Monday, September 29, 2014

Facebook announces re-launch of Atlas

It's Ad Week, and Facebook has announced their re-launch of Atlas, an ad platform that serves and tracks ads across platforms.

To provide some context, Atlas is a main competitor to Google’s DoubleClick. This will also compete with AdMob, an ad technology built specifically for mobile, which was acquired by Google years ago. Further, Marin Software and Kenshoo have been named as Facebook’s paid search partners. So, an advertiser can create a paid search campaign using Marin/Kenshoo and optimize their campaign with the Atlas tool. With Google bringing in ~32% of online ad spending last year, it is no question that Facebook is looking for ways to take a larger share.

According to the Atlas blogpost, the industry is moving to “people-based marketing”. Atlas claims that the use of cookies for  for ad serving and measurement is flawed when used alone, and that their platform can measure cross platform usage across devices. Moreover, they claim that the platform can connect online campaigns to offline sales. Details about how this works, according to the post, is vague.

However, upon additional research, Techcrunch explains that "the platform will be linking users’ ad interactions to their Facebook accounts, not just on Facebook itself, but on other websites and apps”. That said, it will be interesting to see how privacy factors come into play, as Facebook accounts are personally identifiable. CNET goes into a bit more detail about how it works: “The way it works is that when a user logs into Facebook with their mobile device, it registers a special device identifier with the company's servers. This identifier can then be used to track a customer so that if another app on their phone asks for an ad, Facebook can use information about the customer to find the best ad to send their way.”

It will be interesting how this plays out for Facebook. Facebook’s mobile advertising efforts alone represented 62 percent of its $2.68 billion in overall advertising tallies in the second quarter of this year. By tying in desktop more closely with mobile ad offerings, they may see a boost in revenues from cross platform ad spend in the coming quarters.



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