Making a thumbstopper

This is the second of a three-part series on how Facebook is helping advertisers reach the right audience

Unlike some products that have hit it big on Facebook, such as Oreo cookies and the Wendy's pretzel bacon cheeseburger, MegaRed krill oil isn't an easy product to "like" or even understand, which makes selling it all the more difficult.

MegaRed is essentially a premium variation of fish oil - a nutritional supplement purchased by roughly one in six American households and swallowed in the belief that it will lead to a healthier heart. But the pills are expensive, costing about $57 for a year's supply, more than double the $25 price of generic fish oil. Big retailers like Walgreen and Costco have also come out with their own brands of krill oil that undercut MegaRed's prices.

Complicating the sales pitch is conflicting science. So marketers can't claim that MegaRed pills actually lead to a healthier heart.

The goal of a two-day "garage" was to come up with specific MegaRed ads that would be compelling enough to grab the attention of a mother or grandmother scanning her Facebook feed on her phone while in line at the supermarket - and eventually, prompt her to buy the pills. Research showed people didn't know much about the brand.

Facebook, which has held around 200 of these sessions with more than 100 companies over the last few years, hosted the meeting and the garage brought together about 20 people from the company, Facebook and the brand's advertising agencies. Before the session began, the agencies had settled on a theme: "What does your heart beat for?" The idea was that taking a daily MegaRed would keep your heart going so you could do what was important to you.

MegaRed's previous Facebook ads drew about one "like" or other interaction for every 260 people who saw them. The company wanted to do a lot better. The people in the room began tossing around ideas.

"The things we share on Facebook are stories of the heart," said Eric Schnabel, a creative strategist from Facebook's Chicago office who had worked on marketing other products that made health claims, like the cereal Special K.

The team started with ideas for poignant emotional moments. Soon the whiteboard was covered with sticky notes. Next they stepped into the shoes of two model customers, both female, from two different generations, to help the marketers tailor their pitches.

Agnes was a 65-year-old baby boomer. The team started filling out her profile. She regularly went to yoga and Zumba classes and played golf. She traveled a lot, heading to Vermont for a three-day weekend. She liked to pull out pictures of her grandchildren. She was Facebook friends with her grown-up nephews but her own son had unfriended her.

Linda, a Gen X-er, aspired to raise healthy kids, and was worried about her parents' health. Perhaps she was divorced, trying online dating. Schnabel laid out a few guidelines. Visuals count. But don't overdo it. Ads that pop up too frequently feel like spam. Facebook itself generally aims to show one ad for every 20 items in a person's news feed.

Discussing Agnes, the fictional grandmother, the group focused on passions she never had time to pursue. One ad could show a couple her age wearing backpacks in front of the Eiffel Tower. Another, learning to cook the perfect meatball in Italy. A home run would be a message that people liked enough to share with their friends and family - giving a free boost to the campaign.

The most thumbstopping idea of the day came from Roger Lu, a Facebook manager who primarily works on data and ad targeting: A child's crayon drawing of his grandfather pulling a quarter from his head, with the caption: "Thank you for finding money in my ear, Grandpa."

"It's much more emotional and much more unexpected," said Schnabel approvingly.

Selecting the targets
Figuring out the ad content was the fun part. The tension between Facebook and the company emerged when it came time to figure out how MegaRed should spend its money. Modern data collection practices have made it remarkably easy to locate individuals based on what they tend to buy. Online shopping carts record purchases, and data brokers gather information to build a profile based on their past purchases.

Facebook and its competitors can match that offline data to their own dossiers on users to help marketers target their pitches and evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns.

At the meeting, the company argued that MegaRed's money would be best spent going after a narrow group of consumers. Tapping into Datalogix's database of retail purchases, MegaRed wanted to find not just current fish oil users but other people worried about their hearts.

The Facebook folks countered that such specific targeting would be very expensive. Under Facebook's auction system, advertisers compete for limited slots in the users' news feeds; the more targeted the pitch, the higher the cost for reaching each 1,000 people.

Also, it was argued that the emotional campaign for MegaRed might very well draw in people whose potential interest in fish oil was not readily apparent. MegaRed should show ads to every American woman 45 and older and see who was interested in each one, then place those ads in the feeds of people in the same demographic buckets, he said.

Kyle Benedetti, who at the time was director of sales for SocialCode, said, "We can tell you within the first 15 minutes of a post whether it's a good post or a bad post."

@ The New York Times