8月28日
Engagement ads – Finally!
Facebook announced this week the first of it’s kind engagement advertisements. What are engagement ads? Forrester goes into the full details but the gist of it is they are ads that people can do something with. Traditional banner ads are designed for people to click on and then they are taken to the landing page the brand wants them to see. Engagement ads are designed so people can take some sort of action with the brand. There are 3 different type of ads; comment style ad, virtual gift ad and fan style ad.
Comment style ad’s allow viewers to comment on the product right in the ad for other people to see. This is an interesting idea, but in my opinion pretty risky. I’m thinking about a GM ad where environmental groups could really go to town on bashing the gas guzzling trucks GM is selling. Any type of company that is at all polarizing (and I work for one) should think about how they are going to monitor these types of comments.
Virtual gift ads seem pretty straight forward. If you haven’t used Facebook before virtual gifts are ‘pretend’ items friends can virtually throw at each other for fun. I’ve been telling everyone I know that I would love to see a virtual Ugg so I could throw it at my friends. I’m a big fun of Ugg. This is a fun, easy engagement ad that gets people using their network to promote their favorite products to people they know.
Fan style ads will be great to build awareness for fan pages in Facebook. Rather than sending people off to the brands corporate webpage off Facebook this ad would link to the brands fan page. This ad requires the brand have a fan presence already established on Facebook. This would be a great way to make more people aware of a brand’s fan page. We are working with an MVP partner on our Vista fan page which has tripled in members over the last 3 weeks. I would definitely consider buying fan ads to send traffic to my Vista fan page.
Very interesting concept. I think Facebook was the right social network to lead the way on this. Will be interesting to watch.