Emotional Appeal: Facebook Sets Up Ad Creatives Site

Behavioral economics led the way, but social media is eagerly following. Believing that the group dynamics of a social network may be the most effective approach to forging the 'new' advertising, Facebook has set up a site to encourage ad agency creative employees to experiment using its 500 million members as their test bed. One has to worry about the skew of Facebook's demographics and what that may mean for results, but should the ad types bite, it will be a fascinating look at the next stage of influencing consumers:

April Dembosky reports in the Financial Times:

"Facebook is trying to entice a new generation of advertising executives to tap consumers’ emotions through social advertising rather than obsessing over the traditional clicks and conversion rates.

The social networking group will launch a site early next month for creative advertising agencies called Facebook Studio, an online catalogue where the ad world’s top teams can share and comment on the best Facebook ad campaigns.

The social networking group’s space for agencies aims to encourage sharing of ideas on the best ad campaigns

The tool is just one facet of Facebook’s courtship of creative media agencies as the company looks to cement its own brand of online advertising and widen its revenues.

However, for agencies that are used to investing their talents in Super Bowl television commercials, and getting paid handsomely for them, there are a lot of questions.

“One of the biggest challenges that people talk to us about is that Facebook is not a place to be creative because the ad unit size is so small, and there’s no sight, sound and motion,” said Jennifer Kattula, the company’s recently hired manager of agency marketing. “The idea is that social is creative. It’s more than just ads.”

Facebook is beginning the task of selling the sellers on this concept.

The company began its push by inviting a select group of British advertising leaders to meet Facebook’s top executives at an “influencers’ summit” last month in Palo Alto, California.

During one session, the besuited ad executives met with Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s director of engineering, who was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and talked about the word-of-mouth power of Facebook and its impact on truth in advertising.

No longer would agencies be able to sell a bad product with a clever campaign, he told his audience.

“But for ad agencies that are good at what they do – it’s Christmas,” he said. “Because people will be talking about what you do and sharing it with their friends.”

His advice to brands: relinquish control. Let consumers take over the conversation.

While the prospect is terrifying for some ad agencies, others left the weekend converted.

“We’ll look back in time and think the period of the past 50 years was the most artificial ever in terms of how brands communicate to consumers,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, the chairman of London ad agency Karmarama.

Right now, agencies were focusing mostly on keeping abreast of all the new advertising tools Facebook was churning out, she said.

How to be creative on Facebook is an evolving question, one that the website hopes will be answered in its own style – by getting as many ad teams to share, like and comment on creative work as it is released on the upcoming Studio page.

So far, successful campaigns used clear, conversational language to engage directly with consumers, Ms Kattula said.

Oreo, for example, posts questions on its wall like “What’s your favourite part of an Oreo – the cookie or the creme?”

Almost 10,000 people responded, and all of those comments then spread exponentially to their friends’ news feeds.

Threadless, a t-shirt company, asks its fans to vote on which designs they want to see on a t-shirt.

The company gauges demand, then produces the top picks.

“They’re practically pre-sold,” said Ms Kattula.

Though the value of integrating an ad campaign on Facebook is clear, how creative agencies will be compensated for that portion of their work is still open to debate.

Traditional models are based around the agencies taking a percentage of the media buy – very large for 30-second television spots, but undetermined, and seemingly small, for a free Facebook page.

“There are question marks about our industry and remuneration packages,” said Ms Mendelsohn. “Because it’s still so early on, we don’t know what the value of a fan is.”