Commentary
No Surprise: Facebook Wants TV's Ad Money Right Now
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 24, 2011
Advertisers: The buying and selling part of the upfront is commencing, and Facebook wants your TV money.
According to a recent report, Facebook has been looking to recruit big veteran TV sellers. No, Facebook won't be running "Glee" or "Modern Family" episodes anytime soon. It has other stuff to sell: …
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Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Let's start talking ACTIONS, and then I'll be impressed!
Ah, another online service desperately seeking a share of TV's ad dollars but without anything useful to offer. (Google's been trying this one for years - and that led to a strategically unfocused GoogleTV this year.)
What's completely lost on the web efforts is that TV is the advertising antithesis of what the have to offer. As noted in this blog post, the web shatters audiences into billions of tiny fragments (http://wp.me/pU7xa-Gl). TV, on the other hand, gathers audience fragments into coherent mass marketable units where it's cost effective for an advertiser to reach them.
Further, TV uniquely reaches people with NEW messages - new products, new ideas. But the Web is only valuable AFTER consumers know why they should care to search for your product - and Facebook is even worse here.
So which would you prefer? A highly fragmented medium where you can't reach out with new products or ideas OR a mass audience vehicle that causes big change, fast?
Me, I'm sticking with TV. Because nothing causes market growth faster than TV. Nothing.
A recent WebTrends survey (Jan 2011) of display advertising on Facebook across 20 vertical categories reveals an average CTR of .065% (1-in-1538), an average CPC of fifty-six cents, and an average CPM of thirty-six cents.
Anybody with an ounce of media sales experience would look at this data and conclude that display ads on Facebook are absolutely worthless. Otherwise, why are they only $.00036/each?
Facebook doesn't need "big veteran TV sellers" they need something worth buying.
All of the above plus more like saddened that FB would be considered. More blab than fab.
There is little worth in a single $.00036 ad unit because successful display advertising on FB (much like spam) relies on a long tail strategy, which differs from TV's model. Low response rates aggregated across millions of members will yield enough value to perpetuate the cycle.