Today in Social

Facebook is rallying the ecosystem to try to convince the world it’s on a path back to accelerating revenue growth. Today – what a surprise – its preferred partners for advertising services are crowing about how much they love its mis-named ad exchange. (Real exchanges sell inventory from multiple sites.) Don’t get me wrong, adding re-targeting capability to its basic ad units will likely enable Facebook to charge more for them; re-targeting is a tried-and-true method for increasing online display ad effectiveness. And it’s not a matter of focusing on the “wrong” ad units. Facebook is smart to try to improve any of its ad products. It’s also smart enough to concentrate its efforts on the ones that are most social and run in the feed.  That will translate to mobile, and potentially offer the biggest differentiation from traditional online advertising. Creating a manageable hierarchy of Open Graph-enabled analysis, and weaving itself into Apple, will help.