The Friday Five: Native Ads’ ‘Slippery’ Slope
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
You Know What’s Cool? A Billion Users | GigaOm
It’s official. Facebook clocked its one-billionth active user this week. CEO Mark Zucerkberg announced the historic figure in a characteristically brief blog post. Since its launch in 2004, Facebook users have produced 1.13 likes, 140.3 billion friend connections and uploaded 219 billion photos. Most astonishing is that 600 million people access Facebook via a mobile device, putting the company’s mobile advertising struggles into sharp focus.
‘Native Advertising’: The Slope Gets Slipperier | MediaPost
If marketers learned anything from this year’s Advertising Week it is that native ads — in-stream digital ads delivered in the same wrapper as the content they accompany — will be the hot topic of discussion — and controversy — in 2013. But as MediaPost columnist George Simpson writes, the announcement this week that NBC News will join the likes of Forbes.com in encouraging advertisers to develop advertorial content for its digital platforms that looks and reads like editorial pieces is a slippery slope, not only for the media brand but for the advertiser, too.
Are Marketers Truly Customer Centric? | DMNews
While 48 percent of respondents agree that their companies have “a relentless focus on building customer insights,” only 21 percent report that they have or will have a value score for each customer, according to a new study.
Don’t Buy the Do Not Track Hype | Digiday
Everywhere you look markerters are talking about proposed Do Not Track (DNT) legislation. The prevailing industry wisdom seems to be that any form of anti-tracking legislation will destroy online advertising. But as MediaWhiz’s Peter Klein argues in Digiday, that’s not the case. Rather than shutting down the industry, DNT would force marketers to be more creative in their campaigns by tapping into consumers’ expressed interests via data they provide to social networks and other digital platforms.
Want to Really Reach Your Friends on Facebook? That’ll Be $7, Please. | AllFacebook
The Facebook homepage may claim that the social network is free to join and use and always will be but reality is a little different. Facebook announced this week that if users really want their friends to see an important wall post or announcement all they need to do is cough up $7 per post to improve the news feed ranking of the post. It’s an extension of a promoted posts service that Facebook originally launched in New Zealand. Whether regular users are willing to pay for a service that used to be free, much like brands now pay to promote their posts on their brand pages, is not a foregone conclusion. As the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper reports, almost all of the $7 per promoted post will be profit for Facebook.
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