Social Ads Soon to Revolutionize the Advertising Industry

How annoying are the ads that suddenly come up when we are engrossed in a thrilling scene of a movie or popup when we are reading something important. But still, there are ads that we just love to watch again and again. YouTube has thousands of those. But companies never had a way to know if the customers loved their ads till they had drained down huge sums of money in advertising.

I just saw this post on Google's blog, where the author talks about the future of display advertising. Even though there are many interesting forecasts in this post, the one that I really struck me was that 75 percent of ads on the web will be social in nature. People will be able to share ads and comment on them. I think that this will completely change the game in the advertising industry.

Today, so many companies run advertisement campaigns and have to wait for a certain period of time to measure the performance of these campaigns and see the results. Even then they hardly come to know what people who watch the ads like or dislike about the ads. If ads go social, the companies will receive one more level, but a very important one, of insight. Companies will start knowing what did people who watch the ads and purchase the product, like in the ads. Companies will know real time what their target audience doesn't like about the ads and will be able to change the ads on the fly. It will also change the business models of the advertising companies. Companies will start paying advertising agencies money based on the real-time performance and customer feedbacks. This will not only apply to the internet based ads. With Google TV, Apple TV and probably many more in the pipeline, social ads will have a huge impact in the TV industry too.

Facebook poised to expand options for being harassed by high school classmates/ the drunk girl you met at the bar last night

An newly announced partnership between Facebook and Skype paves the way for Facebook Video Chat which seems like the next logical step and will put them in once again in direct competition with Google, this time Google Voice.

Money Quote:
"The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media.

Facebook’s goal, according to sources: To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so. "

Google's Social networking Building Blocks

Here's an article that has useful information on Google's recent acquisitions pertaining to social networking.  According to the article, it has made

five acquisitions in the field: SocialDeck, a mobile social gaming company;Angstro, a social networking search application; Like.com, a social fashion store; Jambool, a social gaming virtual currency; and Slide, a social game maker. It also has a large stake in gaming giant Zynga.

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Think about these as part of the exploration-exploitation axis and what they could mean in its positioning against Facebook.