Social Media’s recent launch of Social Banners is a great step forward in the world of advertising and social technology. In a nutshell, social banners are ad banners that have knowledge of who your friends are, and can track actions they take. So if your friend Sarah see a banner ad asking her whether she wants to go see Wall-E this weekend, and Sarah clicks “yes,” you may see a banner telling you that Sarah wants to see that movie this weekend, and can respond likewise, etc. It’s a totally new angle on banner advertising, and it got me thinking, what do
have in common? They’re all trying to make it easier to access your friends. Access to your friends should be frictionless – you should not need to be on facebook.com to connect with the people you know, your friends should be available to you in whatever context you happen to be in when an interaction with them would be useful or meaningful. To see an advertising technology that endeavors to meet this goal is exciting, and should be illuminating for brand marketers. It’s a fundamental shift in thinking that advertising must be what consumers want, not what brands want to feed them.