Facebook gains ground in the battle for total advertising

The world of advertising and media is in a turbulent phase. Mobility is producing a revolution, a change in the balance of power between the big players; a change that no one can escape from. In the environment of this all-out battle, everyone is positioned. Google launched Fi and thus increased availability of Fiber. It has almost won the battle amongst operating systems, to which Facebook arrived late (Article in Spanish) after fighting for four years (Article in Spanish). This social network has changed so fast that at Territorio creativo, we wanted to share an infographic that compiles and compares all the advertising systems available.

What is happening in the world of advertising?

For the first time, digital advertising has exceeded the sum of radio and television advertising in recent months: in Canada, in Finland, and in the USA, it almost has. And above all, mobile phone advertising stands out, growing steadily: in four years, it will have increased by 72%.

And naturally, some issues have come to light:

• The challenge of attribution: The issue of GRPs does not appear to be a commonly accepted means of measurement. In an environment where the customer journey gets longer each day (but also more measurable), it would seem that we are living in a real revolution.
• In this environment of measurement, based on the ever-present and constantly persecuted (at least on this side of the world) cookies, Facebook has a better plan for advertisers, using instead, the knowledge of their users.
• The Internet today continues to be a volume business (which does not mean that there is room for small, as formulated by the long tail).
• Perhaps that is why the promised micro-segmentation is very efficient but ineffective (Article in Spanish).
• And in addition, perhaps because of that, the world of digital advertising is becoming – as it already was in 1998 – in the world of branding, more sophisticated again. And perhaps, thus, Facebook, with its 1.4 million monthly users (900+ on WhatsApp, 200+ in Instagram) has taken hold of the panhandle of advertising, rather than Google, which is a direct response machine, but not for branding.

How does Facebook face up to this revolution?

What Facebook is doing reasonably fast is that it is trying to deploy its service on desktops and mobile phones, within and outside of their environment (as displayed on the infographic). And just three weeks ago, they organized all the biggest – and increasingly growing – advertising systems of Palo Alto, with a record of all the capital made. Nor can we ignore the importance that their coordinated and optimized management system will likely have in the near future.

It is evident that, since Facebook launched its ad platform in 2007, which sought to gain more fans for company pages, this giant’s offer has gotten more sophisticated. With the maturity of the social environment (and even more so, after all of Facebook’s algorithmic changes), the initial objective of amassing a community has made room for other, more focused businesses: sales, leads on websites, application downloads, etc.

In this regard, the increasingly growing social environment causes a shift from advertising on social networks to advertising in the entire digital environment, outside of the platform. Google already did this with its Display Network, when they left the pure search and extended their methodology to other platforms with the opening of the network. When everything pointed to the race being won by mobile technology, with the opening up of FAN (the Facebook Audience Network – a tool for mobile advertising), Facebook challenged Google on their own terrain; Zuckerberg’s company has just thrown in another twist with the launch of Atlas (the FB network display for desktops). Thus, from now on, the leadership and dominance of one or the other will be highlighted.

This constant evolution is something we have already seen in formats and methodologies of the “recent” social platforms – that in such a short time, digital advertising has grown and matured so much more than in the last 10 years. The pace of Facebook’s services have changed so fast that, in order to shed some light, we decided to publish an infographic at Territorio creativo, which attempts to list out and provide the criteria by which to use each of the advertising systems now available on the leading social platform in advertising revenue (Article in Spanish). Moreover, we are re-creating – with the novelties introduced by the infographic – the format guides for Social Paid Media which we published barely a year ago, where we explain how Facebook has already taken hold of a huge part of the world of paid media on social networks.

How does Territorio creativo implement the Facebook advertising ecosystem?

Based on our Social Paid Media management methodology, we are implementing an update and an approach to the business objectives of all the strategies that we believe are essential. Thus, we tried to organize different Facebook advertising systems according to three business goals:

• Notoriety and Reach: for far-reaching strategies, brand awareness and mass communication.
• Web Conversions: for those campaigns seeking to achieve direct response, conversions, and sales.
• Outside of Facebook: here, we are referring to the advertising that we churn out, outside of Facebook as a channel, but where we can still make use of one of Facebook’s strongest points: segmentation through interest and micro-knowledge of the users.

It is through the definition of these objectives that we begin to work at Territorio creativo, and afterwards, we move to the selection of systems, formats, and the best access points for each. As we also saw in the methodology, which we explained in the formats guide (Article in Spanish) that we are re-creating, result-focused optimization is essential for us, in any social media campaign, being that it is one of the most notable variations on traditional digital advertising.

Both Google and Facebook put a lot of emphasis in the fact that understanding a platform deeply and thoroughly will allow up to optimize a campaign, focusing on results and achieving a higher level of performance than those who do not have that knowledge. Thus, at Territorio creativo, we always work with more than three marketing partners, and between those, we are permanently comparing, seeking the highest technical capabilities to always have the most complete access to the various Facebook systems and their optimization options. Accessing these systems from the most advanced suppliers allows us to analyze and understand the metrics in real-time to achieve more satisfactory results.

To conclude, we expect that the infographic we have proposed today will serve as an outline of Facebook’s advertising offers, and will help you to study their access points and its adaptation to your paid media strategies on the social networks.