Facebook to Ad Agencies: Let's Be ‘in a Relationship’
Social Network Rolls Out Community Site Aimed at Creatives — Facebook today launched a stand-alone community site (facebook-studio.com) where ad agency creatives can share ideas, comment on campaigns and learn what it takes to create a successful page for a brand.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's courtship of the ad business has been escalating for years — from the social ad network it sketched out in 2007 to January's 'Like'-as-sponsored-ad product — but until now its outreach ran through sales teams and developer kits. Facebook Studio (facebook-studio.com) is a different instrument: a community site aimed squarely at the creatives inside agencies, where they can showcase campaigns, critique each other's brand pages, and absorb Facebook's own playbook for what works.
The timing tracks with Facebook's scale: by March 2011 an Edison Research study put 51 percent of Americans aged 12-plus on the platform, meaning brand reach now runs through it whether agencies like it or not. Building a venue where the people who actually make the campaigns learn Facebook's rules is how a platform converts audience scale into influence over how budgets get spent.
First-order effects
- Agency creatives gain a free, direct line to Facebook's brand-page best practices and peer benchmarks, reducing their dependence on third-party page builders and consultants for that know-how.
- Facebook gains named relationships with the individuals who shape creative decisions at agencies, complementing the media-sales relationship it already has with their holding companies.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling brand-page management, measurement, and 'how to succeed on Facebook' education now compete with the platform giving that guidance away, pressuring their pricing and pitch decks.
- Rival platforms courting the same brand dollars — Twitter above all in early 2011 — face pressure to offer equivalent creative-community and certification programs rather than selling purely on inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms progressively absorb functions that historically sat inside agencies — education, creative standards, awards-style recognition — shifting the industry toward platform-mediated marketing relationships.
- With a majority of Americans on Facebook per Edison Research, the gravitational pull of audience size plus platform-authored best practices points toward brand budgets consolidating around one or two dominant social platforms.
The trend: Social platforms are moving from selling ad inventory to directly cultivating the creative community that decides how brand money gets spent on them.