Facebook recently announced plans to rollout a people-based ad tech system, serving ads to people off the Facebook platform while still utilizing Facebook data. This places them in direct competition with the likes of Google, and with a significant advantage—our social selves are a highly accurate depiction of our actual selves; in fact, the importance of the “social” or “digital” descriptor is debatable.
Utilizing Facebook data to serve ads can certainly result in more targeted and better received ads, however, Facebook data alone won’t present a holistic view of its 1.3 billion users. The capability to digitally advertise to people based on gender and age—the beta data Facebook plans to use—is not enough information to personalize marketing efforts.
Effective ad tech will essentially boil down to the ability to mass personalize, and targeting the right people at the right time with the right content. Facebook “won’t let marketers know who you are” at an individual level, rather they will assumedly break people into personas based on age and gender, and further down the line, I would imagine “likes.” Mass personalization will certainly come from detailed and astute persona building, but it must go far beyond age and gender, and even far beyond “likes.” (Claiming “likes” are a useless metric bears no repeating).
With newfound technologies paired with advancements in data science, brands can detect age and gender easily. More importantly, brands can also detect what content will get people to engage, the new metric, with visibility across social platforms into who is talking about your brand and how, inclusive of keen sentiment detection and influencer identification. When you stitch that information with customer data from CRMs, etc., you can actually gain a far broader and at the same time more specific understanding of your audience.
As we continue to navigate the digital marketing landscape and “digital” is no longer a needed descriptor, marketers will be afforded huge opportunities from the ability to mass personalize. If you’re interested in learning more about mass personalization, feel free to reach out or request a demo.
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