As warmer weather rapidly approaches and many of us prepare to switch from heavy sweaters into bathing suits, Facebook (News - Alert) is planning on unveiling new video ads in early June. While each advertisement costs only a mere $1 million, demographics to be targeted include women over and under 30, as well as the same age range for men.
Let’s be honest: this equates to pretty much every social networking fanatic out there, right?
According to recent reports, the advertisements will play automatically upon landing on the website and will take up the entire screen. Luckily, however, they will only be 15 seconds in duration and no more than three ads will invade our social media experience on any given day.
As workers traditionally take their vacation time during the summer months while college kids are out of school, June kicks off what seems to be an advertiser’s dream of catching the attention of the masses. Yet as someone who uses Facebook on a daily basis, I can see how unwanted videos being force fed down my throat could get annoying—and quickly.
Mark Zuckerberg’s (News - Alert) beloved site, which boasts over one billion members, 526 million of whom visit the platform on a daily basis, has seen many benefits powering various types of promotions. This is primarily because like many other things, Facebook thinks outside of the box. For example, rather than simply retrieving data based on what a user likes, the company is selling ads that are much more gauged to their exact interests.
This gives it the advantage of enabling marketers to reach the right audience with the ideal products each and every time, enabling consumers to see ads relevant to them, according to The New York Times.
Examining the organizations with which the social phenomenon has partnered over the years, Acxiom (News - Alert) collects data from several sources, including financial services companies, court records and federal government documents; while Datalogix continues to grow its suite encompassing key spending habits of over 100 million Americans.
Also, BlueKai designs tracking cookies for brands looking to see exactly who is viewing certain Web pages.
“Our goal is to improve the relevance of ads people see on Facebook and the efficacy of marketing campaigns,” Gokul Rajaram, product director for ads at Facebook, commented in an interview.
So while this summer, people might now only be bombarded by things they may actually want to purchase, what are the potential disadvantages this increasing loss of privacy will bring to the public? It likely means we’ll leave tracks, perhaps unknowingly, and then follow them back to websites we click on.
In addition, things users may not reveal could potentially be uncovered via both their online and offline ventures.
While marketers may be pulling in a win with this new strategy, Facebook’s user base could turn out to be the ultimate set of losers.