Rahim Fazal is the CEO and co-founder of Involver, which provides applications and social marketing tools to over 125,000 brands on Facebook. Last week, Involver launched SML™: The World’s First Markup Language For Social Media.
Recently, in an article about her in Vogue, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg pointed out something very interesting about ad spending and why she believes Facebook is positioned to dominate a market she projects to be over $600 billion a year. While Google concentrates on demand fulfillment, which is the narrow end of the sales funnel and represents only 10 percent of all ad spending, Facebook is concerned with demand generation, the broader end of the funnel, where much more money is spent.
Facebook’s concentration on positive brand affiliation, as opposed to point-of-sale, where Google is focused–is more akin to the way broadcast works and potentially much more lucrative if social media can begin to draw the kinds of advertising dollars that television does. And Facebook has taken huge strides to create an environment where brand affiliation can take place, alongside the multiplicity of social interactions.
Right now the dominant context for demand generation is still television, representing close to 50% of all media spending, compared to about 10% for the Wb. http://www.printinthemix.rit.edu/fastfacts/show/350. Many people believe social media holds the potential to challenge and one day supplant television as the dominant medium for advertising. Television remains attractive because the audiences are still large, which means a greater potential for leads, but social media audiences are potentially much more valuable, as brand affiliation is integrated more deeply in the interactions.
What Are the Right Ad Formats for Social?
Let’s look at the two dominant ad formats and their relevancy in the social Wb. When it comes to demand generation, many brands are still using traditional IAB display formats, which have not proved to be very robust for creating leads and certainly have not attracted the kind of spending we’re talking about. The effectiveness of banner ads is measured in click-thoughs, which often take the user away from the experience they were there for, and why people find them annoying. Google Adwords, while more relevant contextually, are also defined by click rate, which is how Google makes its money. What’s missing from both of these formats, especially in the context of social media, is the potential to create engagement. Engagement is the biggest opportunity that social media has to offer brands, and therefore, display and text ad formats are less effective in the social Wb.
Instead of trying to overlay that space with messaging that might not be relevant to the user, it’s important to look at the criteria that have driven the success of social Wb experiences. While a display ad format is typically a jpeg image or rich media Flash animation of certain standard dimensions, a social media ad works better as an application that takes advantage of the social platform’s API set and can exist in several different formats. At Involver, our focus is primarily on the Facebook Fan Page, which is a 520 pixel wide format. But social media ads are about more than pixels, they’re about integrating with the media – the ad is also the experience.
Five Key Attributes of Social Media Ads
What makes Facebook so effective is that it puts the user at the center of the experience. For ads to be successful in this arena, brands need to pay attention to five attributes: personalization, share-ability, content-richness, context, and interactivity. Below these attributes are examined further with some examples:
Personalization – The Wb has moved towards more and more personalization. Platforms like Facebook put the user at the center of the experience, which is one of the most significant reasons people become captivated in social networks. So when brands communicate with customers in a way that creates a personalized (read: richer) experience, customers become more open to sharing their data, and brands can in turn use that data to create even higher levels of engagement and social media ad formats that are even more effective.
A great example is Wrigley’s 5React Gum, which attracted over 100,000 people to participate in a promotion requiring them to share their Facebook information. In exchange, users received access to an exclusive flash game dynamically personalized with the user’s own Facebook photos. People will volunteer their data if they know why they’re doing it and if it makes sense for them to do so. 5React Gum has nearly 4 million Likes on their Facebook page.
Share-ability – Incorporating sharing in the social media ad format can be powerful. Here, we are not referring to simply adding a share button, but rather making sharing part of the experience and tying it into pre-existing user behavior (see Interactivity below). A great example of this is a popular jeans company that created an application where a user can pick from a catalogue of jeans for the winter season. This triggers a personalized poll that can be shared with friends through the Facebook News Feed asking friends to pick which pair of jeans that person should buy.
Content-richness – Behavior on social networks typically involves consuming, interacting with, and sharing content. Content has become such an important part of the social Web that brands are becoming publishers in order to participate in the experience. Social media ad formats aren’t simply static files like their display counterparts, but rather rich and dynamic applications. Therefore, brands are creating whole teams of people in their organization that are responsible for producing and distributing content. This content can then be used to keep applications ever-green and extend the shelf-life of the social media ad format.
Interactivity – Unlike a traditional display banner ad, social media ad formats tend to be highly interactive and mimic the type of actions users are already taking. Activities such as games or surveys or quizzes have therefore become very popular for brands to use in their campaigns. From a marketer’s perspective, interactivity drives sales, as it allows user to engage with the brand through multiple rungs in the engagement ladder or steps in the sales funnel. One reason social media ad formats are more effective than television ad formats is because they create active participation rather than passive engagement (think YouTube. While an online platform, YouTube is very passive).
Context – Unlike traditional display banner ads, where a marketer can produce one ad and display it on 10 or 20 or 30 different Web sites, the most effective social media ads are contextual to the experience. So while many of the branding assets might be the same, the application that produces the experience will be different on a Facebook Fan Page than it will be on an iPhone application or a Facebook Connect-enabled Website. Each end-point presents a unique opportunity to produce a branded experience, some stronger than others.
With mobile, for example, a marketer may wish to use location-based services or pull in someone’s contacts from their iPhone app. On a Facebook Fan Page, a marketer may wish to make the ad highly interactive, fun and quick, like a game, because the canvas-size is small.
Addressing the Challenge
The challenge right now to implementing these attributes is that applications leverage disparate technologies and are difficult to produce. What has been missing is the infrastructure to make these formats more accessible. At Involver, our approach has been to try and introduce a standardized set of tools and technologies that can be made available to the developer community to better enable them to produce these social media ad formats.
Social Markup Language, or SML™, democratizes social web development by putting the required tools and infrastructure in the hands of the development community. SML™ makes it simple for front-end developers with CSS/HTML/Javascript experience to build customized applications on platforms such as Facebook in days instead of weeks (similar to how Macromedia enabled developers with Flash for rich media ad formats). SML™ can potentially open up social media to deliver its promise as a mainstream tactic for marketers and accelerate investment in social platforms.
By effectively removing the barriers that have inhibited brands and agencies from entering this market, we believe spending by brands and agencies on digital media in general and applications in particular will continue to grow perhaps even faster than current predictions. http://www.penn-olson.com/2010/07/20/digital-ad-spending-to-grow-by-40-billion-forecast/
To find out more about Involver and SML™ visit http://involver.com/
