Tuesday, November 6, 2007

I was rejected from the Facebook press conference

Apparently I don't really rate because I was rejected from the Facebook press conference today, in which they re-invented advertising. Here are the stories, posted late in the day, from Ad Age, Adweek and The New York Times. A quick glance at them seems to indicate that Facebook has discovered the profile page--as in the advertising model that MySpace has employed for several years. There are, of course, differences. As with the sponsored groups that these advertiser pages will more or less replace, when a person on Facebook counts an advertiser as a friend it will be included in the news feeds that all of that person's Facebook friends get about his or her activities. In addition, and this is where it gets really viral or really icky--depending on your point of view--is that that person's Facebook friends will see ads from the advertiser that their friend is a friend of--including, to use the Times' example: "A photo of Bobby and the fact that he likes the Prius." I dunno. It sounds like the kind of thing that would make me want to avoid asking any Facebook advertiser to be my friend. Apparently, a small group of advertisers, including Sprite, are going live on the site now. I didn't find the Sprite site, but if a Sprite home page is loaded onto Facebook and no one makes friends with it, does it make a sound?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

WTF? If they don't want CPT in the house, who do they want?

Facebook's slide towards obscurity has begun.

Catharine P. Taylor said...

You tell 'em David. Anyone want to be my MySpace friend?

Anonymous said...

perhaps the reisman book "the lonely crowd"----what you used to have to read in a required sociology class----was truly prescient....
perhaps not.......