The company said People Powered Stories will be the first of several social advertising products Microsoft plans to launch in the coming months. The product's release comes at a time when there is growing evidence that people are more likely to purchase a product recommended by a friend, while simultaneously showing a reluctance to purchase products directly marketed through social networks.

In a blog post and at a presentation in New York, Jenn Creegan, GM for Display Advertising Experiences at Microsoft Advertising, said the company was partnering with Bazaarvoice to offer People Powered Stories. The platform will allow advertisers to "tap into Microsoft's highly social and engaged audiences across multiple screens and deliver relevant ads in a way that is targeted and more measurable than is available for social advertising on the web today."

The announcement was coupled with the release of a study Microsoft commissioned of 713 social media marketers.

According to Creegan's blog post:

• The top two reasons advertisers invest in social media is to drive word of mouth and brand awareness (27% and 26% respectively).
• 72% of advertisers said measuring ROI on social media campaigns is too difficult.
• Advertisers believe 65% of word of mouth misses the intended audience.
• 73% of those advertisers surveyed said they want to make sure the ratings and reviews they curate online reach their target audience (which is more than likes, tweets or any other sources the survey asked about).

But, much as they did last week, most brands scored a big swing-and-a-miss: big, because Twitter was already super-charged with Saturday night's death of Whitney Houston, meaning some people who had no plans to watch the broadcast were tuning in after reading tweets about the 48-year-old singer.

No brand, obviously, was looking to capitalize from Houston's death. But few brands seemed poised to benefit on the increased use of second screens even if it had been a normal broadcast in a normal year, according to Lora Schaeffer, Resource Interactive's director of social media.

"Brands need to catch up with increasingly social consumers and realize that it's not just a social missed opportunity, but a commerce missed opportunity," Schaeffer said. "Technological barriers continue to fall as consumer adoption of purchasing through social and mobile channels continue to rise....For every brand that fails to come to that realization, a competitor is already working to deliver on that vision."

The unexpected winner from Schaeffer's point of view was Chipotle, which used the event to showcase its first national ad in its 18-year history. The two-minute animated ad, featuring Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's "The Scientist," blew up Twitter even though the advertisement didn't cross-reference social media channels.

Other Solid Attempts

Schaeffer listed three other companies that did well in utilizing both screens during the broadcast. Interestingly, only one of the three was a tech company.

• Target: The retailer got praise from Schaeffer for developing "the most integrated experience on Grammy night," including exclusive support of the Grammy mobile and tablet apps, as well as use of the #TargetColor hash tag and its @TargetStyle Twitter handle.
• Microsoft: The software giant partnered with rapper Wiz Khalifa to promote its Bing search engine. "By combining a Khalifa-driven traditional spot with a Twitter Promoted Tweet and Promoted Trend campaign, as well as social conversation throughout the night, the brand surrounded the social consumer and scored a win for Microsoft," Schaeffer said. "But, Bing did fail to mention those social efforts during the brand's ad spot."
• Pepsi: The softdrink maker followed up last week's Super Bowl ad featuring Elton John with a tongue-in-cheek reference to Twitter and the hash tag #jesterfail. "Given Pepsi's long-standing use of music as marketing, it came as no surprise to see a heavy Pepsi presence on the Grammy telecast," Schaeffer said.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

That wasn't all that surprising: continued growth of the social network, not to mention tablet and smartphone technology that make it easier to tweet while watching television, means that record will probably be broken several times between now and next year's Super Bowl.

Industry trade journal AdAge essentially live-tweeted the game on its Twitter account, making comments and adding insight into each commercial. USA Today partnered with Facebook to create an admeter that allowed fans to rate and immediately share their favorite ads with friends.

The game did prove that some brands still have something to learn about using social media as a marketing tool. Toyota undercut an otherwise brilliant, dog-centric advertising campaign by effectively spamming any user that used a game-related hash tag, such as #Giants and #Patriots. With multiple verified accounts centered around the @CamryEffect tag line, almost every user who posted on a game-related hash tag got an offer to enter a contest to win a Camry.

For the record, commercials did not dominate the most tweeted parts of the broadcast. The most tweeted moment of the night, according to Twitter, was the end, when a Tom Brady Hail Mary pass failed to find a receiver and 12,233 people tweeted in a single second. The second most tweeted moment came during Madonna's halftime show, which averaged more than 8,000 tweets per second and had a high of 10,245 tweets in a single second.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.

Walgreens recently purchased some love on Twitter, literally. In choosing the self-serving hashtag, #ILoveWalgreens, the company made a grievous error. They assumed love that wasn't there.

People enjoy going out to eat, so they might love a favorite restaurant. Many enjoy shopping for clothes, so they might admit to loving a favorite designer or even a boutique store. People might even love their doctor or hairdresser, but very few people love fast food restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers or pharmacies. In these cases, you can't buy love, but you can buy attention, and the two are different beasts.

The social media spend, designed to combat a very specific issue, was inappropriately broad and presumptive. A better case would have been to focus on the problem, that Walgreens could no longer accept Express Scripts, and choose a tag that supported their efforts there, like #freedominhealthcare or #yourscriptchoice and gave voice to a public who feels unheard and unloved when it comes to healthcare decisions.

Hulu's Arrested Hashtag

Hulu is sponsoring a hashtag to promote their Superbowl commercial with Will Arnett. The hashtag, #mushymush, is in reference to their ongoing theme of alien world domination through excessive media intake.

While their hashtag is on point, it's not a hashtag that is particularly interesting to their average fan. Hulu could have been more daring, and ended up with real traction had they chosen a hashtag that would really resonate with their viewers.

Because they chose an Arrested Development star, and dropped several references into the ad, they could have created buzz by pointing that out or even asking Arrested Development fans to count the number of references in the video. This, of course, would mean a heavy focus on the show and that may not be in the best interest of a big Superbowl spend. But there are many ways they could have jazzed this up, and stayed show-neutral. Hulu is staffed by a variety of cool and fun folks, as evidenced by the campaign itself. Creativity is important and #mushymush can't have been the most interesting thing that came out of their advertising department.

They also did a poor job of communicating what they wanted. While they did get some high profile retweets, from Roku and Yahoo_Screen, many of the other dozen tweets are either done by Hulu themselves or by Hulu employees. If they asked their employees to share the video, which isn't a bad thing at all, they should have also suggested sample copy. Their star even tweeted about it without using the hashtag, as did most of the folks who watched the video and shared it. There's no call to action on their viral mechanism, the video. Why not end the video with the hashtag? I'm laughing, give me some instructions as to what I should do to share the funny with my friends.

Subway Offers Up a Footlong Hashtag

Photo credit Luca Falda

Unlike Hulu, who couldn't get any attention on Twitter for their hashtag, Subway has gotten attention, but the wrong kind. Their main problem wasn't in their choice of hashtag, it was that they didn't gauge sentiment before they advertised on the social network.

From people angry that a $5 foot long really wasn't $5, to employees who resent having to work at Subway, the hashtag is a busy one, rife with anger. To be fair to Subway, however, there is a solid amount of positive sentiment in their resulting tweets too.

They could decrease some of the negativity if they let Subway employees know that they are about to release a trending hashtag and ask for their support. They should also react in some way to the negatives, using Twitter. I would suggest reaching out to all of the negatives and thanking them for their feedback. Who knows, there could be some positive engagement with the brand to come from it, rather than just pulling the hashtag when the going gets tough.

The Takeaway

What we can learn here is that there is no easy ad spend. Whether you're slapping a vinyl cling on your car to promote your housecleaning business or coordinating a multi-million dollar ad campaign for an international beverage maker, the details matter. Creativity grabs your attention, but it's the practical details that ensure the brand is remembered and the call to action is acted upon.

Advertising on a social network is not different in this regard, but there are parts of this ad spend that are unique to the medium. Prepare your employees with detailed instructions that recommend appropriate behavior. Choose to align with existing sentiment, and don't make it all about you. Do some preliminary insights gathering, and be prepared to shelve the entire thing if the risk outweighs the benefits.

Have you ever seen an ad that made you say, "My daughter would love this ad!" Cooliris builds ad technology that elicits that response. "Our vision is to make every single pixel in the ad interactive and living," says Aneesh Karve, product manager of Cooliris' ad technology, AdJitsu. So far, it has pushed mobile and desktop ads into three dimensions, creating ads you can go into and look around. Today, it's offering a first look at "high-interaction" ads, which unlock the laws of physics in touch-controlled ads.

When I first met Cooliris, it was making 3D AdJitsu ads. These got noticed by the market, but the team began to realize that advertisers were fixating on the 3D tricks itself, the trees, rather than the forest of immersive ads Cooliris wants to build.

"We were talking immersive, but the market was hearing '3D,'" says CEO Soujanya Bhumkar. Aneesh Karve says the most common question they get about their product is, "Do I need 3D glasses?" But the 3D stuff was just an example. "This is the future of how you do display advertising."

"Whatever is available on the technology stack that we're deploying to, we're going to pull out the bag of tricks available to us and make something cool out of that."

The 3D ads use WebGL in browsers, and they run natively on iOS. This is a technology for which the market isn't quite ready. Phones will have blazing-fast graphics soon, but they don't yet. "3D is awesome, but right now 3D penetration on mobile is just at the crack of dawn," Karve says. "What we wanted to do was reach more people on today's technology."

High Interaction

Today, Cooliris has a demo that steps back from the 3D cliffs and canyons they've been showing around so far. It's a simple game with real physics. You tap the screen, and round pieces of candy appear. They roll down, in the direction of gravity, and they bounce off each other like real objects.

The engine was designed by a physicist. The existing software development kit contains the full physics engine, so they can reach more people whether or not they have WebGL.

Objects feel as real as possible. They're aware of each other, they respond naturally to the forces of the user's input. Gravity is dynamic to the accelerometer. Whichever way is down is the way the candy falls. Coming up next for AdJitsu is realistic momentum and friction. The point is not to make something loud and noticeable. It's to make an ad that you want to play with as though it's a real object.

When demoing high-interaction ads, a partner told the team, "My daughter would love this ad." That's a pretty good sign.

You Don't Have to Be A Physicist

AdJitsu ads can be built using PageKit, its own set of tools that allows developers to write ads in 3D and with real physics without having to know how. When approaching 3D ads, Cooliris knew they had to build something more democratic. Not everyone is an OpenGL graphics programmer. Karve says the goal of PageKit is to enable any artist with Photoshop, HTML and CSS skills to make something immersive and high-fidelity. "Now, you don't have to be a physicist to write a miniature game with real-life dynamics."

Since its a format any HTML developer will recognize, the ads also support normal rich media content like embedded video. The output supports browsers or the native iOS environment. Here's a video of Max, a 13 year-old up-and-coming programmer, demonstrating how PageKit works. Don't worry; he'll walk you through it.

Ads You Want To See

To Cooliris, the value of ads is not about impressions anymore. It's about time spent in the ad. These are ads you can go into and play with. But this isn't "gamification." It's not a gimmick to trick users into clicking more. It's just there, it feels real, and it piques your interest. You'll never remember the brand if you don't enjoy the ad experience. Cooliris thinks that experience is the most important part.

What do you think? Does this ad look fun? Would you stick around and play?

That sounds ominous for the health of Web content. But ad spending is up by over 20% this year. Online ad spending will exceed print magazine and newspaper ads for the first time this year. So, put another way, online ads in the U.S. are still worth enough to brands to waste $12 billion a year on them. But is all this waste necessary?

Dr. Magid Abraham, CEO of comScore, says that today's display ad market is "characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user." Online ads may be working overall, but the problem with out-of-view ads "dilutes the impact of campaigns" and puts a "drag on prices" for publishers.

31% of ads in the study were delivered successfully, but they were never seen by a consumer. The user either scrolled past the ad before it loaded or never scrolled it into view. On average, 4% of ads were delivered to viewers outside the desired geography, with some campaigns running as high as 15%. That means some ads were shown to customers in places where the product is not sold.

Even among ads that were seen, 72% of the campaigns in the study ran alongside site content that was "not brand safe." If you're advertising cheeseburgers, and your ad runs next to a news article about the obesity epidemic, you're not likely to get much value out of it.

Online ad growth is projected to slow down over the next five years, but the trend is still positive. It's a good sign for the Web that the ad market is healthy, but it could be much more effective with smarter technology.

Lead image by TaxBrackets.org via Creative Commons. Second image by vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's reelection campaign has already spent $5.8 million on Internet advertising - more than the campaign has spent on media consultants, broadcast, print and miscellaneous media combined, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

• Newt Gingrich (R) $64,9110
• Mitt Romney (R) $428,057
• Ron Paul (R) $288,331
• Rick Santorum (R) $59,518
• Jon Huntsman (R) $16,525
• Fred Karger (R) $100
• Total $1,441,641

Court rulings in 2009 and 2010 loosened rules on how so-called Super Political Action Committees spend advertising money, and a lot of that money is expected to head online. That could dramatically change the landscape of the 2012 presidential election and open new revenue streams for online companies that host ads.

PACs Could Spend Heavily On Internet Advertising

Most of the 269 groups that have registered as super PACs with the Federal Election Commission hire advertising agencies to make media buys, making it almost impossible to determine which specific companies got money when looking at expenditure reports. But one PAC, the Ron Paul-supporting group known as Endorse Liberty, has been making direct media buys, offering hints about which companies are poised to get a boost in the current election cycle.

Endorse Liberty spent $740,964 on online advertising in the two weeks ended Monday. Of that, $462,350, or 62.4%, went to Google for AdWords buys, according to OpenSecrets.org, a Web site operated by the Center For Responsive Politics.

During the same time, Endorse Liberty spent $195,629 (26.4%) on Facebook advertising, $32,804 (4.4%) on paid Stumbles and $50,000 (6.8%) with online advertising agency CampaignGrid LLC.

Google Prepared To Work With PACs

Of course those numbers reflect spending by one PAC in support of one candidate, and they do not paint an overall picture of who the big winners and losers will be in online advertising during this election season. But they do suggest Google could dominate, and that may stem from the company's active solicitation of advertising from PACs. Google will also likely benefit from ads placed on YouTube by both the PACs and the campaigns.

"In 2010, independent expenditure groups had a limited budget, but we're already seeing that 2012 is going to be big," Sean Harrison, head of advertising sales for independent expenditures at Google, told TechPresident.

The blog reports that Google is actively mobilizing to handle campaign ads, including putting up a firewall between PACs and candidate campaigns, which are barred from coordinating advertising efforts one another.

As for what the campaigns themselves are spending, that's harder to tell: OpenSecrets only has breakdowns of general expenditures for each candidate's campaign, and online advertising buys are lumped under "Media" for most of the candidates.

Photo credit Gage Skidmore.

It's a generalization to say that the realities of this market have driven the quality of Web experiences into the ground. But surely, you've noticed lots of annoying, flashing, animated ads bothering you to do something. Well, remember Cooliris? In October, we covered its first forays into 3D ads. Cooliris has a feeling we Web users would rather be delighted by ads than harassed. Sound too good to be true? Read on and see for yourself.

When we first met Cooliris, it was introducing its new ad unit, AdJitsu, which had just launched its first interactive, touch-controlled, 3D mobile ads.

One of the campaigns was for the Samsung Galaxy S II. Instead of a boring banner ad, consumers saw a phone jiggling around inside the banner in response to the accelerometers of their iPhones and iPads. When they tapped the ad, it opened up into a sort of app, in which they could zoom in and out on the product, manipulating it with familiar touchscreen gestures, in order to check it out.

It was neat. But was it revolutionary? Would the ability to play with a virtual model of a phone really convert any viewers into customers? Cooliris enlisted the help of some neuromarketers to make the case that AdJitsu ads were at least more interesting than passive videos, but the brain scans left us with more questions than answers. Sure, these ads are stimulating, but does that make them effective?

The Next Level

Well, Cooliris has been working on making the product speak for itself. What they showed me this time is not just better; it is bigger. There's more to these new ads. You can explore them, experience them. You don't need your brain scanned to find them enjoyable.

And there's more AdJitsu news than just new ad campaigns. Before, AdJitsu was an in-house mobile ad unit. Now, it's a platform, and it goes beyond mobile devices. Using Web technology and developer-friendly tools, now any advertiser can make ads that don't suck.

Setting The Ad World On Fire

"Our goal was to take the world of display advertising and set it on fire," says AdJitsu product manager Aneesh Karve. He says that ads today don't take advantage of the capabilities of today's hardware. AdJitsu isn't even stopping there; it is building an ad platform for devices one or two years down the road using next-generation graphics library WebGL. When phones get WebGL support and smoking-fast GPUs, AdJitsu will be ready for them.

The 3D models come from a variety of places. Some advertisers, like video game makers, already have 3D models ready to go. Other manufacturing companies, whether they make cars or phones, have engineering models at the ready that AdJitsu can simplify and prepare for the Web. Other ads use commercially available models or data, and some advertisers even spring for custom models. To bring those models to life in an interactive ad, AdJitsu has built versatile tools and a powerful engine.

The AdJitsu Engine

Currently, Apple doesn't allow third-party advertisers to use WebGL, even though the mobile Safari browser supports it. The only ads allowed to use WebGL on iOS are Apple's own iAds. Apple claims that this is because of security holes. Karve notes that it also lets Apple get a head start in 3D advertising on its platform. Either way, AdJitsu ads still run natively on iOS devices, and you build them with AdJitsu's software development kit.

But for other devices, PCs, tablets and phones alike, the engine uses WebGL. The performance isn't quite there yet on most Android phones, but it runs, and Cooliris is thinking ahead to next year's phones, anyway. AdJitsu has built upon the Web and cutting-edge hardware to enable silky-smooth, immersive 3D ads that run anywhere, and that anyone can build.

The Tools: Do Your Own AdJitsu

AdJitsu's tool is called PageKit. Developers can write an ad once and run it everywhere. PageKit even makes it easier for developers used to writing 2D code. It bridges the gap to 3D for them, so they don't have to start over again and learn OpenGL, which Karve points out has a "pretty heady API." You write in PageKit's markup, and it all compiles down to the native iOS engine and the WebGL engine.

Need more perspective on that? Allow me to introduce Max. He's 13. In this less-than-three-minute video, you can watch him build an AdJitsu ad in "62 or so" lines of code. Don't worry, non-geeks; he explains the process amazingly well.

The Kicker: Better Analytics

For those still looking for a traditional "value-add" for these 3D ads, you don't have to scrutinize an inscrutable brain scan this time. Cooliris has gone with something more easily measured.

Since users interact so extensively with these 3D models, AdJitsu ads can record heatmaps of which parts of the experience are most interesting to consumers. That's valuable feedback for advertisers and product people, who can use it to figure out what kinds of features to emphasize. Can your average banner ad do that?

Ads That Don't Suck

Instead of racing to the bottom with garish display ads, Cooliris has posed a challenge to the advertising world. With all this potential at our disposal, why do ads suck so much? They don't have to. AdJitsu has proven they can be fascinating, beguiling, even beautiful.

What will we do when the ads are better than the stuff we're putting next to them? I know what I'll do: I'll try to make even better stuff. Thus far, Web ads have been a race to the bottom. Hats off to Cooliris for raising the bar for all Web experiences, not just for ads.

What do you think of these ads? Would you play with one?

The data are compiled directly from information from online advertisers, including data from websites, commercial services, free email providers and other Web properties. "Even with a softened economy, digital advertising is making tremendous gains," says PwC US partner David Silverman.

Maybe it goes without saying that the future of advertising is online, but it's good to know the numbers back that up. It's important to break down the trend into mobile and desktop, tablet and smartphone numbers sometimes, but it's also important to see the big picture.

A steady climb in online ad revenue, even in a bad economy, means that the Web is working for consumers and brands alike. Even if it isn't working perfectly, it's working. We're putting enough time and energy into the Web that it's becoming a real, growing economy. Now let's go out there and make some stuff!

The pop-up also offers a link to the ads preferences manager, where users can see exactly how Google profiles them for advertising. It shows categories, which can be removed or edited, as well as your inferred age and gender. It also shows the ID of your browser cookie, which Google tracks to personalize your ads. You can also manage blocked advertisers and opt out of personalized ads altogether.

Visiting the ads preferences manager is an interesting trip. When I checked my categories, I learned that Google "infers" that I'm in the 35-44 age bracket. I'm not really sure how to take that. I think I'm flattered. Curiously, you can't correct that, though you can remove it.

For the most part, though, the preferences are pretty accurate, and none of these data points are creepy. It knows I like music, computers and news. Wow. Good guess. And certainly, if someone is trying to sell me something, those are good categories to aim for.

But does this kind of targeting add value to my life? It works in the aggregate; that's why Google is Google. But I'm not sure how different my experience would be if I turned off personalization, and I don't think "why these ads?" makes me feel any safer. In fact, it's just another click target next to an ad, and it usually doesn't convey much information.

As a company who watches its users' every interaction to improve its efficiency, those extra milliseconds with our cursors near ads can't be lost on Google. The earnestness behind "why these ads" feels genuine, but it doesn't really do much to help the user.

Transparency is an important message for Google. It's part of establishing trust. Google makes an effort to be transparent about government requests for user data. One of Google's strongest brands is its Data Liberation Front a team totally dedicated to helping users eliminate traces of themselves from Google services if they so desire.

But as the "why these ads" video says, it's no secret that Google's business is advertising. It has built a huge arsenal of free products for us, and they serve as a platform for Google's advertisers to analyze us, target us and reach us. Google thinks creating a dialog with is users about advertising will be engaging. But are you ever going to +1 an ad? Does knowing Google's advertising profile of you make you more inclined to use Google's products?

For something that may seem like a relatively minor detail in the course of one's day, this Ad Swap (formerly Ad Selector) functionality is Hulu's bold, experimental bet on the future of television advertising. The idea is simple: by giving viewers some say in what ads are displayed, you can show them more relevant messages. For advertisers, the value in more effectively targeting ads toward the people most likely be interested in the company's product. Everybody wins.

In fact, every major metric measured saw a substantial increase. Brand favorability, purchase intent and stated relevancy, all measurements highly sought after by advertisers, improved significantly when ads were selected by viewers rather than played randomly.

Granted, it's not all viewers who are participating in the Ad Swap program. Hulu said they only expect about 3% of users to opt in to the initiative. Still, the study demonstrates the effectiveness of a generally more innovative and user-centric way of displaying advertising in a digital age, something from which media companies old and new can likely draw a few lessons.

The study tested a 15-second car ad on different subject groups. Some saw no ads, others saw them on various combinations of TV, PCs, smartphones and tablets. Those who saw the ad on TV alone recalled the brand of car correctly 50% of the time. The people who saw it across all devices got it right 74% of the time.

The study also found that multi-screen advertising increased "engagement," meaning that subjects remembered more details about the product. Twenty-two percent of the TV group remembered that the car was a 4-door sedan, versus 39% of the multi-screen group.

These results come on the heels of multiple Google analyses of tablet use, one showing that users flock to their tablets in the evenings, and another breaking down the kinds of activities tablets are used for. News flash: it's mostly for consumption. So the moral of today's story is, if you want to get inside people's heads, it's measurably worth the money to reach them across devices all day long.

Google's Smooth Moves

To that end, Google has also announced AdWords for video today. This makes it easy to place ads on YouTube videos.

Google has also recently launched new incentives for advertisers who optimize for mobile devices. Google, of course, is almost entirely in the advertising business, so its partnership with Nielsen on this study conveniently defines a problem to which Google is the solution.

How do you feel about advertisements in general? Do they make for a better Web?

The social networking site will give at least $50 to up to 200,000 small business in a partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.

Facebook already makes an estimated $4.05 billion in global advertising revenue.

Facebook will start the advertising push with a roadshow and a series of webinars that teach small business owners how to use the site and social media. Facebook has set up a page for more information.

Currently, brands and business are not be able to operate like a person when the Timeline feature rolls out on Thursday. But the site is making changes to how businesses represent themselves.

Contextual advertising on the site has been increasing in quality. It used to be spotty, but the amount of social sharing going on is making it easier for people to pinpoint how to deliver ads,improving conversion rates.

This trend may have moved Facebook to change how it allows consumers to interact with brands. Right before the launch, Facebook took away the "Like" requirement for brands. Fans no longer had to "Like" a brand page in order to comment on it. This news came in the wake of an infographic that showed over 40% of fans don't care about the page or interacting with the brand, if they are not given a reason to do so.

As social sharing becomes more prevalent, it's likely that display advertising will continue to be the most efficient source of revenue for the company.

Ad revenue for the site, which has over 750 million registered users, will miss the expected $4.05 billion mark, according to analysts, but the slowdown in growth is explained as a diversification into other revenue streams like Facebook Credits.

The numbers suggest that attempts to drive consumption and spending across games, credits and other Facebook add-ons is fleshing out the bigger ad revenue picture.

When all streams are taken into consideration, total revenues at Facebook should reach $4.27 billion this year, eMarketer estimates. That more than doubles the $2 billion Facebook is estimated to have earned in 2010. Ad revenues will make up 89% of the total this year, down from 95% in 2009, says the site.

The $4.27 billion should beat FB's internal estimates, which were about $4 billion. Based on earlier reports, Facebook has been moving at a fast clip, doubling its first half revenues. An earlier report showed that it had doubled its half-yearly revenues.

Revenues in US territory will do just as well. Ad revenues here are expected to pass $2 billion in 2011, making for over half of the company's total revenue. Overseas ad revenue will continue to eat away at the US chunk of the market as mobile penetration and broadband to the home increases across developing nations, especially in Asia.

Overseas ad dollars is predicted to represent 50% of the pie next year and a slight majority by 2013.

Ads now join other Google content as part of the company's personalization efforts with Plus. "A single +1 applies to the same content across the web, no matter where it appears," the announcement says, meaning that clicking +1 on an ad, a search result, or a Web page has the same effect on one's interest graph. The +1 button will start appearing on AdSense for Mobile Content text and image ads by early October. Users who don't want their personal +1 data to be used in ads will be able to opt out in their personalization preferences, even before the ad features go live next month.

On mobile ads, the +1 button will replace the 'g' logo on the left side for several seconds and then fade out.

Now that personalization with Google Plus has dollar signs attached to it, the path to monetizing the network is more clear. Just in case it unsettles them, though, Google has allowed advertisers to opt out of running +1 buttons in their campaigns.

Personal feedback on ads has worked great for Facebook, but Google's ad networks have a much broader reach around the Web. By adding its new social layer to its massive ad business, Google can now make the play it has been waiting for all along in its eyeball competition with Facebook.

Do you think +1 recommendations will add value for advertisers? Sound off in the comment.