In an
Ad Age report, Facebook executives reveal that the world's largest social network is still focused on growth, not monetization. "Lots of companies our size have decided somewhere along
the line that they'll turn on the monetization and slap banners up," says VP of Sales, Mike Murphy. "That's not what we're trying to do."
Rival MySpace may smaller in size, but at $1
billion, it books about three times as much ad revenue as Facebook. Just last week, Jeff Berman, MySpace's president of sales and marketing, said the News Corp. site had set it sights on the
seven-figure ad budgets usually set aside for the Web's major portals.
Facebook won't be following suit, says report author Michael Learmonth. Marketers, meanwhile, are figuring out how to
leverage Facebook on their own. Burger King's "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign is a good example (even though Facebook eventually took the application down), and the CNN integration with Facebook Connect
is another. Of course, the conundrum is that the company didn't earn a dime from either campaign. As Learmonth says, "the promise of Facebook as a marketing platform is to get woven into the
conversations taking place there" for advertising messages to become like a "Trojan horse into the news feed," says Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer.
Read the whole story at Advertising Age »