By Samantha Karol
Marketing Assistant, CPX Interactive
On the front page of the Business section of last Sunday’s New York Times, was an article about the tremendous growth of social media giant, Facebook. The question the article posed was whether Facebook has grown too fast since its inception five years ago.
This week, the site was projected to reach 200 million users, astounding considering that they only reached 100 million last August. The article goes on to tell the stories of several Facebook users, and mentions the various conflicts that have ensued between Facebook and its users. However, it was when I neared the end of the article that I found some information that is very relevant to us here at CPX Interactive, and to the advertising industry as a whole.
If you have been on Facebook recently, you may have noticed stories in your news feed about someone’s choices for “Top 5 Movies of All Time,” or been offered the opportunity to become a fan of a certain company. This is all part of Facebook’s new “engagement ad” campaign. According to the Times article, these interactive ads are aimed to be a solution to consumer resistance to intrusive advertising on the Web.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook is referenced as saying that “her company’s revenue was growing despite a brutal downturn that is hurting other kinds of online advertising.” While Ms. Sandberg is not incorrect, CPX is also among the online players continuing to succeed and bring in revenue despite the economy. We owe that largely to our own continued innovation of creating ads that people want to click.
We also find that the ads with the highest conversion rates across our network are ads that are interactive in some way, and that offer users the opportunity to engage. This can range from invitations to respond to trivia questions to brain teasers (example above) to playing a game, like duck hunting, within the ad space.
Another aspect of this new ad initiative is to offer advertisers the opportunity to target Facebook users based on language and geographic location, a major advantage of the online advertising space in general. The article goes on to state that some advertisers see this type of interactive, targeted advertising as the future of the industry. As a member of the Facebook generation, I find that I am more apt to respond to ads when I feel like I am being targeted directly. The key is engaging the user, and these new ad formats certainly accomplish that goal. If this is truly the future of the industry, it will be very interesting to see what comes next.
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