A possible shift in the advertising landscape?
From an email Jonah Peretti, the CEO of Buzzfeed, sent out to employees and investors:
This same lucky shift made our business model work for the first time. A couple years ago, we were trying unsuccessfully to sell social advertising to a market that only wanted to buy banners but things have changed dramatically since then. Now many agencies and brands are refusing to buy banners, companies that rely on traditional display units are suffering, and budgets are shifting rapidly to social advertising. One of our board members, who was initially skeptical of our decision to not run banners, recently said that “social advertising will be the biggest media business since cable television.” Times have changed.
Which begs the question, what is social advertising?
“In social advertising, ads are targeted based on underlying social networks and their content is tailored with information that pertains to the social relationship.” – Catherine Tucker, Cornell
“Whereas in traditional, non-social, advertising the ad is targeted based on what it knows about the individual person (cookies) or the individual page (keywords).” – Wikipedia
Examples of Social Advertising from Facebook, Buzzfeed:
