Facebook holds an interesting competition twice a year for their Preferred Marketing Developers (PMDs). They are challenged to create new and innovative tools which will help businesses achieve their goals using Facebook. The grand prize winner of the challenge which was completed in September, titled “From Conversation to Conversion” was Optimal.
Optimal is a company based in the UK which specializes in creating proprietary social analytics and audience creation technology. They won with their submission of a new Open Signals API. The submission beat out 60 other PMDs. This is the second time Optimal has won this competition.
The Open Signals API allows marketers to synchronize Facebook ads with virtually any piece of data or API that is available and relevant to your business. Matching up ads on Facebook with the time a related ad is running on television, for example, is now possible with this new API. You can also link the Facebook ads to in-store revenue or foot traffic statistics, or even the weather in a local area.
This API dramatically expands the flexibility marketers will have when creating advertisements on Facebook. Having the ability to automatically activate and disable ads, or adjust the demographic to which they are displayed based on just about any factor imaginable, gives marketers an extraordinary advantage which was previously unavailable.
Some examples of how this can be used include:
- Triggering Mobile Facebook News Feed ads to start displaying to users in a ten mile radius from a store location based on the foot traffic dropping below its average in that location for the time of year.
- Activating Facebook advertisements in each of the 40,000 US locations which has a high risk of severe weather to promote a safety product, or public service announcement.
- Synchronizing advertisements to display only in the 15 minutes immediately after a major television advertisement runs so viewers are shown the product from multiple platforms.
- Adjust the type of advertisements being displayed to Facebook users based on the number and type of coupons being used in a store.
The added flexibility this API gives marketers makes it quite obvious why they won this highly competitive competition. This product will undoubtedly revolutionize the way many companies use Facebook advertising, and can easily benefit large multi-national companies as well as small local shops or even online businesses.
Congratulations to Optimal for winning this competition, and good luck in the future.
You can read the official announcement on the winners, including information about other winners, from Facebook HERE.
