Facebook Advertising History

Advertising is an ever evolving industry for one main reason.  Marketers want to advertise their product on the most popular mediums right?  Well that most popular medium has been constantly changing.  It used to be radio, then it went to TV, and most recently it has become the Internet - specifically Facebook.  It may seem that everyone knows Facebook's history because of the movie The Social Network or just simply from common knowledge, I certainly thought I did.  However, that is only scratching the surface of it.  When I looked deeper into the way they've single handedly changed advertising, I found that there were obviously some things I didn't know.

I found this amazing slide show that chronicles Facebook's advertising history on a HubSpot Blog.  I will be using that as a reference, but I wasn't able to link to specific slides, so I'll just be directing you to the appropriate slides as we progress through their history.  Anyway, let’s start at the beginning.  Facebook was launched in 2004 and was actually named Thefacebook.com.  It started collecting ad revenue right away - but not the way we would think of now.  Back then it was ads called flyers that were displayed along the side of the site.  They were simple in design and cheap.  Local businesses and student organizations would buy them for $10-40 per day (Slide 14).  They aren't much different from the ads we see down the right side of the page today, but the main difference is the price.  After flyers came flyers pro.  This was advanced in a way that advertisers could target based on demographics.

From there it meddles with ad groups and other small revenue generating endeavors, but then in 2010 it started something big: their mobile app.  This really sling-shot them past other social media sites in terms of users and ad revenue.  Throughout the slide show you can see how their users, ad revenue, and mobile users continue to increase.  Another big thing they did was enable more advanced targeting options for advertisers (Slides 60-61).  This in turn created more of a "want" from marketers.  In other words, advertisers wanted to use Facebook to market their product or service because 1) there were so many users and 2) there were such advanced targeting options.  These concepts were relatively new so advertisers flocked to Facebook.

After that, Facebook started advertising on their mobile app (Slides 74-78).  They inserted them into our news feeds so as to not interrupt our experience.  They also started Social Graph, which was all about providing information to advertisers.  Social Graph recorded data such as the pages users "liked," who we were friends with, and what music we listened too.  This included cookie-based advertising.  Cookies are proof of different webpages we've visited.  So, marketers were provided with more information than ever; therefore, increasing their targeting ability exponentially.  There are some good ad stats on slides 90-94 that are worth a look too.

Zuckerberg's most recent endeavor to make Facebook more appealing to marketers has to do with what users are buying in stores.  Forbes has an article that came out in February of this year explaining that they are now able to sell information from what users have purchased online and in-stores based off of loyalty programs.  This is just the newest way advertising has evolved in our society.

As for Curran, he has outlined a very different history for advertising in chapter 10 of his book Media and Democracy.  He discussed advertising in the mid-Victorian era and how marketers went about it.  For one, he gave an example of two newspapers.  The first was a paper read by 100,000 lower class people, and the second was a paper read by only 1,000 upper class people.  He said that advertisers would choose to run ads with the upper class paper because they had the purchasing power even though there were 10x more people reading the other paper.  This was marketers’ mentality back then because they didn't know any better.  As you can see with my Facebook example, that is not the mentality now.  Like I stated in the third paragraph, advertisers choose Facebook for two reasons and one of them is because of the sheer number of users.  Advertisers get a wide reach into a huge group of diverse people.

A second thing I got from reading Curran's chapter ten was that advertisers had no idea what journals/papers to advertise with based on audience interests.  There was a great quote that seems absolutely ridiculous in today’s day and age, but Curran states, "The advertiser had no means of accurately determining which journal might be best adapted to his views, and most likely to forward his interests" (153).  This literally seems impossible because of all the ways we have to find target audiences in terms of marketing and advertising, but that is how it was back then.  Now, we come to the second part of what I stated earlier in the third paragraph: Advertisers have very advanced ways to target specific audiences.  Here's the bottom line, not long ago, advertisers had to pay to show ads to everyone even if some of them were people who may not have any interest in their product or service, thus getting a low return on investment (ROI).  There was a great quote from the blog post where I found the slide show.  It states, “The improvements in Facebook’s advertising platform are helping marketers to reach their audience in ways that often aren’t possible through other channels” (HubSpot Blog).  Meaning, by advertising on social media such as Facebook, marketers have the choice where to place their ads in order to get a higher ROI.  They target us based on what we have "liked" and what pages we've visited, as well as our demographic information such as age, gender, location, etc. 

Advertising is a unique industry to study because it is always changing.  Marketers used to not have a clue who they targeting and how to choose the appropriate medium.  Over time it has evolved into a complex idea of nailing the correct medium and getting through to your target market.  Facebook has done this throughout its ten year history and that is why it is such a successful company.