Veremis Praises Facebook Approach

Facebook has officially floated on the US stock market, with Mark Zuckerberg ringing the NASDAQ bell remotely from Facebooks California headquarters to signal the start of the day’s trading.

As it does so, Marco Veremis, president of Upstream, and a former senior advertising strategist for Grey, McCann-Ericsson and DDB, developing advertising strategies for brands such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Sony, has praised the company for stating its preference for “user engagement over short-term financial results” in a recent amendment to its S-1 filing.

Says Veremis: “Facebook has acknowledged something about mobile that no other major player has been prepared to recognise to date: that the growth in impressions available to marketers as mobile penetration grows does not equate to an opportunity to monetise the channel by bombarding people with advertising.

“Mobiles are very personal devices and people are very resistant to any form of mobile advertising. Research we carried out earlier this year showed why we have been contrarian to this for such a long time, with 79 per cent of consumers in the UK and 72 per cent in the US stating that they find advertisements on their mobiles or smartphones irritating. What’s more, only one in six (11 per cent) Brits and 15 per cent of Americans who have surfed the internet on their mobile phone have ever even clicked on a mobile advert.

“This move to denounce current practices by as big a name as Facebook at last bursts the bubble around the inevitable growth of mobile marketing driven by growing impressions and calls for greater emphasis to be placed on consumer response and conversion rates. To get consumers to respond over mobile a brand needs to speak less and employ the right technologies and formats that achieve true relevance and impact. Very few companies truly possess these tools and as such monetization so far has been disappointing despite the smartphone boom.”