ADOTAS – As we reported earlier this week, Facebook revealed its plans for a mobile ad network at its “F8″ developer conference in San Francisco today.
To kick off the conference, founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company announced more than a dozen new developer products, including:
- Audience Network: Developers now have a new way to effectively monetize mobile apps.
- The new Facebook Login: Letting people select what information to share with apps.
- Anonymous Login: A way for people to log in to apps without sharing personal information from Facebook with developers.
- Improved stability: A two-year stability guarantee for our core developer products.
- App Links: Making linking between apps easier.
- Parse updates: Updated Parse pricing to make building apps less expensive, and new tools for developers to build apps with Parse that work offline.
- Message Dialog: Letting people share content from apps with friends through Facebook Messenger
- Mobile Like Button: Like the Pages or content of individual apps through a native, mobile Like button.
- FbStart: A new program to help mobile startups grow through a package of resources and tools provided by industry leaders.
- Send To Mobile: An easy way for people to send an app to their phone after visiting a web site and logging in with Facebook.
Industry veteran Jeff Dachis, Chief Evangelist and Advisor at Sprinklr, said the F8 announcements reinforce two themes: the rapid maturation of Facebook as a company and an ongoing land grab for mobile revenue.
“From developers, to users, to advertisers, everyone benefits from Facebook maturing and guaranteeing that it will just work,” said Dachis. “Your average TV watcher and your average TV advertiser never worry that television won’t be on the air, but up until now Facebook couldn’t make that same guarantee. This is Facebook signaling they are ready to step as a mature company.
“Anonymous login is going to be a major friction reducer for everyone in the Facebook ecosystem,” he added.” As a user you’ll be able to get access to a lot more, while giving up a lot less. As an advertiser you’ll be able to drive more high quality engagement from ads. And Facebook stands to benefit greatly from happier users and happier advertisers.
“Mobile is the future of advertising and everyone is trying to stake their claim,” Dachis continued. “Twitter got there first with MoPub, now Facebook is introducing FAN (Facebook Audience Network). They’re both going to end up with market share in the massive, growing market for mobile ads, but it’ll be interesting to see how they differentiate and compete over the next few earnings announcements.”
Here’s how some other industry leaders are reacting:
“As an early adopter of Facebook’s mobile ad product, we have experienced rapid growth with mobile both inside and outside of politics. Facebook has been an early partner in our targeting efforts, and we’re excited to see what comes of the Facebook Audience Network. With FAN, advertisers are getting access to a big missing piece of the puzzle. We plan on using this capability to help extend audience-based targeting onto mobile devices. Small changes in Facebook can have a big impact to what everyone does in ad-tech. There is always a lot of anticipation on our end to see how Facebook is impacting the ad space. We admire how Facebook is always working to rapidly improve in mobile. The fact that you have to update your technologies along with their updates is a good tradeoff to getting a better experience.” – Michael Beach, Co-Founder of Targeted Victory.
“Mobile is the fastest growing digital marketing channel but it’s still only a small portion of digital media spend. However, the opportunity is much larger than just mobile. Facebook can apply the same model to publishers across all digital media and threaten Google’s dominance in a meaningful way.” – Marc Poirier, Co-Founder & EVP, Business Development of Acquisio.
“For Lotame, this is great news. Facebook continues to be an important channel and platform for advertisers and marketers looking to engage with their consumers. It is uniquely positioned to power cross-device user identification via their known user registration information, and offers a unique option for advertisers to achieve their cross-channel marketing goals on the Facebook platform.” – Kalyan Lanka, VP of Product Management at Lotame.
“Native ads and enhanced targeting capabilities, both relying heavily on massive amounts of user data Facebook holds, have been put on the forefront of Facebook’s efforts to become a mobile marketing leader and it has proven itself to be right way to go. With the industry still perplexed with the issue of ad relevancy, Facebook was able to fit ads into the natural user experience, while ensuring content applicability to the end user.” – Gil Regev, Vice President of Marketing at MassiveImpact.
“Anonymous Login is Facebook’s answer to the death of cookies. Cookies just don’t work for mobile. This is a new way to handle customer profile management for unique users across devices without forcing the user to give up personal data.” – Janrain CEO Larry Drebes.
“Although there are still lots of open questions regarding how long users will be able to try apps for, instant personalization and other items, today Facebook raised the bar when it comes to accessing people’s personal information, data, privacy, and it is allowing users to take control over what others can access. This is a major milestone for Facebook and for app developers in general – putting the customer experience first and putting users back in the driver’s seat.” – Olivier Amar, CEO of MyPermissions.
