It has been a few weeks since Facebook announced the relaunch of Atlas, giving the marketing industry plenty of time to fully digest the news. Among the range of new features Atlas purports to have, what stood out is the potential for dispensing with cookies and the bridging of the offline and online worlds.
Turning to the developments in relation to cookies first, every marketer knows that cookies are a fork in a world of soup. Cookies hint at how a marketing campaign is doing and provide a rough guide for targeting. However, with the migration to mobile and the surge in video content, the limitations of cookies has been brutally exposed. The marketing industry is therefore crying out for a new mechanism on which to base campaigns. By dispensing with cookies and instead linking a user’s interaction with an ad to their Facebook profile, the insights that could be gained with Atlas are potentially very exciting. It is also one of the major factors setting Atlas apart from Google’s DoubleClick.
At face value, linking to a user’s Facebook account offers a much more effective way to run a cross-channel marketing campaign by making ad targeting consistent across the various devices consumers now use. However, it is not clear whether Atlas can overcome the challenges of cross-channel and analysis on video. Much has already been written about how difficult it is to analyse the effectiveness of video marketing content and it is difficult to see how the Facebook account link will do anything to alleviate this problem.
Aside from the move away from cookies, Atlas also purports to bridge the gap between the offline and online advertising worlds by linking the interactions of customers in the real world to their Facebook profile. Unfortunately, it’s far from clear how well this will work as it seems that it is dependent on customers purchasing items in a shop and providing the email address they used to set up their Facebook account.
Ultimately, marketers will favour the platform that has the best data-set making the partnership model that Facebook is set to deploy very interesting. By including major Facebook-owned platforms like Instagram, and presumably eventually WhatsApp, Atlas could own a very large and rich data set.
It remains to be seen whether Facebook will mimic Google’s full service model. Atlas is currently only an ad serving and tracking tool, however, an ad-buying feature is coming down the pipeline and it makes perfect sense for Facebook to expand its offering further. For third-parties, the potential for ad tech development that Atlas’s approach to tracking and analysis offers is very interesting. However, one factor that is worth considering is how consumers will react as ads they are used to on Instagram and Facebook start following them across the internet, and their offline and online worlds converge as their purchases on the high street clearly influence which ads they see online. Internet privacy is an ongoing concern and you could imagine a scenario where a vocal negative reaction causes Facebook to change track on how Atlas operates. That uncertainty could play on the minds of marketers and brands alike, potentially slowing Atlas’s development.
The bottom line for marketers and brands is that more information and tools to target consumers is a good thing. Whether Atlas will be able to mount a sustained disrupting influence on online marketing is entirely dependent on how the platform develops.
By Itay Gadot, VP of Sales and Marketing at dmg.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus