Facebook Says the Facebook Ads It Didn't Sell Work Great
Here's Facebook's retort to people who say Facebook ads don't work: A study that says people who see brand messages on the site spend more money on those brands, right away. — The catch: The study focuses on “earned media” …
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'Facebook ads don't work' critique predates the company's ad business itself: Valleywag called Facebook 'consistently the worst performing site' for advertising in March 2007 [[a:1177536]], and blogs documented poor results that same year. Facebook answered by scaling anyway — booking $1.86B in advertising by January 2011 and pushing onto Google's performance turf [[a:1189745]] — so the volume question was never really settled, only outgrown.
What changes this month is timing and framing: weeks after a widely described IPO fiasco and investor doubt over mobile ad revenue, Facebook counters the effectiveness critique with a study showing people who see brand messages on the site spend more on those brands right away. The catch, as AllThingsD notes, is that it covers earned media — brand messages people encounter organically — not the paid inventory the criticism targets. The story's unusually wide pickup (Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, GigaOM, Mercury News, plus multiple comScore properties) signals how much rides on the answer for buyers who were already pushing hard on Facebook's ad line in May 2012 [[a:1195983]].
First-order effects
- Facebook's sales organization gains a data-backed rebuttal to the effectiveness critique that has trailed the platform since 2007 — though strictly it answers a different question, defending earned exposure rather than the ads it sells.
- Brand marketers evaluating Facebook get a new metric to cite internally — immediate purchase lift from on-site brand messages — while still lacking direct-response evidence for bought placements.
Second-order effects
- If brands fold earned Facebook exposure into their media math, budget lines between 'marketing' and 'advertising' blur, strengthening Facebook's hand against performance-priced rivals like Google whose sold inventory is judged on clicks alone.
- Third-party measurement firms such as comScore become arbiters of the debate, since platform-commissioned effectiveness studies invite every competitor and skeptic to commission counter-studies.
Third-order effects
- Social platforms defending ad value through attribution studies rather than click-through data points to a structural shift: measurement methodology, not inventory pricing, becoming the battleground for digital ad budgets.
- Post-IPO, Facebook faces a second audience for ad efficacy — public investors worried about mobile monetization — meaning effectiveness claims will be argued in public as much as in pitch decks.
The trend: As Facebook's ad business scales beyond the $1.86B booked in 2011, disputes over whether its ads work are shifting from click-based critiques toward contested, commissioned measurement studies of brand impact.