If you're in an ad agency, you're working on a Facebook campaign right now. Ah, go on, you are.
Or at the very least, in your most recent
idea shower someone suggested a Facebook app as a component to your next campaign.
Facebook campaigns are fun to create. They’re different, interesting, and creatively and technically challenging in their own special way. If they’re carefully crafted, they really work (if your definition of a working campaign includes being liked – another discussion).
The ingenious way Facebook is structured means that you can place ads within it that are targeted so accurately that neither your campaign nor the consumer have to leave the environment.
And if demographically targeted ads are just too sloppy for you, don’t worry, here comes
real-time contextual advertising – get in front of people when they’re mid-conversation. Ser-weet.
But despite the brilliance, there is something brands should bear in mind.
I’m a massive advocate of digital marketing, and one of the best things about it over the last ten or so years has been?its lack of boundaries. As ad agencies, we've had freedom to express and experiment as we've had in no other medium. We've been pioneering something genuinely new and exciting.
This freedom isn't exactly hard-won, but it is a core component of what makes the whole thing so incredibly vibrant and refreshing.
Things have developed rapidly over the decade since, and generally for the better – more bandwidth, better ideas, better strategy, more integration, better execution, more consumer understanding.
But still there is always this great thrust to experiment, to push boundaries, and to engage with and delight audiences.
So here’s the niggle - here’s where Facebook seems to fly in the face of this spirit in a certain, important way. It’s proprietary.
The fact it’s proprietary means there are rules. Have a look at the Facebook Promotional Guidelines:
These guidelines exist to protect Facebook users from spamminess, and are undoubtedly a good idea from that perspective.
But in a brand context they are saying that this is private property, and that on this property you have to behave in a certain way. And it’s not even the rules themselves that bother me – but more that this is a space that has to have them.
This is a situation where one brand is imposing its rules on another; it’s a business that takes ownership, to a degree, of the way other businesses communicate and operate.
In other media, this may be a part of life, but it just doesn’t need to be this way in digital.
Also, consider that every time someone puts a ‘Like’ button on their web page or a Find us on Facebook button on an ad, they are laying out a proportion of their ad spend on advertising someone else’s business. A minor point maybe, but as someone in the advertising business, it matters to me.
So Facebook gets exposure for free, which would not be so much of a problem if it was a philanthropic organisation - but it’s not. It’s a brand, a business in it’s own right (and by the way, Apple manages the same trick with the iPhone).
Just to be clear, I’m emphatically not against Facebook, or brands using it. When used well, it is a very powerful tool, and it is a fun, interesting place for a brand to be.
But I would recommend that brand owners and agencies go into it with their eyes open. Don’t put all your energy, ideas and spend into Facebook. Make sure you also have a digital space where your brand can completely be itself, a space you own and can control. Eggs, baskets, Facebook.
