Facebook’s New Premium Ads: A Huge Mistake?

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 07 Mar 2012

At last week’s first-ever Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC for short), Facebook officially announced the integration of four new products into their advertising model. These additions represent the most invasive placements on the social networking site yet. For the first time, they’ve placed ads within the previously untainted News Feed (on both desktop and mobile sites)—a move that speaks volumes of Facebook’s new trajectory.

Facebook users don’t often warmly embrace shifts in their social media routine, so it’s only natural to wonder how Facebook’s 845 million users will react to these game-changing announcements. What will it take to make sure these new ad formats don’t backfire on branders?

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Facebook Sponsored Stories Turn Your Life into a Commodity

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 22 Feb 2011

This post originally appeared in our February  issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Facebook’s Stories project has, for all intents and purposes, fulfilled its end goal. Now a fully-fledged, first-of-its-kind ad network named Sponsored Stories, not unrelated to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets/Trends/Accounts, it allows brands to affix their name (and corresponding Facebook page) to an organic, consumer-generated activity in the hopes of populating the well-intentioned promoter’s friend network with a more compelling push to purchase. This approach is infinitely more engaging, and invasive, than any brand-spun messaging could hope to be—and that could be what makes it pure (or evil, depending on your perspective) genius. It raises the inevitable question: Is your privacy even more at stake these days? Let’s look behind the stories.

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The Three Most Important Words in Advertising

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 29 Oct 2010
"There is angst in ad land over the complexity of media," writes Story Worldwide CEO Kirk Cheyfitz in his latest article for the Huffington Post. You can say that again! Luckily, everything that follows this introductory sentence serves to unravel the complexity in this "how-to and how-come piece" about Paid, Owned, and Earned media. There's been a lot of talk about those three categories lately, and yet, they're still pretty confusing. What follows is the ultimate demystifier.
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