Numerous UK companies have pulled their advertising from Facebook reports the BBC. Vodafone, Virgin Media, First Direct and the AA have removed themselves from the rotating banners of the social network du jour due to their appearance in a number of Facebook’s groups promoting the British National Party (BNP).
If we take the numbers presented by Valleywag, that’s at least a loss of $400,000 per month to Facebook. The question now (apart from wondering how much of a discount the companies got) is if this will put a dent into the cash-flow of Facebook, or if they are in the purple patch of being able to set whatever rate they want, and watch companies fall over themselves to buy up the inventory?
It also raises some questions for the legions of internet advertising solutions that are springing up – do you have such a fine granular control on where you deliver bundles of inventory? In a fast moving and growing environment of a social network (or even the internet as whole) can the ad networks adapt in real time ensure that the varied tastes, corporate objectives and social etiquette to avoid the potential problems of affiliation advertisers with the wrong site or group?
A good question to brainstorm over the weekend, I think.
Company Index: Facebook, Vodafone, Virgin Media.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
god bless the bnp, they are so hip to the movement. this made me laugh so much, those poor nationalistic buggers - I just tried a search for BNP on FB groups and got nothing but anti BNP groups (+ weirdly the young labour party and its 271 members). I bet they had 110 members before this and now they are nearing some tipping point of 10,000 facebook users - the damage vodafone, virgin media et al have done!
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:22 pm
As far as I can tell the BNP are a legal entity
Would we be so egar to celebrate corporate think on another topic?
If we took, for example, a case where the BNP stood for something like the Zionist did pre-WWII would we all jump for joy becuase Tesco withdrew there 1936 Olympic sponsership of Facebook(tm) ?
Why are Zionist OKAY but the BNP not?
PS I am a Jew
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I am not jewish either. They are a legal entity and thankfully we live in a society where they are absolutely allowed a voice, not one I agree with, but still a voice. Not sure Zionism pre-WWII preached hate (as the BNP have demonstrated through numerous docos), certainly they wanted their own state/segration, maybe that is the parallel you are drawing - this is all a bit off topic web businesses
August 4th, 2007 at 7:18 am
The point is not so much about the BNP, it is about advertisers ensuring that their brand appears next to content that matches their “percieved” values.
The question is can media agencies buyers and social network owners guarentee that a brands adverts will not appear next to UGC content that may carry a negative context.
This problem is know as the “homer simpson” effect where a consumer is not fully engaged with a brand but sees it repeatedly out of context and eventually just associates the brand with that context which is why Vodafone and others didn’t want their brand being displayed next to the BNP whose values diff from that of Vodafone.
So can this problem be fixed. The answer is yes. Firstly the brands can choose to ONLY advertise with online sites that control the content and therefore context, such as the Guardian Unlimited, MSN or blognation.
Secondly and more importantly NEW ad serving engines are appearing from companies like wunderLoop that are based not on the context of a sites content but on the indivdual and their behaviour, so that advertising appears related to their profile.
It will be interestin to see what the response is from Facebook. So far it has been to replace mainstream ads with Facebook Flyers.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
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