain age, a certain gender,
you know where they live. You can actually target your ads to
show up on those people's profile pages on MySpace," Mark
Glaser, editor and host of MediaShift, a Web log at PBS.org, told
the NewsHour.
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The sought-after
demographic |
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Advertisers are anxious to reach the nearly 160 million MySpace
and Facebook users-many of whom fall into the coveted 18-34 age
group. This age group tends to be better educated, make more money
and have more discretionary income to spend.
And MySpace and Facebook encourage users to volunteer personal
information about themselves - something all advertisers want
so they can better target their ads.
Both sites stand to make large amounts of money by offering advertisers
unique opportunities.
"For example, knowing a list of people's friends isn't necessarily
useful unless the system could automatically remind people of
birthdays, and then advertise a specific gift the friend might
like based on his or her preferences," reporter Stefanie
Olsen writes on CNet.com.
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Security
concerns |
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Some media experts are concerned that social network users don't
fully consider the amount of personal information they're putting
in the online public sphere.
Search engines such as Google track all of your searches and
can tell if you are interested in a certain movie star, planning
to buy a new MP3 player or facing a specific health problem.
 Plus
when advertisers use behavioral advertising, they are using technical
tools called "cookies" to follow where you are visiting,
page by page, click by click, on the Internet.
"They're following to see what sites you visited so that,
let's say, you had gone to a travel site and looked into buying
a ticket to go to Jamaica, and then you went on and went to a
few other sites, and you were on a social networking site, and
you got an ad that actually was offering you a deal on that trip
to Jamaica," Glaser explains.
"So it's a little bit scary when you start to see these
very targeted ads. And you wonder, 'How did they know that I'm
interested in Jamaica? How did they figure that out?'"
Consumer groups and others are looking for ways to limit such
access.
"There's been talk about a do-not-track database, which
is similar to a do-not-call database, where you could actually
put your name in and say, 'I don't want online advertisers and
marketers to track my movements online.' But the marketers and
the Web site publishers believe that that's not a good solution
because it's going to take away from their ways of making money,"
Glaser added.
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Will it work? |
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Not everyone thinks this new advertising tool will work. Some
fear that it may annoy and alienate the very Web users advertisers
hope to target.
"I think it's going to be easy to get advertisers to test,"
Keith Benjamin of the venture firm Levensohn Venture Partners
told the San Jose Mercury News. "I'm skeptical whether targeting
is going to get people to click through and buy something."
--Compiled
by Annie Schleicher for NewsHour Extra
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