Facebook buying Instagram (and more)
"What does this mean?" we all ask. It means that Facebook is going to continue to find new ways to monetize its service through ads, especially on mobile devices, which means more opportunities for brands to get in front of potential customers using Facebook.
There was a study released a few weeks ago that showed that Facebook mobile ads had a significant lift in performance over standard Sponsored Stories ads. This is good news, considering we are all sitting on our brand budgets and trying to figure out whether to give them to Facebook or the thousands of other brand publishers out there.
Facebook also just announced that it is in beta with FBX and working with eight launch partners to use Facebook ad inventory for retargeting. What's next for Facebook? Well, we think that this foray into real-time bidding is the first step toward Facebook tapping its potential for direct-response advertisers. It's looking to drive scale and ROI performance that can start to be competitive with a traditional data-targeted network or demand-side platform. We shall see.
