Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.

Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:

1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.

The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?

Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.

The McCain campaign decided to enter the world of Facebook yesterday with the launch of the Straight Talk Express application. So what does the application do? Not much to be honest. All it does is embed the video which I’ve included below. That’s it! It also enables users to invite their friends and provides links to John McCain sites as well but nothing else.

I’m not quite sure why the McCain team decided to launch this application rather than embed the video on a fan page but that’s their decision, not mine! The McCain team is way behind the Obama team on Facebook given that the Barack Obama fan page has now crossed 1 million supporters. The John McCain straight talk express application has added less than 1,000 users so far but then again it just launched yesterday.

The video created by the McCain team is a really well done MTV Cribs style overview of one of the Straight Talk Express buses. I’m not sure how this tells me anything about McCain as a candidate but I definitely learned a little something about his bus driver. Check out the video below and feel free to install the Straight Talk Express application.