Facebook has officially launched the Atlas advertising platform which is purportedly going to give the giants of the industry like Google a run for their money. Facebook calls this “people-based marketing” since the social media giant will not be utilizing cookies to track people and to learn more about their browsing habits. It will be using the login credentials of its over 1.3 billion users, the biggest database of any Internet company in the world! Hence, Facebook can track a user on mobile devices too since they are not relying on cookies here (cookies don’t work on mobile devices). It is going to be a paradigm shift as far as advertising is concerned and this has got the digital advertising agencies quite frenzied.

Facebook can even track its users offline. If a Facebook user goes about shopping in a mall and enters an email id in the shop registry and that shop is on Facebook, then the social networking giant can map that id to the actual user. It can then easily find out whether that person saw a particular ad or not! This helps marketers to reach real people across devices, platforms and publishers. So the cross-device impediment that they used to face until now has been removed. They can now target, serve and measure the performance of their ads across devices.

All this leads to better optimized ads that can help the digital marketers get better ROI on their media budget. When a company like Facebook has so much user information the natural proclivity is to tie that data to analytics and an ad server and start targeting users in hitherto unheard ways. “That’s Marketing Nirvana”, said one digital advertising CEO; how true! Marketers will now be able to successfully serve ads to people based on their demographic data like age, gender, socio-economic status, et al. They can even measure how effective their ad campaigns have been at targeting the right customer group. Instagram, as a publisher is already plugging into the Atlas ad server in order to examine and authenticate ad impressions, according to a Facebook Atlas Update. Looks like there is a lot to come in the days ahead.

So, is this the start of a new era of holistic advertising?

What do you think?