Appvertising - making money out of virtual poop

Vainly trawling Google for any further viral leakage on ‘appvertising’ I stumbled across this report from the Graphing Social Patterns Conference in San Jose which is currently taking place:

Seth Goldstein (inventor of Food Fight on Facebook):

‘Advertising = Appvertising.

Facebook could provide the promise of personalized advertising because advert is tied to social data.

Facebook will provide new models of advertising that weren’t possible until now.

You can ask questions across applications that can reach hundreds of thousands of people.

Need to build advertising specifically for social networks.

I was shocked how Facebook users provided information about themselves.

In our Food Fight application people earn virtual money by answering questions and then they can pay for food to throw. We found many would pay 20 times more for throwing “poop.”

Can you make a business from throwing “poop?” People want to do things they can’t do in real life. I don’t do it and I don’t think it is sustainable. But the engagement levels are out of control.’

Choice, quote, ‘can you make a business from throwing poop?’. Well to some degree, it seems you can as evinced by Food Fight.

Much of this talk of personalized adverts according to user make-up seems like the stuff of isolated think tanks. Ask anyone, do you want an advert on your Facebook profile? NO. Do you want an advert based on your Facebook profile? NO, that’s creepy (see here).

Would you use an application that was sponsored by a brand and which you found useful, such as Super Wall etc? Yes, if the brand is adding value. We’re still in the gold rush stage of Facebook apps, and have yet to see anything truly innovative or disruptive - those are the apps brands should be investing in, the disruptors.

Facebook applications, like widgets/gadgets are viral entities and brands would do well to think about developing for this nascent medium. Applications are designed to be portable, tell a brand manager that what you’re proposing is something the consumer will want to take with them across the web to their Google startpage, Facebook profile, netvibes profile, blog etc where they’ll let other people grab it and take it and they’ll forget about not having the budget to hire Fallon and create Play-Doh gorillas rolling down Phil Collin’s driveway and they”ll say ‘ I think the client will like that… but can you make it out of plasticine?’

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