Internet Research Pro

Facebook Corrals User Comments in Ads

One year ago, Facebook made waves from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley with a splashy event to launch its ad platform with Beacon and Social Ads. Facebook Ads would revolutionize the advertising business, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, by allowing marketers to “be a part of the conversation.”
Today, Facebook is working to convince marketers of the value of its ad offerings. Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook, spoke with eMarketer about how the company is doing so, and how advertisers are using social networks now.

“I think that advertisers are getting increasingly sophisticated about this notion that social networking is a new medium, that if you approach it [as] you have approached traditional Internet advertising on a traditional publisher, you won’t be successful,” Mr. Kendall said. “If you approach it with the lens of, ‘How do I interrupt the user in their flow through my site?’ it’s not going to work.”
The Engagement Ad product is one of Facebook’s ad offerings that is geared toward engaging the user with a particular product or service of the advertiser. One type is a video commenting ad through which the user can comment on a product or service.
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“The commenting function is something that you see happening all over the site in noncommercial ways,” Mr. Kendall said. “Writing on someone’s wall is just another flavor of commenting, so we’re basically drafting off that activity that’s happening millions of times a day across the site and putting that into an advertising product so that users can engage with commercial content in the same way they engage with noncommercial content.
“If I see that ad unit after some of my friends have already commented on it, [those comments] actually show up inside the ad,” Mr. Kendall continued.
Dreamworks Pictures tested the concept for the film “Tropic Thunder.” The filmmaker was pleased not just about the commenting feature, but about being able to see the specific comments, Mr. Kendall said.
Another recent campaign was for MTV, promoting its Video Music Awards, with a video commenting trailer.
“There were people commenting about Kanye West and Britney Spears, who were both featured in the ad creative,” Mr. Kendall said. “That level of engagement was absolutely the goal of the ad product, so it’s cool to see that happening on the user side, and advertisers valuing that.”

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