Thursday, May 26, 2011

Is Facebook the next great advertising network?

Yesterday at the eG8 summit hosted by Publicis, Mark Zuckerberg made his case for Facebook to become the leading platform for advertisers when he said, "If you think about advertising, what’s going to be more effective than any advertising you show is something your friend says they Like."

Aside from wondering if they actually teach kids the English language at Harvard, this statement raises one big question.

If Facebook is going to take over the advertising world, who's going to pay for my TV?

I have some 900 channels coming through my cable box for which I pay about 75 bucks a month. But what really pays the writers, actors, directors, cinematographers, gaffers, grips and assorted other providers of that content is advertising.

Marketing dollars have been flowing to digital media, with facebook being a leading recipient, mostly at the expense of newspapers and magazines. Will this start happening to television? It hasn't yet. In fact, at this year's up-fronts where networks preview and sell their shows to advertisers and their agencies, they were asking and getting top dollar for their shows.

Facebook is now changing, and will continue to change how people communicate about brands and products. But until they find a way to bring mind numbing sitcoms, ripped-from-the-headlines melodramas, and reality-shows-that-are-anything-but to Facebook for free, Zuckerberg will just have to coexist with television.

1 comment:

  1. Completely different ad channels from my perspective. Fragmentation of media (digital or not) continues to make creating an effective media strategy more complex and yet often more effective. Re; Zuckerberg's grammatically flawed comment~ what one of my friend "likes" may not be something I would "like" after checking it out. While the digital WOM factor works (Facebook advertising works); it is not the be all and end all in our professional world. that being written, if i were CEO Zuckerberg, I'd make such a claim as a positioning statement for my company given the opportunity. Wouldn't you?

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