Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Advertise here with BSA
Superheroes In Simple Math by illustrator Matt Cowen.
More picture here
Join us on Facebook, on Twitter or Pinterest
Start your own Design Contest today and choose from 50-200+ custom design made just for you.
Design You Trust RSS Feed | Design You Trust on FB | Design You Trust on Twitter | Design You Trust | Subscribe to DYT by Email
Last November after our paidContent Entertainment conference in Los Angeles, I got to talking with a gentleman in the advertising business who went off on a bit of a wine-fueled rant regarding some mobile advertising executives. “They think they can just slap a QR code on a print ad and say, ‘There, that does it, now we have a mobile strategy’,” he said, going on to bemoan how stupid all those other ad executives are but leaving me with an important point.
Following Facebook’s advertising event in New York (covered ably by Ryan Kim here) I was reminded of that conversation. Rather than presenting some sort of new innovative mobile ad unit or technique, Facebook’s first mobile ads will simply be an extension of its Sponsored Stories ad product to the mobile screen.
That’s not really a mobile strategy: it’s a desktop strategy that’s moving onto the mobile screen because of looming pressure from investors and desperate brands looking to reach consumers on their mobile devices, where they are spending more and more time.
As Facebook knows as well as anyone in mobile, with 425 million mobile users and a far-reaching plan to build out the mobile Web, mobile advertising has huge promise but no one really has any idea how it’s going to work. About $4 billion will be spent on mobile advertising in 2012, according to IDC, but display advertising on mobile is a very difficult proposition given the limited real estate that marketers have to utilize. The market is so up in the air that the Internet Advertising Bureau held a contest to pick five innovative mobile ad formats and received a wide range of submissions.
So it’s not entirely fair to ding Facebook for deciding to just move Sponsored Stories into mobile: as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD points out, Twitter is basically doing the same thing. There may not be a better way to reach mobile consumers at this point, but this is something that may not sit well with Facebook mobile users, who tend to freak out when the company changes even the smallest feature.
There is a huge opportunity for someone with Facebook’s size, reach and mobile expertise to develop a killer mobile advertising strategy, much the same way Google changed the way online advertising was bought and sold with its search engine and ad auctions. Unfortunately, what Facebook rolled out Wednesday falls short of that goal.
What’s true, however, is that the Sponsored Stories move will buy Facebook some time to really nail the mobile advertising experience in a way that turns on advertisers without turning off consumers. Just don’t call it a mobile strategy.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Opportunities and challenges for mobile dealsFacebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
Foursquare just made what it called “a little announcement”, but it’s really not little at all. It’s switching away from the Google Maps API to OpenStreetMap. For the map images, it hired MapBox, a start-up that makes pretty maps out of OpenStreetMap data. Starting with foursquare.com, foursquare’s maps now use MapBox Streets.
Foursquare cites Google’s decision to start charging for access to the Google Maps API in October as the reason it started looking for alternatives. But it sounds like it just made more sense to the team philosophically, too. “We love the idea of open data,” the announcement says, “and were happy to try it out.”
Sponsor
Lots of businesses built on top of Google Maps have been switching providers lately. Foursquare’s blog post points to StreetEasy, Nestoria and Fubra, all of whom went with open data. We also covered the decision by AllTrails, a network for outdoors enthusiasts, to start backing away from Google before its launch.
Google’s decision to charge for API access could not have been made lightly, especially considering the importance of Foursquare. But it may have been inevitable. “Overall it’s healthy for the ecosystem,” John Musser of Programmable Web told us when Google announced the change. “Services need to be sustainable with business models that work for both sides.”
It’s also hard to ignore Google’s efforts to compete with foursquare directly. Its mobile Hotpot app, Google Places recommendations and Google Latitude check-ins all seem like ways to crowd out Foursquare, although why there are so many overlapping Google apps for this is hard to understand. There are also Google+ check-ins, which will be the social glue that ties them all together.
So now Foursquare and Google are direct competitors. When you use Foursquare Explore on the Web to search for places, you’ll be taking eyeballs away from Google. Moreover, Foursquare is now a major patron of open-source software. Not only will it support the work of the people building OpenStreetMap, it will also let Foursquare contribute to the open-source Leaflet Javascript library, which powers the maps.
Foursquare’s iPhone and Android apps won’t be affected, because they use the mapping components integrated with those operating systems, both of which use Google Maps. But Foursquare’s data are now independent of Google, and that’s no “little announcement.”
Discuss
Facebook is planning to make a bulk of its money from advertising, that’s no secret. When you’re logged into the social network you’ll see display ads on the right-hand side of your Newsfeed that loosely fit your interests. The company is also dropping “Sponsored Stories” directly into your Newsfeed as well, so it seems like nothing is off-limits at this point.
In the past, the company has used your web history for ad targeting and with the whole Beacon debacle, turned your purchasing and liking into “social ads” that freaked everyone out. It seems like we’ve come full circle since Beacon, as one user has explained how he became an unexpected spokesperson for an item that would make some people blush.
Nick Bergus is like any other Internet user, he found something funny online and posted it without thinking twice. If it’s funny it’s worth posting on Twitter or Facebook to get a laugh or two from your friends. You might even get a bunch of likes.
Little did Bergus know, his funny post would be turned into an advertisement paid for by Amazon.
55 gallons of what?
If you’ve ever spent some extra time surfing around on Amazon, you know that there are some really odd things you can buy on the site. Up until a year ago I didn’t know that you could buy toilet paper in bulk on Amazon, but alas you can. Bergus found something else I didn’t know you could buy on Amazon, personal lubricant. But not just a little tube of personal lubricant, a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant. I’m not sure how he found it, but obviously he was stoked that he did.
On Valentine’s Day he thought this would make a great tweet and Facebook post along with a link to the item:
A 55-gallon drum of lube on Amazon. For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.
A week went by and then one of his friends noticed that his post made a return visit as a Sponsored Story next to his Newsfeed:
This isn’t just a one time showing though, as his friends are telling him that they see the ad every single time that they log into Facebook. Oops. Facebook clearly saw the post by Bergus as a popular piece of data when it came to this product, so Amazon is now paying to have it featured. There’s no telling how many people have seen this ad and recognized him in the photo, but it must be pretty embarrassing for him.
So be careful of what you post on Facebook, or you just might become the next spokesperson for it.
Bonus material – This review for the product on Amazon is too funny not to share:
A little over a decade ago, I bought my 55 gallon drum of lube. I never thought I’d use it all but a few days ago the pump finally ran dry. I’ve had a lot of good times with it. My wife, too. And not just what you’d think. One day I just hosed down our hardwood-floored hallway so I could use it as a slip-n-slide. You shouldn’t think of this as a ‘purchase.’ It’s an ‘investment.’ An investment sure to pay off in spades.
Although smartphones and tablets share many common attributes, they differ greatly as it relates to where the devices are used, what they use them for, and most importantly, how you should market via search to consumers on the different devices.