GM’s Facebook Dispute Concerned Page Takeovers [REPORT]

RSS Feed

GM’s Facebook Dispute Concerned Page Takeovers [REPORT]

May 29th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Earlier this month, General Motors made headlines when it announced plans to pull its ads from Facebook because they were “ineffective.” But the story may be more complicated than that, a story published in AdAge on Tuesday suggests.

Sources told AdAge the reason GM decided to pull its advertising is because Facebook wouldn’t let the company run “bigger, higher-impact ad units” than what it currently offers — i.e., small display ads and Sponsored Stories. GM wanted to run a full-page takeover. Facebook said no.

Facebook declined to comment about client meetings. GM could not be reached by press time.

The original report, which was published by The Wall Street Journal three days before Facebook’s May 18 IPO, has been blamed in part for Facebook’s less-than-spectacular market performance. GM reportedly spends $40 million on Facebook annually, about a quarter of which goes to paid ads. The other $30 million goes towards content creation.

Facebook’s ad revenue has been increasing at a rate of $1 billion per year since 2009, bringing in more than $3 billion last year alone. The social network will face mounting pressure over the coming months to grow those figures without compromising users’ browsing experience.

It’s a problem, of course, that just about every other online publisher faces. Some, like Twitter and Tumblr, have opted for “promoted” messages over large display units. Even those companies have had to revise products when users reacted negatively, as Twitter did with a hovering mobile display unit called the Quick Bar (or “Dick Bar,” as users dubbed it.)

Facebook has thus far dabbled with both display and promotional advertising. Its only large-format display ads, which take up most of the page above the fold, appear when users log out of Facebook.

Ian Schafer, CEO of ad agency Deep Focus, expects that the logout ads are “probably the only bone that Facebook will be throwing into the large-format ad realm for the foreseeable future.” That’s because “Facebook protects its platform at all costs. That’s the Zuckerberg way,” he says.

“We need to stop thinking about Facebook as a publisher, and look at it instead as platform,” Shafer adds. “To say [Facebook’s] ads aren’t big enough is begging for a MySpace-like fate for them, and a big dramatic withdrawl from Facebook because they won’t give you bigger ads feels so uninspired. It’s not about baiting people into clicks, it’s about what you do once [users] do interact with the ads,” he insists.

As a user, what kinds of ads would you be most willing to tolerate on Facebook’s website and mobile apps? Would you rather see hovering display ads or an ad takeover on the right side of your Newsfeed, as examples, or would you prefer to see promoted posts from brands you follow within your Newsfeed?

This story originally published on Mashable here.