According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is aggressively pitching their social-context ads to big advertisers like Ford Motor Co.
The ads appear on the right side of a user’s homepage, with an image and headline from the advertiser. You can also see if your friends like the ad or the company that paid to put it there.
“Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.”
Nielsen Co. says including information about individuals a person knows in an ad boosts recall of the ad by 68% and doubles awareness of a brand’s message.
