Adaptly, a company that aims to assist brands in increasing and understanding their “engagement” across social media, may now have greater ability to help its clients: The company is the 13th to be awarded Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer title for the social net’s exchange.
For Adaptly, being given the keys to the Facebook Exchange is a validation of its model. In an interview with AdExchanger last year, months before FBX even opened, CEO Nikhil Sethi explained why social media was quickly upending the traditional ways that marketers, agencies and media companies brought advertising to consumers.
As Sethi said last year, Facebook is “not a consumer entity. It’s a better version of a cookie. It’s replacing the cookie because it’s a much, much more accurate version of identity.”
Updating his remarks this week, Sethi reflected on that statement. “Identity is key — FBX takes into account a media buying strategy using third party data sources independent of the powerful identity paradigm and first party data Facebook has natively,” Sethi told AdExchanger this week. “Both tactics, buying through an API and through FBX, have significant value depending on the primary motive and goal for a campaign.
He added, “We’re in the early stages of supporting FBX and will have more to report soon. However our team is committed to bringing new buying experiences and use cases to FBX.”
The brand advertising problem and the matter of connecting online and offline marketing campaigns are the two most critical areas where Adaptly thinks it can best use the FBX platform for clients such as PepsiCo, Frito Lay, OMD, NBC Universal, and Showtime among others.
“Using knowledge of an audience’s interactions with digital elements outside of Facebook can be powerful to send a message to those users as they continue their journey online,” he said. “Similarly the incredible accuracy of native first party data to target a message to the correct user on the correct device, coupled with powerful measurement tools built right into the core of an advertiser’s business – both online and off – results in two approaches that complement one another very harmoniously.
One other interesting aspect of Adaptly’s being allowed to enter the FBX tent has been its long-standing collaboration with Wildfire, a social marketing software developer that helps brands serve ads on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Apart from its own social network, Google hasn’t delved too deeply into the social ad space and has no deals with FBX.
Both Facebook and Google have been vying for dominance of the display market, with the search giant leading with $2.26 billion in net US digital display ad revenues in 2012 and $3.11 billion expected in 2013, according to eMarketer. Facebook, which lost the top spot last year, will rake in $2.75 billion in 2013, up from $2.18 billion last year, eMarketer estimates.
Though that doesn’t mean Google will get access to FBX through Wildfire, at least in this case. Adaptly only supports Wildfire’s sponsored ads, which are separate from FBX’s retargeting and other features.
“Yes, our relationship with Wildfire by Google remains strong and we continue to innovate together to provide robust media buying capabilities to their customers through Facebook native advertising opportunities.” Sethi said.
