Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing

This is the first in a series of posts exploring the future of social advertising.

The explosive growth in social networking, especially amongst the highly sought after 16-35 demographic who are increasingly immune to overt advertising, is prompting widespread experimentation in ‘social network advertising’ campaigns.

Global brands like Microsoft, Toyota and Universal Pictures have teamed up with MySpace to deploying HyperTargeting Ads on the world’s largest social network whilst Coca-Cola, Sony Pictures, eBay and more have partnered with Facebook to deploy Social Ads on the world’s fastest growing social network.

Considering it’s less than a year since the notion of ‘social networking’ became mainstream, ‘social advertising’ is certainly this year’s breakout success.

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Yesterday, Bebo, the UK’s top social networking site for 13-24 year olds, according to comScore, announced the launch of Open Media, their social video publishing platform which gives each Bebo user a personal TV channel within their profile page on the social network.

High Profile Media Launch
Open Media launched with branded channels from an impressive list of media companies including the BBC, CBS, MTV Networks, ESPN, Channel Four and BSkyB.

Content owners using Open Media are not charged to create branded channels on the platform and can use whichever video player technology they choose.

Content owners can sell video advertising within their branded channel and retain 100% of the revenue generated. Bebo will charge content owners to promote content within the network, however.

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Marketing on social networks is less about Social Ad(vertising) and more about Engagement Marketing.

The former, a word play on ‘Social Ads’, is about targeting marketing messages to users on Facebook through the news feeds of their friends.

Engagement marketing, on the other hand, is about engaging a user with brand/marketing experiences that makes such an impression that they willingly share it with their friends.

This approach has been used successfully by global sports and fashion brands on the ‘other two’ social networks, Bebo and MySpace.

This post is a follow up to Saturday’s open letter to Facebook in which I suggested they considered introducing a monthly subscription option that offered users averse to sending and receiving Social Ads a way to opt out.

Disclosure: Real Fresh TV works with a number of online publishers to provide content owners a one stop digital distribution service for publishing multimedia content online. Our publisher partners include YouTube, Bebo, Brightcove, Veoh and Azureus.

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I started Real Fresh TV in October 2005 after hearing that one of the first companies to make a video podcast available on iTunes received a million downloads in 24 hours.

To me it signalled the start of consumer awareness of today’s ‘on-demand culture’, of content delivered to anyone who wanted it anywhere on-demand, of entertainment delivered on my terms rather than on a broadcaster’s schedule.

From then onwards working in and excelling in this space became an obsession.

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