Facebook’s Age Comes with a Little Clutter
Facebook is an advertising juggernaut. It is propelling the company to higher and higher stock values. The Facebook News Feed is 11 years old next month. It’s really getting old in digital years.
The ad sales on the News Feed has only been available for 5 years. Some feel the clutter of ads has reached its saturation point and Wall Street wants to know what’s next for the advertising gorilla. So Facebook has rolled out mid-roll video ads and messaging ads. The mid-roll ads interrupt long-form video content just like on broadcast TV. Facebook is also working on a mobile tab that would be available to advertisers.
With more and more people wanting to advertise on Facebook, the answer for any medium to control cluttered inventory is to raise prices. In some cases that may be happening. That will drive future growth for Facebook without overloading the ad content.
We don’t want Facebook to go the way of cable and add massive breaks to movies and extend the movies by up to 1 hour. We all should prepare for higher advertising costs on Facebook, or the audience we all want and need will drift away to other non-cluttered platforms.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.