for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
Facebook doesn’t see itself as a social network but as a social operating system. The simple theory to remember is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra that everything is better with friends. That’s why Facebook sees itself as far greater than a new-style portal but as the essential plumbing for the Web to go from a solitary experience to a social one. That should change how industries operate. Fair enough. There has been success in this approach, notably in the unprecedented growth of social gaming. E-commerce would appear just as ripe for transformation, considering shopping is a quintessentially social experience. Early results, however, aren’t encouraging. Ashley Lutz of Bloomberg reports that Facebook commerce experiments by retailers like Gap, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom have flopped.
Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge,Massachusetts. “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
Read the full story at Bloomberg.com.
More in Media
Ozone’s platform tries to simulate how publisher content appears in AI answers
Ozone’s new simulation platform aims to crack AI’s black box to let publishers model how their content gets surfaced in AI answer engines.
CNN builds in-house agent infrastructure as it prepares for AI-driven media trading
In Q3, it plans to test one or two properties to see how they’re interpreted by LLMs, before turning in Q4 to buyer behavior and whether budgets are being allocated toward agent-to-agent trading experiments.
How a ‘TikTok doctorate’ made 26-year-old Griffin Johnson a venture capitalist
Griffin Johnson made it big on TikTok back in 2019, now he runs a VC firm and uses his marketing expertise in the Derby world.