Facebook Pushes Advertisers to Employ User Data More Effectively

Facebook is pushing advertisers to be more strategic with the vast data the social website has on its 1.4 billion users. The company is encouraging more creative tactics, such as distributing different versions of the same ad depending on a viewer’s interests, said Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions. She’s also preparing marketers for the opportunity to use Facebook’s targeting data for ads on Instagram, the photo-sharing application owned by the company.

Facebook will highlight the efforts in meetings with clients and ad agency partners at the Cannes Lions festival in France, the largest annual global gathering of advertisers and marketers. The company is seeking to increase its share of the $145 billion global advertising market that EMarketer estimates at 8 percent. The mission is that “the creative community really starts to learn and understand the power of our data,” Everson said. For Facebook, the advertising event in southern France is like “preparing for the World Cup or for the Olympics,” Everson said. The company is constructing a space resembling its Menlo Park, California, headquarters to train marketers on ad ideas that might work best. Advertisers such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus have already tried running different versions of the same ad for different interest groups, she said. Facebook already uses some of its data for ad targeting on Instagram, but it’s limited to age and gender. That’s about to change, Everson said.