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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.

So when Ben Bernake isn’t in meetings discussing how he plans on running the entire economy, what does he like to do? According to a Washington Post article out yesterday, he likes spending time on Facebook. While the article leaves room open for the profile being a fake (my guess it is as I can no longer find it), there are many items in the profile which have similarities to the actual Ben Bernake. The dead giveaway that it’s fake?

Well there are actually a few. The profile listed his activities as “maintaining economic data, giving speeches, economic analysis.” His interests are “reducing inflation and stimulating growth.” Finally, his favorite quote is one of Alan Greenspan’s: “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.” The profile appears to instead be the work of a college student looking to have a little fun rather than the actual person in charge of running the U.S. economy.

We all need a little break from our day jobs though, right? There appear to be a number of fake celebrity profiles on Facebook though. There are over 20 Paris Hilton profiles, 11 Angelina Jolie profiles, 30+ Brad Pitt profiles and more. Facebook is known for shutting down fake profiles so I’m somewhat surprised that there are that many fake celebrity profiles. Then again with more than 250,000 profiles (and probably 300,000 at this point) set up per day, a large percentage of them must have fake information in them.

Have you befriended Ben Bernake on Facebook? Do you have any other celebrity friends?