As promised, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today introduced Facebook Ads, telling a room full of marketing and advertising execs that it represents "a completely new way of advertising online.

"For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation," said Zuckerberg. "And they're going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do."

Facebook Ads consists of three elements: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads; and an interface to gather insights into people's activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Zuckerberg detailed for the New York crowd how Facebook Pages will allow users to interact and affiliate with businesses and organizations in the same way they interact with other Facebook user profiles; and how Social Ads will combine social actions from a user's friends -- such as a purchase of a product or review of a restaurant -- with an advertiser's message.

Social Ads can appear either within a user's News Feed as sponsored content or in the ad space along the left side of the site.

According to a statement from the social network, this will enable advertisers to deliver tailored and relevant ads to Facebook users that include information from their friends so they can make more informed decisions.

The third element, Facebook Insights, gives access to data on activity, fan demographics, ad performance and trends to better equip marketers for improving custom content on Facebook and adjusting ad targeting. Facebook Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Social Ads customers.

More than 60 major consumer and internet brand partners joined Zuckerberg for the launch, including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Sony Pictures Television and Verizon Wireless.

In addition, Facebook also announced today that 44 websites, including eBay, Fandango, Live Nation and CBS Interactive, are using Facebook Beacon, a tool that enables users to share information from other websites for distribution to their friends on Facebook. With Beacon, websites offer Facebook users the most relevant parts of their sites for distribution on the social site. When a logged-in Facebook user visits a participating site, he is asked whether he wants to share activities with friends.