Photographed by Sunny Shokrae. Facebook just got a little more up in your business. Starting today, the 'book will fully implement a new ad network called Atlas. In a spin it's calling "people-based marketing," Atlas will serve ads targeted to you based on your Facebook data. And, while it's a Facebook property, Atlas will also serve up ads on non-Facebook sites.
From an advertising and marketing perspective, this is a turnkey moment. The newly rebuilt Atlas is able to capture data showing how online campaigns correlate to offline sales. That's absolutely huge for media buyers.
From a user perspective, today's announcement represents the further encroachment of digital data into our lives. The information we put on Facebook will now be used to follow us across the web to better get our eyeballs on ads more germane to our lives.
Sure, it's meant to be helpful — you wouldn't want constant cat food advertisements when you so clearly have two dogs. Nevertheless, "people-based marketing" "solves the problem" of cookies — those encoded little buggers — having limited capabilities on mobile and in demographic targeting.
In a way, Facebook is becoming more efficient at tracking and using our data than the NSA. We wonder how George Orwell would feel about that. (Mashable)