See how campaigns can become more thoughtful and deliberate, and relationships among advertisers, publishers and consumers more cooperative, in a post-Facebook world.

You can pan it or praise it, but you cannot ignore it. Facebook's new advertising approach will be closely watched by advertisers and publishers alike. On the one hand, it's Facebook. If Facebook clears its throat, it's an industry-wide E.F. Hutton moment while everybody waits and listens. But what Facebook is doing isn't just newsworthy because it's Facebook doing something. What the company is doing is innovative, unique, perhaps even prophetic. Regardless of whether they are a boon or a bust, in Facebook's actions we glimpse the future of advertising.

Which is not to say that Facebook's programs are advertising's end game. The future of advertising is not profile-based keywords or effusive, uncompensated consumer-affiliates. Nor is it marketing through the social graph or affinity targeting. The future of advertising -- in whatever media -- is creating greater harmony among publishers, advertisers and audiences. Here's how Facebook is pushing in that direction, and why it is important for the rest of the industry to take note:

• Ads should complement content, not compete with it. Almost all advertising to date has existed at the expense of user experience -- a necessary evil to allow for the delivery of free content. Well, it needn't be. Done right, advertising complements content and enhances the user experience. I would posit that the attributes on Facebook's profile pages don't exactly constitute "content," but allowing advertisers to target based on these self-proclaimed affinities at least offers the possibility of improving Facebook's utility to its users. It is a model crafted with the (admittedly lofty) objective of making the site more relevant both to its users and to advertisers. Even if it falls short, it is still a long cry from optimizing per-page revenue and some of the other objectives employed by publishers.
  
  
• Quality will emerge as a more important campaign attribute than quantity. The currency of the impression will continue to be devalued, particularly relative to types of interactive that are much clearer indications of a customer's brand affinity. The ability to scale will always be important, but the arbitrary numbers that have previously constituted scale will be reset, to better reflect a campaign's impact, not solely its reach. Chase Financial is one of the pioneering advertisers with Facebook, and at the launch of the ad programs it announced that its interest in Facebook was not for its reach but for the genuine interaction possible there. That speaks volumes about a shift occurring in the industry: 61 million users, and advertisers are approaching it with the conversation skills they have honed through blogs and much smaller social media channels over the past couple of years.
  
  
• Frictionless media uniformity will give way to publishers' unique and proprietary programs. The standardization of ad units has probably been the single greatest culprit of the online publishers' vicious cycle that begins with devalued impressions, progresses to ad clutter, then further devalues impressions, and on and on. Agencies have suffered as well. Creative costs have risen, not because of broadband or video or other technology advancements but because ads must be increasingly bombastic in order to cut through the clutter created by allowing an agency to create a single banner and blast it, impression cap-less, across literally thousands of sites. But there is hope. As advertisers begin to focus on quality over quantity, suddenly a campaign of tens or hundreds of millions of impressions isn't necessary, nor is a media plan that must include the biggest sites and broadest reach networks. Profitable results of meaningful scale will be achievable through much smaller programs and less sprawling publishers. As a result, publishers will differentiate themselves not through their audience quantity but through their audience quality and the unique programs that leverage their readers. I'm not talking about a proprietary-sized homepage takeover that usurps every user's attention en route to a desired article or channel. That's not leveraging relationships -- it's exploiting them. Rather, we will see a continuing growth in popularity of initiatives like Facebook's, or widget marketing campaigns like what my company, Freewebs, has been constructing or over a year, which allow advertisers to approach each site with a specific focus and distinct media and creative plans.
  
  
• Brand relations on the web will grow in quantity and value. These early forays of marketing in the social graph are laying the groundwork for an entirely new perspective on interactive media and advertising in general. With online campaigns shifting to focus on quality of interaction, the very metrics by which success is evaluated will alter. Reach, frequency, even clickthrough and conversion will give way to measurements of engagement specific to the campaign. Interaction at this level, and with this scale, is unique to interactive, and the channel is now poised for another stage of fruitful growth for brand marketers. From test channel to ancillary channel to complementary channel, interactive will ultimately become where brand relationships are cemented and validated, making online not just core to every campaign's plan, but core to a brand's overall footprint. Brands will be defined not just by how they present themselves online, but by how others respond to them, connect with them and represent them on the brands' behalf.

The sum total of these evolutions will be campaigns that are more thoughtful and deliberate, and relationships between advertisers, publishers and consumers that are more cooperative and symbiotic. It's too early to tell if Facebook has cracked a code here. But it's clear that the direction it is pointing is one the industry should turn towards. Maybe not to focus our gaze solely on Facebook, but to look past it to where we all are headed.

Shervin Pishevar is president of Webs.com. Read full bio.