Personality ads

Often you don’t need to build a whole new application on Facebook to achieve viral brand awareness. It’s often enough just to switch the application personality – its name, the copy and graphics (what could also be called its skin) – in order to create a whole new app.

The classic case study for this is when the Resident Evil film gave their personality to the already popular Zombie app on Facebook for a campaign. They were expecting 10,000 sign ups to their email mailing list but in the end got 1 million!

The Zombie app - Before

The Zombie app - After

Nudge has just done something similar for Kinship Networking with the RAF app – “Best Crew By FAR” launched simultaneously on both Facebook and Bebo.  The app takes a basic social feature we added to The Apprentice Board app and then rebuilt for the RAF.

The generic feature is “Top Friends with roles” – on the Apprentice Board this meant your friends became board directors, marketing directors or the tea boy! On Best Crew by FAR your friends can become a Fighter Pilot, Squadron Leader or Medical Officer.

All great fun and very viral as it means each user ends up inviting 8 friends to add the app and join in the fun.

Comparing social ad networks

At the Facebook garage and at the Monetising Social Networks conference last week I presented slides on the ad network of the future and how app developers have to start preparing for it now.

One of the key slides was a comparison of Social Ad Networks current capacity which we see here. Across the top are the features offered to advertisers with the name of the network down the left hand side.

All advertisers offer standard display units, some offer Integrated (where you can see social network features such as a photo of a friend who is using the product), very few offer targeting (demographic by age and gender, geo by location or profile data by what people have in their profile interests) mainly because of terms of service restraints by the platform.

The most interesting column is feature sensitive (or deep integration) where the ad networks provide a commoditised way of purchasing features that are intrinsic to the apps (a Resident Evil version of Zombie, a Mike and Ike sweets gift icon on Gifts or an Indiana Jones Fedora hat on Where I’ve Been). This is the gold seam for social network advertising.

The only network really targeting this at the moment is Social Cash with its emerging Point Cash technology which allows apps to sell in game points (eg. coins on My Aquarium for example) to advertisers to offer as rewards to users who click on its ads.

Update 15/3/2009 – original matrix removed – contact Nudge London direct for latest version

This sheet is based on a review of their web sites and marketing documents. Since then I’ve met with a few ad networks to understand their offerings in more details and am building a picture of which have the winning technology.

Please do add any comments to this post and I’ll try to update the framework with the most correct information about the various feature sets of the social ad networks.

Update – 2008-10-07 – this matrix is now a bit out of date. I’ll do an update shortly