Social Advertising Needs Econ 201

The current obsession in the industry is with audience-based targeting platforms. Programmatic and exchange-based ad buying are the equivalent of econometrics, or classical economics. Getting the best prices and optimizing effectively are important. They’re critical to making this industry work at scale. But great trading doesn’t matter unless the creative moves real humans with their subjective and unpredictable emotions to react, and in social advertising to share. It’s not worth debating which part is more important; the answer is both.

At BuzzFeed we spend a ton of time measuring and engineering for sharing. We don’t believe sharing just happens, that it’s like catching lightening in a bottle. We spend equal time thinking about what is great creative that people will relate to, experience novelty in, and want to share. We tracked 2 billion events across 225 million uniques of partner traffic in our Mongo databases in June, but we also applied the best of our creativity to hundreds of organic posts and branded content posts in conjunction with our agency and brand partners.

For social advertising to reach its true potential, it must be guided by math and moved by art. We need to trade like econometricians and do creative like behavioral economists.