Every advertiser’s dream — to place ads directly into relevant conversations and meetings between people who will buy their products — may soon be here, and it’s all because of our little friend called the Internet.
A little background is needed to understand why this is such a big deal. Since advertising’s earliest beginnings, putting ads for name-brand spears in the hands of mighty warriors and strategically woven into buffalo paintings on cave walls, advertisers have sought two simple things — get the most money and do it as cheap as possible.
Print ads have made up the majority of what we know from advertising history — in the backs of newspapers, yearbooks and event fliers. Later on, say around the ’70s, we started to see a boom in TV ads. They moved from much of an afterthought in marketing budgets to being a main source of spending.
Not much changed for several decades after that. Plenty of research was done on the most effective colors in ads, placement in newspapers and magazines, the use of certain words and phrases on a subconscious level — anything that would improve the number of people moving from not knowing who a company is or what they do, all the way to a dedicated and satisfied customer.
The overarching problem with this kind of advertising is there’s little in the way of hard numbers to tell how effective ads in those mediums are.
Take a newspaper ad, for example. How can you, as a business owner, know how many people have read the ad you ran yesterday? Well, we could take a small sample of people and, after having them look through a copy of that day’s newspaper, see how many of them noticed the ad. Take that number, then multiply it by the rough number of papers picked up that day, and you can get an idea of how many people noticed the ad.
The problem: There’s no way to tell how many people who noticed the ad will actually move to a purchase. If they don’t buy anything, it’s essentially wasted money.
Then came the Internet. It was a little troublesome in its early days and not terribly useful or organized for advertising, unless you count spam.
By the way, companies sent so much spam in the ’90s because it worked. It is amazingly cheap because you don’t actually have to pay for postage and envelopes, not to mention all the hours of wages for people to go through lists of people likely to buy, make the package and then send it out.
Then Google came. Google has masterfully taken a previously untapped market and made billions from it. Google catches you when you least expect it — searching.
When you’re browsing a website and see the little white box with blue text in it, that’s probably a Google ad. Despite being ignored, on the whole, their redeeming quality is they are targeted. You can compete for ad space on searches like “athletic” or “romance” so that when people search for something related to your product, they see your business.
It’s a wonderful business model, and it has served us well, but Facebook thinks it can do better.
Facebook is a neat idea — connecting friends and family, or just drunken acquaintances, and letting them see every detail of our lives. It’s a ton of fun.
But no one at Facebook is going to pay for you to do that. There has to be some green coming in somehow, or Facebook wouldn’t exist, plain and simple.
So, here’s the Facebook revolutionary idea: Ads can be “liked,” commented on, etc., and pulled off the sidebar into our feeds and profiles. That’s it.
So what’s the big deal? Well, Coca-Cola would rather use you to do its advertising because they know that if friends see you buying a Coke, they’re much more likely to buy than if some nonsensical polar bear or Santa Claus tells you to.
Imagine it. Soon, we’ll look at a friend’s profile and see a drink ad with, “John, Jane and seven other friends like this,” then their comments below on how tight that stupid polar bear looks in his Halloween costume or whatever they decide on.
Surprised? Offended that Facebook is so commercialized?
Maybe you think they’re “selling out.”
Don’t.
Everyone is out there to make money, because we all have bills to pay — including your 1,200 closest “friends.”
Devin Graham is a 21-year-old business management senior from Prairieville. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_dgraham.
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Contact Devin Graham at [email protected]