Facebook Atlas – Challenging Googles Dominance?

Data is the battleground for today’s big innovations and Facebook’s new advertising platform Atlas has been heralded as starting a revolution in how marketers can target users across the web – will this finally be Facebook’s answer to Google dominance?

Atlas promises two core appealing features for marketeers – it lets advertisers measure campaigns across devices by solving the cookie problem and it lets them target ‘real people’ across mobile and the web by making use of people-oriented data rather than just cookies for targeting and analytics, which Google relies on. Atlas also gives advertisers access to Facebook’s targeting across the entire web wherever consumers access it, which directly challenges Google’s display offering.

More ‘people based’ data and more targeting means that these features give brands further opportunity to understand and talk to their consumers in a new way – as individuals.

Gone will be the days of finding 18-25 year old females in the UK and soon we will be able to target Jane, who lives in London, shops at Topshop, travels first class, has a pug named Betsy and holidays at Val d’isere twice a year. Hitting audiences at right time in the right place becomes a more tangible reality for advertisers.

Some will argue a social media giant actually challenging Google in this space is a fantasy; that Google captures users at the point of searching and this purchase intent is more indicative of behaviour than demographics or ‘likes’.

But, this launch sees Facebook pushing beyond social just as a channel but a different way to understand digital marketing as people focused. If Facebook can take away the user effort of having to search at all (because they’ve already been shown what they want already) and Facebook can unlock social commerce in this way – then we could well be set for some major changes to the advertising landscape.

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