Contemporary Advertising 14th Edition by William Arens ,Michael Weigold ,Christian Arens

تمرين 1

If you are using this text for a college course, the popular social networking application Facebook needs little introduction. You already know all about it. Facebook has many users, over 900 million worldwide.
But it is especially popular on college campuses. This is due partially to its origins-while Facebook is now available to anyone over age 13, it was started with a focus on college students. In fact, when founder Mark Zuckerberg (see People behind the Ads, Mark Zuckerberg, in this chapter) launched the site in 2004, it was open only to members of his school, Harvard College.
What makes Facebook so irresistible Certainly, highly addictive features like the "Wall," where friends can post messages, "pokes," and "status," and where there's lots of space for posting pictures, are part of the appeal. Users of Facebook can stay in touch with lots of people, almost in real time. The site is so addictive, in fact, that universities have begun trying to find ways to limit access during class hours.
So Facebook is a Web site that is visited by young, influential, highly educated users who spend inordinate amounts of time at the site and are passionate about what they do there. Can you think of anyone who might be interested in that group?
Of course the answer is advertisers, and in fact, advertising has, from the beginning, been a part of Facebook. The costs of running and maintaining the site are defrayed by ads, which is why it is free for users.
Software giant Microsoft has an exclusive contract with Face-book to serve display ads. Microsoft sells space to advertisers, then pays Facebook for the opportunity to show ads on the site's pages. The particular ads that appear on a given page are determined by data collected by Microsoft. The goal is to place the right banner ad on the right page. As you know from Chapter 15, this is typical practice on the Internet, not only for Microsoft but for other large companies like Google and Yahoo!
But in November of 2007, Facebook launched a program that was anything but typical. "Beacon" was designed to let users share information about offsite activities, including purchases, with their friends. FHere's how it worked, at least in theory. You join Facebook. Later you visit a different Web site, like that of movie ticket vendor Fandango, and you buy a movie ticket. Just a short while later, your Facebook profile updates and tells your friends about the tickets you bought.
It was almost inevitable that Facebook would develop something like Beacon. That is because what excites advertisers about social networks like Facebook, even more than the desirable demographics, is the fact that people are busy influencing one another at the site. This is the real power of social networks, and the real draw for advertisers.
Recall our earlier discussion of Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Gladwell describes the power of a few influential people in starting social epidemics. Advertisers see Facebook as a place where influential can share information about what they buy with many other people, potentially starting many such epidemics. This is why Zuckerberg has long claimed that Facebook would start an advertising "revolution." And not coincidentally it is why some valued Facebook's worth to be in excess of $100 billion.
But from the start, Beacon was flawed. For one thing, even though third-party sites were supposed to inform Facebook users about what would happen when they bought at the site, it appears that some did not. So a Facebook user who bought something at Overstock.com was supposedly never told that Overstock was a member of the Facebook advertising network and that his or her purchase would be shared with friends.
Second, users did not "opt in" to the program (sign up for it), they had to "opt out" (cancel it). That virtually guaranteed that a lot of people would be unaware of how much information they were sharing with others. Eventually this was changed so that users had to opt in, but not before significant damage to Facebook's credibility had occurred.
Even worse, a software engineer discovered that even if Face- book users explicitly indicated that they did not want to share information about purchases, Facebook collected the information anyway. This turned out to be a practice that directly contradicted Facebook's publicly stated policies.
In the end, Zuckerberg decided that Beacon had to be changed. This was prompted by the bad press the program had received, the cancellation of several large advertisers, including Vodafone, Virgin Media, and Prudential, and several user-based petitions, including one organized by Moveon.org.
The founder posted an apology to users at the Facebook blog on December 5,2007. It read in part (go to http://blog.facebook. com/blog.php?post=/7584397130 to read the entire apology):
About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them.... When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends.... But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share.... I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Zuckerberg was good to his word, and the program was changed. The modern incarnation of Beacon is far different from the version introduced in late 2007. For example, according to the Face- book site, "When [an advertiser sends information about a purchase] to Facebook, the user is immediately alerted... and will be alerted again when they sign into Facebook. The user must proactively consent to have [the information] from your Web site published." This, of course, is a far cry from how things started.
So, for Zuckerberg and many Facebook users, the Beacon experience was a hard lesson learned. To Zuckerberg's credit, he acted fast and apologized for his mistakes when it became clear that users would not tolerate Beacon's privacy settings. Facebook continues to be one of the most popular (and valuable) locations on the Web. And there is little doubt that advertisers will continue to search for ways to leverage the unique attributes of social networks for promoting their brands.
Why was Beacon created Was it ethical to ask users to "opt out" rather than "opt in" to the program?