Robb Webb (robwebb2k.com) reports that Facebook has just added an interesting feature to ads on their site: the ability to give feedback.

In addition to allowing users to scroll through different ads, now users can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down Digg-like rating to ads. These kinds of clicks prompt a pop-up with a drop-down with possible reasons a user might like an ad (“Good Offer”, “Relevant to Me”, “Interesting”) or dislike it (including TOS-violations like “Pornographic” and more subjective feedback like “Repetitive”)

This is similar in some ways to Seth Godin’s SquidOffers (currently discontinued), which allowed advertisers to crowdsource advertising offer messages considered attractive by the Squidoo community.

But likely there are 3 motives at work here:

1. encourage the community to police ads that might not be compliant with Facebook’s TOS, or offputting to users
2. build in some sort of quality score, similar to Google AdWords’s, by incorporating user feedback into the pricing/ranking for advertisers and ads
3. give incentive and train users to pay attention to ads–if they feel like they have a say in what appears there and believe ads will be targeted to their interests and tastes, they might not learn to ignore them

Given the outcry against Beacon late last year, Facebook has to tread carefully with its advertising in order to not destroy the high-quality user experience that have been key to the site’s success. Giving users the sense that they have greater control over the ad messaging they’re seeing might reverse the perception created the last time “Facebook ads” came up in the news.

Also discussed at allfacebook (including Facebook’s official statement) and WinExtra.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.