Page 6 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

A closer look

into Facebook’s

people-based

marketing

By now, we all know that using cookies alone for ad Also new is the extension of the geographical area in
serving and measurement is flawed, since they do not which users can make settings for advertisements. In
work on mobile and therefore can’t capture the whole this section can be found, among other things, why a
path to purchase, besides supposedly overemphasizing particular ad appears in the timeline, or how personal
last-click attribution. data will be used for promotional purposes within and
outside of Facebook, so that the user can determine
Facebook’s ad serving and measurement platform, At- which ads he sees or not.
las, allows brands to reach people across multiple de-
vices with its so-called “people-based marketing”, stat- Facebook makes no secret of the fact that it still wants
ing: “We’ve entered a new marketing reality where mar- to collect and use the data of its users, however, claim-
keters and advertisers are quickly shifting from a reli- ing it would be in their users best interest: The experi-
ance on cookies to using the insights from real people ence would be enhanced by optimized location tracking
and real actions to make business decisions.” with matching information, such as the display of res-
taurants nearby. Further, it should soon be possible to
Atlas was purchased by Facebook in 2013 and is oper- buy conveniently from Facebook directly, without hav-
ated as a separate entity. Just last year it has been re- ing to leave the platform, and eventually the social net-
launched with an entirely rebuilt code base and user- work asks its users to give access to their device infor-
interface, aiming to make media more measurable, ac- mation, such as location services on their mobile, in
countable and transparent, so that Facebook’s clients order to provide optimal functioning of the apps.
can optimize their campaigns and drive business re-
sults. The new update brings in fact no changes regarding
the sharing of information with advertisers. In its privacy
But promising more transparency does not necessarily policy, Facebook states: "In some cases, we share with
mean making concessions when collecting user data. At advertisers and their service providers and partners the
least that’s what Facebook proves again. information we have collected on their websites or in
connection with their advertisements (…) to help pro-
At the beginning of 2015, the social network has updat- vide, understand, and improve our services”, confirming
ed its privacy terms and guidelines. New is now the sec- that “only non-personally identifiable information (such
tion "privacy basics", where users receive tips and in- as cookie identifiers) are shared.”
structions how to take responsibility for their experience
on Facebook. So far, Facebook has made use of peoples’ activities
on Facebook pages, but in the future will also consult
The question is, if the new Atlas is responsible for the signals from other websites and apps, since interest-
changes, since the data and cookies policy have been based advertising is an international industry standard
updated as well to take into account new features that by now.
make the documents easier to read. In the words of Fa-
cebook: “Atlas solves the cross-device problem and “So where a cookie-based measurement platform
brings people-based marketing beyond Facebook to the would not be able to understand when one person is
rest of the internet and the mobile and offline worlds.” served on a home laptop, an office laptop and a mobile
phone, people-based metrics would. This discrepancy
With the change of the cookies policy, Facebook clari- impacts not only reach, frequency and attributed con-
fies to now use cookies and similar technologies outside versions for marketers, but also real business results”,
of the social network and the entire Zuckerberg empire. Facebook believes devoutly.◊
You can imagine that this is most probably a result of
the launch of Facebook's advertising services Atlas that By Daniela La Marca
target users across all platforms based on the Facebook

ID.
6 Asian eMarketing January 2015 - Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions