Will advertising on Facebook work tomorrow? AdTech announcement musings…

It’s no secret that Facebook ads, at least in their current form, are not the money-making machine that Google ads are these days (despite the fact that there are people who have never clicked on them at all). The real question is whether or not Facebook’s expected brand-spanking-new ad system will be able to deliver better results.

A lot has been said about the expected announcement. But in the end, all that really matters is whether or not the ads are good enough to bring in money.

A while ago (I can’t find the post) Fred Wilson said that when an ad is relevant to him, it becomes content. I think he’s absolutely right. I always look for the full page Fry’s ad in the paper on weekends because that’s good content to me (although it never leads to financial responsibility). But that works because the content makes sense in the context of a newspaper.

So the trick in Facebook’s new ad system, in fact one might argue in all new ad systems, needs to be the ability to make advertising into content that makes sense in the context of a social network. My gut says it needs to be more than pairing advertisements with the things people say they are interested in.

But I guess we’ll see.

[ Update: I found a post that Seth Godin wrote where he says what I'm saying but far more eloquently. Read it here. ]

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