• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 4, 2011

Facebook may have overtaken Yahoo as the display ad champ, but the social network still wants to become a more inviting destination for brand advertisers. To that end, the company last month brought on Mark D'Arcy, former president of Time Warner, as director of global creative solutions, to help brands and agencies generate new ideas for including Facebook in campaigns.  

D'Arcy's hiring comes about six months after Jennifer Kattula joined Facebook from Microsoft to head up agency marketing. Most recently, the company launched Facebook Studio to showcase successful creative campaigns and its ad tools. With these steps in mind, Online Media Daily asked several agency creative and media executives what changes -- if any -- they'd like to see in the ad opportunities on Facebook or in how the company interacts with agencies and advertisers. Here are some of the main points:

More compelling ad units. No surprise -- the biggest rap on Facebook when it comes to advertising are the small rectangular units that serve as the site's dominant ad format. Whether Social Ads or Sponsored Stories, these boxes in the right-side column don't scream high-impact creative. But given Facebook's rejection of traditional, interruptive advertising, it's hard to imagine it springing pushdown units or page takeovers on users anytime soon. Still, agencies want more options than Facebook currently has on offer.

"Right now, it's not a very fun place for creatives to push work because the canvas is very small, but I think that's why they need Mark," said Matt O'Rourke, chief creative officer at CP+B, whose best-known (or most infamous) Facebook effort was the Whopper Sacrifice campaign in 2009 on behalf of Burger King, which ended up getting pulled for breaking the site's terms of service.

O'Rourke pointed out that YouTube also began as a "locked-down, banner-only" site before opening up to broader ad options. "Now doing custom work with YouTube is as easy as asking for," he said. "We're working on something right now with them that's never been done before, and the process has been completely painless because they've structured themselves internally to work with agencies to make that kind of stuff happen."

One challenge in that regard is that Facebook doesn't have a splash page like YouTube or the other portals that provide these as a high-traffic platform for advertisers. Each user has their own home page and profile page. For all the connections it fosters, Facebook has no central square. That means it must find other ways of giving advertisers the ability to launch immersive, inventive campaigns at scale.

"If Facebook can find a way to allow for richer ad experiences in innovative, interactive ways that are both brand-friendly, cost-friendly, and consumer-friendly, they can find a winner," said Joe Mele, director of media and marketing at Razorfish. Easier said than done -- as even he admits. Mele points to areas like gaming, check-ins, and social e-commerce as segments where Facebook can build on marketing opportunities.

Perhaps the nearest analog Facebook might look to is Skype, which recently added a masthead unit to the user home page as it looks for new ways to increase revenue prior to its initial public offering. Like Facebook, the company is sensitive about alienating users with overly intrusive advertising, disrupting the intimate nature of its Internet chat and video service.

To that extent, Skype is rolling out advertising slowly, and not allowing the home page ad to unfurl automatically, as pushdowns do on many sites. The company is also encouraging marketers and agencies to develop campaigns that tap into the service's functionality and international user base. Skype CMO Doug Bewsher said last month the company has not had a negative backlash to the new ads so far.

More creative tools for brand pages. Facebook's answer to the traditional portal home page for advertisers, of course, is the brand page. Marketers get to create their own presence on the social network free of charge -- what could be more open-ended than that, right? But even here, restrictions inhibit the full potential of Facebook Pages, as company profile pages are formally known. Like what?

In short, make brand pages as fully functional as marketers' own sites. That starts with changing the formatting of pages so there's more space for creating original content. "There's also potential to have better APIs and better support so brand pages can be a much richer, more immersive experience than they are today," said Aaron Shapiro, CEO of Huge Inc. The digital agency's award-winning Pepsi Refresh Project last year integrated Facebook as part of its social media strategy.

But Shapiro noted that the stand-alone RefreshEverything.com site was the hub of the campaign rather than a Facebook page. "It would be very difficult to do a Refresh Everything-type project with a Facebook brand page because the technologies don't really support it," he said. Shapiro adds that many brands aren't doing enough with tools already available, so he believes efforts like Facebook Studio will serve as useful resources.

Better analytics. Creative isn't everything. Ad executives also suggest that Facebook could do more when it comes to providing metrics around campaigns to better evaluate return on investment. "Analytics is a bit of a black box as far as what goes on within Facebook, so if they could improve that, it would help marketers also," said Shapiro. That means providing an equivalent level of reporting and measurement for a Facebook page that marketers or publishers might get through other third-party tracking services.

"With Google Analytics or Omniture, you can see what everyone clicks on -- click-through paths, page opens -- all the kind of detailed data to see what's working, what's not," said Shapiro. "You don't have that same level of visibility on Facebook."

Work and play better with agencies. Ad executives believe Facebook's failure to build stronger ties to Madison Avenue is partly to blame for the lack of brand advertising opportunities on the site. "Facebook could do a lot more to engage agencies from a relationship standpoint," said Adam Kasper, executive vice president, digital investments at Havas Digital's Media Contacts unit. "I believe agencies will welcome any increase in commitment from Facebook."

In particular, agencies want the social network to play a more proactive role in brainstorming about Facebook ad efforts and keeping them in the loop on new developments. "We need to know what's on their product roadmap so we can work with them to determine ad opportunities," said Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president, brand strategy and emerging media, at digital agency 360i.

She cited the newly launched Facebook Deals and Facebook Places as examples of recent initiatives. "The earlier we know about these innovations, the better we can partner with them on ad-based integrations," Hofstetter said. That's where new appointments like D'Arcy come in.

The ad community has welcomed Facebook's hiring of Time Warner's former Global Media Group head as a positive step. "Mark D'Arcy has a reputation for trying to create deep relationships with brands and creating compelling, original advertising opportunities with them, and he could certainly bring this to Facebook," said Razorfish's Mele. Whether his big media background will help bridge the gap between Madison Avenue and Facebook remains to be seen.