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Advertisers Target Hyper-Social Internet Users
The ad, tailored and optimized for each viewer by Sharethrough, a start-up company in Stanford, Calif., is one of many attention-getting spots it is sending to social network users it believes are most likely to view the ad and pass it along to others.
Software like Sharethrough is best suited to industries, such as Hollywood, where creating buzz has a proven record of driving revenues. Says Jonathan Helfgot, senior vice president of marketing at Twentieth Century Fox: "There's an element to all our campaigns of getting a film in the culture, making people feel that the film is part of their world and if they don't go see it they will be missing out on life," he says. "It's similar to social networks that tell you 'everyone's on them' so if you're not on them, you're missing out."
Skeptics point out that Sharethrough is not the first start-up to promise a shiny new method for advertising online. VideoEgg, founded in 2005, has a similar cost-per-engagement pricing model, a wider array of clients from Procter & Gamble to Hyundai Motor
To some consumer advocates, this is a line companies shouldn't cross. In 2007, Greenberg was criticized when he wrote a series of articles for the technology blog TechCrunch detailing the lengths to which advertisers would go to insert their brands into social media. Some digital commentators were incensed at the tactics he described, including paying bloggers for favorable product reviews and accessing, as Sharethrough does, personal profile data. Others were simply offended at the notion of bringing the shopping mall into their walled social gardens.
Greenberg insists that his sharing technology, which shifts the burden of "pushing" products onto users, will play a big part in the future of advertising. Internet "users won't accept advertising in a traditional ad, but they will [accept it when it comes] through a friend." Advertisers hope he is right.
