Facebook and Social Ads

No announcement in the last year has driven home the reality of the Collision of Commerce and Media more than Facebook's announcement yesterday about their new social advertising strategy. It is at once brilliant and obvious. While I'll be the first to say I think it's dangerous when 23 year old CEOs (or even 38 year old Presidents...or 33, if you use my "myspace adjusted age") talk about 100 year trends (see the bottom of this article), in this case I think Mark is right... we're going to see a massive shift in how people are marketed to and the idea that marketing is going to graft (said here without the pejorative connotations of some definitions...replace with 'draft' if you'd prefer) onto the power of word of mouth is inevitable. We've said it many times before in this blog...it's all about transparency and as long as everyone knows what's happening, consumers will ultimately be ok with it. Here's the other thing that was brilliant: Facebook turned privacy inside out. Another part of the genius of being 23 years old is that Mark has probably never heard of the Doubleclick / Abacus privacy debacle that put mental handcuffs on everyone in the digital industry for the last 6 or so years. Privacy issues? What privacy issues....Facebook members are real people who opt into these behaviors. Ohhhhh yeahhhhhh. Sometimes it just takes looking at from a different angle. On the lighter side of the Facebook world, here's a great video making its way up the YouTube charts: