Young idea about to take off. Quick!! shoot it down!

I have to admit I only discovered facebook a few weeks ago. Somewhat shameful for an alleged eMarketing expert, but I guess I never had time.

Anyways: one of the first things I thought when I first landed on the site was "what a great advertising platform this is". Advertising finally lands in the land of peer recommendation. A dream for advertisers (and for users too, IMHO).

Like always when you attempt something new however, there can be a few initial hiccups. You don't necessarily get it right the first time.

In this case, some unlucky media planner, having bought blind placements on facebook(*), ended up with their clients ads on a coulpe of undesirable pages displaying content from the BNP (an extreme right-wing political party). The media pore a few liters of petrol on the fire, and you end up with a ridiculous situation in which most major advertisers are pulling their ads from facebook tout-court, rather than addressign the problem more 'surgically'.

A new idea, which coudl have been really great if given time to develop, has probably been killed whilst still young. how sad!

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(*) In simple terms, blind buy is pretty common in online advertising, although possibly not the most sophisticated buying models. You select a site or a network of sites that you deem are appropriate to place your ads on (because of affinity with your target audience, cost-effectiveness, etc) but you don't know exactly what the content of those sites will display at the moment your ads are live. By the way ... this doesn't happen only on facebook. A miriad of other sites sell ads based on the same principle, including the famous AdSense from big brother Google.