• by March 28, 2011

Facebook, continuing its aggressive pursuit of the ad world, in early April plans to launch Facebook Studio to "showcase best practice examples from agencies worldwide for the creative campaigns they've produced." The news comes six months after the social media giant brought in Jennifer Kattula from Microsoft to head up agency marketing, just after Facebook's launch of real-time targeted advertising.

"We think agencies are poised to be thought leaders for savvy social marketing, and we've created this online tool to help them share their great creative," a Facebook rep told Online Media Daily . "The site will be open to all agency submissions around the globe, and to the public as well."

"We'll be there," tweeted New York-based Red Tettemer + Partners, with the agency's executive creative director Steve O'Connell adding: "It's fantastic. Hopefully, it will result in agencies pushing each other and moving the whole category of social marketing forward a bit."

Jonah Goodhart, co-CEO of Moat.com -- which offers its own creative ad-sharing service, but for banner ads -- called Facebook Studio a move in the "right direction" and a "great thing for the industry." Goodhart said he agrees with Facebook that "advertising is about emotional engagement," not clicks.

One measure of engagement in the social media world is how many people become "fans," Goodhart said. But Sam Weston, director of social for Interpublic's Huge, said that once they "like a fan page, the vast majority of users ... rarely go back to it." If Facebook "really wants to see big changes ... they need to tell their user base how to engage," he noted.

Weston applauded Facebook's move to improve ad creativity, but added: "I don't think that's what's holding advertisers back." For greatly increased ad revenues, he said, Facebook must change advertiser expectations.

Marketers will not commit to comprehensive social-marketing campaigns costing from $60,000 to $100,000 per month until Facebook comes up with ROI and metrics to match, he explained. "They need to standardize the expectations and make it easier for companies to see the value in spending real money. They don't need to change opinions with creative, but with the purchasers themselves."

"Because it's still so early on, we don't know what the value of a fan is," Nicola Mendelsohn, chairman of London-based agency Karmarama, told The Financial Times, which broke the Facebook Studio story.

In the same article, Kattula said people claim that "Facebook is not a place to be creative because the ad unit size is so small, and there's no sight, sound and motion .... The idea is that social is creative. It's more than just ads."

Successful Facebook campaigns, Kattula said, have used clear, conversational language to engage directly with consumers. She gave the example of Oreo asking wall questions like "What's your favorite part of an Oreo -- the cookie or the creme?" and Threadless, a T-shirt company, asking its fans to vote for which designs to put on a T-shirt.

Facebook has also teamed up with The One Club's One Show for what they are calling Facebook Studio Live, a day-long "dialogue with Facebook engineers, marketers and product teams to learn how to use Facebook to build campaigns that are social from the ground up." The event will take place May 12, as part of The One Club's Creative Week in New York.