Long time no write, I have been really busy in the last two weeks. Big news coming professionally. I’ll keep you posted on this.

Schedule aside, there’s an idea that has been on my mind for quite some time. Actually, since I saw the What happens in the Facebook stays in the Facebook Flash presentation, and after my advertising teacher told us something like : “Advertising on the web is great, because you can track the viewers behavior, including pre and post viewing”.

AdServer conspiracy

Well, Facebook knows a lot about you, and in advertising, the more you know about your viewer, the more relevant the ads you present him can be. Now, Facebook has an internal advertising platform, Facebook Social Ads, based on this. Nothing external, such as AdSense, yet.

But lets imagine that Facebook launches an external AdServer and builds a big network of small advertisers, like Google AdSense, or a small network of large advertisers.

First, as Facebook knows a lot about you, it simply has to set a cookie in your browser when you go on your profile, and reuse the cookie when displaying a banner on newyorktimes.com. The AdServer would then know that I’m a 27 years old male in a relationship with a university degree.

The force

This could lead to very interesting possibilities:

• Segmented Ad Performance Calculation : Does you ad under-performs except with single gay females with a college degree? You can’t know now, but a Facebook AdServer could tell you.
• Segmented Ad Presentation: Only present the ad to your target segments. So you could have a Monster ad presented only to unemployed viewers and viewers who didn’t update their work profile for the past 2 years.
• Segmented Ad Selection : Present an ad more specific to the viewer’s segment. Creating various versions of the same banner is cheap, so if you can present a version more specific to a segment. So you could have an Obama ad targeted for:
  • Afro-Americans
  • Hispanic-Americans
  • The bunch

The ethics

Sure, this raises many ethical questions, as it could be misused by the wrong people (you know, the bad guys in 24 and in Michael Moore’s films).

I remember (or I think I do remember — please let me know if I’m misquoting) that, while I was working at ZeroKnowledge Systems way back, Adam Shostack’s moto was: “Someday, soon enough, all databases will be interconnected”.

That’s why ZeroKnowledge developed their Freedom platform, allowing you to browse anonymously. But nobody cared at the time: querying a 500MB database took a few seconds on cluster, so no one could realistically store so much information in a usable way. That’s why ZK’s great idea and platform never really worked, business-wise. Too much, too soon.

But in the 2008 world were Google and Yahoo crawl — and even cache — a huge portion of the web, where 25% of adults in Quebec have a Facebook profile, and where interconnecting platforms is easier than ever with all the APIs around, this could be up and running tomorrow morning. Too little, too late?

Big brother is watching us.

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