Atlas and Facebook
In this article we learn that Facebook is reintroducing Atlas, a network that lets advertisers buy ads using Facebook data and put those ads on non-Facebook sites. Additionally, Atlas will allow advertisers to TRACK the effectiveness of their ads everywhere on the web. Even though the ad won’t be displayed on Facebook, the claim is that the ads will still be more effective because it is using the demographic data Facebook uses to display ads on its own site. From the second article, we learn that many advertisers used cookies to figure out what you’re looking at online to determine what ads to show you. But on mobile devices, there are no cookies for advertisers to track, so now they rely on Facebook data because Facebook tracks browsing activity. Atlas gives this anonymous information to partnering advertisers.
This plays off of what we learned in class about tracking clicks to a website to track popularity and what the consumer is browsing. Although there isn’t a second price auction happening, we can imagine this advertisers trying to find the best place (position X,Y, Z, etc.) as well as the appropriate ad to display on a webpage. Using Atlas, one can find out what trends are popular among what group of people. In addition, since a feature is to be able to track how well an ad is doing, one can also use Atlas to track the number of clicks the ad received or how many clicks led to a purchase. Overall, there are a lot of similarities to what we discussed regarding ads and clicks.
In addition, Atlas is partnering with companies like Omnicron against their biggest competitor, Google’s DoubleClick display ad. With a growing network using Atlas, the ultimate goal is to have more power over what Google does by convincing more and more publishers to let Atlas into their business. In class we learned that when a company A has more outside options, it will have more power over company B. In this case, Omnicron is partnering with both Facebook/Atlas and Google. Even though Omnicron is partnered with other companies as well, if Atlas is able to convince more partners to join-(including those partnered with Omnicron)- Atlas will be able to have more bargaining power over all its partners. Thus, the new Facebook ad network Atlas, takes many concepts of networks and applies it to its business.
http://recode.net/2014/09/28/facebook-will-facebook-data-to-sell-ads-on-sites-that-arent-facebook/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2688339/how-facebook-s-new-ad-platform-lets-brands-track-you-around-the-web.html