ChasNote

In an interview with Justin Smith at InsideFacebook we got talking about advertising formats that are best suited to social media environments, and I proposed that previous media revolutions — like radio and TV — offer instructive analogies:

“[If you take] a look at radio (the internet of our grandparents’ day), people listened to news clips and radio plays. If you go back and listen to advertising during radio plays, the ad is a mini version of a radio play. You didn’t get a blinking light on your radio or something that created cognitive dissonance. And when things moved onto television, the ad didn’t contain two guys sitting around microphones doing radio plays — commercials changed as well. They got beautiful people, got a good soundtrack, and took advantage of all the visuals.

“If you bring that forward to social network environments, it’s largely about the conversation. As a Facebook user, I have a relationship with a couple hundred people, and my News Feed is where the conversations between my friends and me are happening. Marketers can’t just come in there and insert a radio play and hope that you will pay attention. The format that we’re engaging in is an online conversation, and the advertiser that wants to be a part of that needs to mimic what users are doing: join the conversation, not throw in a banner ad that disrupts that experience.”

Thanks for the ink, Justin!

Graffiti, the popular Facebook drawing app, adds a new feature today with help from Intel’s sponsorship dollars. When you see a Graffiti you like, you can embed the animated version — the artist’s virtual brush strokes as he or she draws the image — into your own site, just like you’d embed a YouTube video.

Here’s one I like from the recent Haagen-Dazs sponsored bee drawing contest by Priya S Patel:

At Regeneration.org Dell announces the winners to its “What Does Green Mean to You” Graffiti contest in Facebook. Here’s “best overall.”

Watercooler’s Justin Smith lists (at InsideFacebook) CPMs and eCPMs that Facebook app developers are collecting through ad-sales partners such as Social Media, VideoEgg, Lookery, AdSense and others. Most of those interviewed report CPMs between $0.04 and $0.60, with a few above a $1.00.

FM sells advertising and sponsorships on a few Facebook applications, including Watercooler and Graffiti, with CPMs in the $6-12 range. Though it’s important to note, we currently monetize only a minority of the ad inventory on those applications; we partner with several of the ad networks listed in Justin’s post to backfill the remainder.

Including Cars.com’s KickingTires blog:

Stuart Elliott, the advertising and media columnist for the New York Times, makes BMW’s Graffiti contest in Facebook the topic of today’s column:

“Almost half the spending for the campaign, estimated at $15 million to $25 million, is being devoted to online media. By comparison, executives at BMW of North America say, Internet ad spending for other models ranges from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets. The online elements of the 1-Series campaign include letting members of Facebook, the social-networking Web site, design virtual cars and send them to Facebook friends….”

“The goal has become ‘to give people a reason to engage with or participate in your advertising,’ said Patrick McKenna, manager for marketing communications at BMW of North America in Woodcliff Lake, N.J…. ‘We’re trying to let our hair down a bit and have some fun’ with the campaign, he added. That is evident in the offbeat ads being created for Facebook, which include the chance to design virtual cars.”

BMW’s Graffiti contest that invites Facebook users to color in outlines of 1-Series cars has done a few things very well.

One, ad units on Graffiti app pages within Facebook as well as websites outside of Facebook (eg, Boing Boing) are performing better because the campaign invites participation.

Two, it enlists a core group of active social-network participants (more than 9000 submissions in the first 7 days) into a fun, transparent evangelism effort: Participants spend, in many cases, hours personalizing images of BMWs that they then share with friends.

Three, it takes advantage of the friend-to-friend newsfeed mechanism at Facebook to spread word of the campaign beyond the paid media program.

Four, the concept and the images themselves are capturing the attention of bloggers, columnists and Twitterers, such as Facebook’s Dave Morin. Ben Barren’s headline captures it best: “i found a blog post about a twitter about bmw’s facebook campaign.” UPDATE 4/7: Stuart Elliott at NT Times dedicates a column to the campaign. Others pick-ups below.

I also love that BMW’s advertising in other areas of Facebook (through Facebook, not FM) integrates a single message across multiple media plans. With the Graffiti contest BMW built a killer idea that resonates especially with existing Facebook members, so why not show the Facebook audience that you’re hip to the applications they all enjoy? Here are some banners BMW ran elsewhere on Facebook:

Credits: The team that made this happen includes Brendan Starr at GSD&M; Jon Lor at DotGlu; Mark Kantor, Tim Suzman and Ted Suzman at Graffiti Wall; Jean Aw at NOTCOT; and FM’s Jen Tamez, Marcia Simmons, Liam Boylan, Matt Jessell and Lester Lee.

A small sampling of other coverage:

Auto site Top Speed:

Autoblog:

Han D Work blog:

Blog post and Twitter from Inusual Network:

Facebook’s senior platform manager Dave Morin twittered that BMW’s Graffiti contest “could be one of the most brilliant social media campaigns I’ve seen in a long time.” Thanks, Dave!

Over the weekend BMW rolled out its What Drives You? contest in Facebook’s Graffiti. Participants choose from a library of outlines of the 1-Series:

Then they color them in — more than 2700 entries so far. On Sunday, submissions were rolling in at a rate of one per minute. Here are a few faves:

And as those participants color in their entries and/or become Fans, other Facebook friends hear about it in their Newsfeeds: