Where's Facebook Advertising Headed?

This post is in response to Inside Facebook’s post entitled, What CPM is your app making? As someone who is in charge of quite a bit of digital advertising budget from 12 brands ranging from consumer electronics to financial services and many things in between, I find advertising in/around Facebook applications very challenging and questionable.  As marketers get smarter about their media selection and care about joining the conversation with their audience, extremely integrated opportunities have emerged within the digital space.

For quite a few marketers, their audiences are on social networks such as Facebook.  As many Facebook users are installing applications and such, the marketers are trying to buy their way into the consumers attention span.

Just as we have advertising networks such as Advertising.com, we’re starting to see the same type of networks emerge within the widget/application space.  If history repeats itself (which it very likely will), we will see these widget/application networks create standardized ad units (IAB standard if not already) and go on a scaling spree… how much inventory can they sign up to maximize their reach across the web.  The top 2-3 will be acquired to bundle into a Platform-A type approach by most media companies, and the world will not be any better off than it was prior…. why?  Because these type of ads are non-integrated.  Most of these ads run alongside these applications and don’t have high interaction rates.

Do these ads running in these Facebook applications add any value?  Can they be amplifyed offline?  What is the real value of them?  I think we’re seeing the value from the Inside Facebook posting… <$1.00 eCPMs.

Darren Herman is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. Herman writes about technology, entrepreneurship and digital media at his blog, http://www.darrenherman.com.