On Monday, Facebook announced that it had rebuilt Atlas, the ad platform it bought from Microsoft last year, from the ground-up. No doubt, this will have delighted brands and media agencies alike. This is because while there have never been more channels and platforms to engage consumers with, to date it has been tricky to correlate how those devices and screens impact what we buy.
Like most people, I use multiple devices to access the internet on a daily basis. I use my smartphone to check my emails on the way to the office, my laptop during work hours, and my tablet to watch YouTube videos in the evening. Although I am just one person, before Monday’s announcement, current device-based targeting technology – largely dependent on cookies – means that to advertisers, I am viewed as three different users. How then can they possibly hope to reconcile online impressions with offline purchases?
That is the exact challenge that Facebook has sought to tackle, by bringing us people-based marketing in the form of a newly rebuilt Atlas. A new code base will help marketers to target people via multiple devices and connect online activity with offline sales. This is the holy grail of marketing in the digital era. Certainly Omnicom agrees, as it has lined up some of its biggest clients – Pepsi and Intel – to be among the first to test the new platform.
This move is really rather clever of Facebook, and not just because it solves a fundamental problem in today’s online marketing world. When the company first floated, its share price bombed. This was not just down to technical issues and hype; those in the know were concerned that the company was ill prepared for the multi-device – mobile in particular – era. Profits would, they predicted, slump. And while it seemed for a while that the naysayers might be right, Facebook has shown quarter on quarter growth from its mobile activities in recent years.
The rebuilding of Atlas will surely only accelerate these profit margins. Not only that, but the process of using Facebook Atlas to buy ads off Facebook properties means giving even more data to Facebook. Atlas will know how much is being spent across all channels: display, search, video, and mobile. The success of Facebook Connect means that the company now has ownership rights to masses of data outside of its own properties. It has acquired this information through stealthily recognising that the more data it has, the more powerful it will become.
Perhaps Google’s Eric Schmidt should be less worried about Apple, and instead look more closely at how Facebook might rival the great Google in the not too distant future? After all, data is the battleground for today’s big innovations and what the rebuilding of Atlas demonstrates is that data has become the engine room of any marketing strategy. As a marketer you need the best data to do your job. And not all data is created equal. Without quality data at the heart of the campaign, it is akin to running a Michelin-starred restaurant with cheap ingredients.
With this in mind, it will be interesting to see how marketers seek to bolster Facebook’s data with independent audience information to truly understand their consumers in a new way – as human beings. With a broader understanding of their customers’ likes and dislikes, advertisers can treat people as individuals. And that will be the secret of Atlas’s success; making people feel that brands are relating to them on a human level. After all, we all want to feel that we are more than just a number.
Kevin Tan is chief executive of Eyeota
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