How To Get Celebrity Endorsements
By Peter Kafka
Facebook has a big ad business. But its display ads tend to get ignored by the
overwhelming majority of its users.
Ad.ly says it can fix this, with a time-tested method: Celebrity endorsements.
The social media ad start-up has already been doing this for some time, via its
core product, which pays social network “influencers” to give products and brands a
thumbs-up. That message appears in the celebrities’ news stream, where their
followers are supposed to pay more attention than they would if they saw a
conventional ad.
Now Ad.ly is rolling out a second ad unit, specifically for Facebook–a display ad
featuring the celebrity’s endorsement. The start-up is packaging the two ads
together to advertisers as the “Facebook Bundle” and promises that it can deliver
eyeballs for less than $5 per 1,000 views.
It’s a pretty simple concept, as you can see from the materials the company has
been sending to advertisers.
Don’t know if they’ll work, but they can’t be worse than many of the display ads
Facebook sends my way right now. It routinely thinks, for instance, that I may be
interested in joining the CIA, after I spend 18 to 24 months getting my Criminal
Justice Degree. The social network is also insistent about getting me to whiten my
teeth.
There’s always a risk that Facebook finds the new ads problematic for some reason
(see: Twitter), but Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh says he reached out to Facebook
last week and they sounded enthusiastic. I’m waiting for Facebook PR to confirm
that with me, but for now we’ll take Gullov-Singh at his word.
I do have one worry, though. I keep looking at this Sgt. Peppers collage that Ad.ly
put out to show off the “influencers” it has on its roster, and I don’t think I can
recognize more than half of them. But that may have more to do with my impending
old age than anything else. Right?