This piece by Somini Sengupta in the New York Times takes a critical look at Facebook and its quest to be “the Web’s most effective advertising platform.”
Interestingly, Facebook is working with some of Verdi’s data partners to get there. In other words, Facebook users don’t divulge all of their relevant characteristics on the platform, so Facebook – like others – relies on external data to better understand their users, and to more accurately “package” them for advertisers.
Remember the saying, “At Facebook, we users are NOT the customer. We are the PRODUCT, and Facebook’s advertisers are the customer.”
Facebook – whose stock is worth a lot less than at its IPO – is still being watched carefully by Wall Street, who “wants to see it take concrete steps to prove to advertisers that it can show the right promotions to the right users and turn them into customers.”
Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s what we database marketers do for our clients.
In fact, one of our current challenges – once we reach the right Facebook users with our clients’ ads or sponsored posts, what’s the best way to get them to engage with our clients OUTSIDE of Facebook? But more on that in a future post.