Most of the ads on Facebook today—little rectangles running down the right side of the page, each holding a tiny image and up to 160 characters of text—barely hint at the huge bet Sandberg and Fischer are making. Facebook aims to be not just a place to advertise but an entirely new way to advertise—one that uses the power of social networks to create and amplify brand messages. In essence, the company is pushing a highly charged version of word of mouth, long seen as the most valuable of all marketing because people view friends’ recommendations as more credible than marketers’. Conventional word of mouth reaches only a limited number of people. Facebook, where each of an estimated 600 million active users is connected to an average of 130 friends, changes all that by lending personal recommendations enormous reach. After all, anything a user does on the site can be broadcast automatically to all that person’s friends. “This is in many ways the Holy Grail of marketing: making your customers your marketers,” says Sandberg, who joined Facebook in early 2008 after building up Google’s ad sales operation from four people to 4,000. “For the first time, you can do word-of-mouth marketing at massive scale.” To put it another way, when we use Facebook we no longer just view the ad; we become the ad. It’s a notion that disturbs some people, especially as Facebook continues to challenge social norms about privacy and use of personal data. Indeed, one reason advertisers love Facebook is that ads can be precisely targeted to specific audiences on the basis of their stated interests, location, “likes,” and much more. “A lot of data is being harvested and monetized by Facebook and its advertisers, but users have no idea,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of a nonprofit digital-marketing watchdog called the Center for Digital Democracy. Zuckerberg believes that these new, more personal forms of marketing are the only way advertisers can adapt to the increasingly social nature of the Internet. On average, users spend more than six and a half hours a month on Facebook, significantly more time than they spend on other major sites—mostly because they are so engrossed in communicating with their friends. There’s an implicit contract in social media that people not be interrupted by commercial pitches, just as it would be inappropriate to start hawking Tupperware without warning at a dinner party, suggests Ted McConnell, a former longtime P&G marketing executive who’s now executive vice president of digital for the Advertising Research Foundation. This means the attention- grabbing kind of image-based advertising that still dominates television, magazines, and even major websites could be an artifact of one-way broadcast media—which is to say, all media that preceded the Internet. (via You Are the Ad – Technology Review)