As someone who isn’t ingrained in the culture of advertising, I felt like I was in a foreign land at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco. That is, until every other word I heard at the conference was “social”. Now that’s something I feel comfortable talking about.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of discussion about ROI, CPC, CPM, and all of the other usual advertising jargon. But for me, it felt like the advertising community was just getting its feet wet with monetizing social services, even though Facebook and Twitter have been around for quite some time now.

The problem with advertising on social properties is that its users are continual moving targets. When I’m on Facebook, it’s easy for me to leave Facebook quite often. As soon as someone posts a link, I’m out of there. The same goes for Twitter. What advertisers and marketers haven’t quite grasped yet is the concept of engagement.

Even though Facebook has over 850 million users, they’re not sitting back watching ads like those who are watching the Super Bowl. They’re changing the “channel” constantly, and the response to that has been to track those users wherever they go. That’s not going to cut it, so brands are going to have to actually dig in and do some long tail work if they want to grab eyeballs and clicks.

Take us with you!!!!

One of the concepts that was kicked around quite a bit at ad:tech is engagement with potential customers through rewards. By making your marketing message “shareable”, you can give people incentives to carry your message with them wherever they go. That’s the smart way to do things, and if brands start giving things out to people for watching their ads or mentioning them on their Timeline, that’s where some money can start flowing.

Take a company I saw this week for example, it’s called Fanzy. The company created a Facebook app that lets customers not only become fans of a brand, but want to become an even bigger fan by way of rewards.

By creating “super fans”, you’re cutting out the need for spending ad dollars on “remnants”, meaning the crap that is leftover on ad networks that only get in front of people who will probably never click on a link you pay to display, or buy what you’re selling. By engaging people, brands can focus on the folks who can really spread the word about them and their product.

Fanzy got it right and I hope that advertisers paid attention. Something tells me that they didn’t, though. “Engaging” people sounds like hard work, because it is. It’s also something that a company has to adopt throughout the entire staff, or at least the teams that interact with customers. It’s much easier to pay a crap-ton of money for a bunch of display ads and *hope* that people click on them. It’s all advertisers know, and it’s the only option that advertising networks have given them.

Engage or die

A flashy ad unit isn’t going to do the trick to get people’s attention any more on the web, it’s a completely different ballgame now. The TV ads we see now are laced with hashtags and requests for Likes on Facebook, it’s becoming commonplace.

What companies have to really figure out though is how to turn those hashtags and Likes into continual business, interaction, and word of mouth. That’s the “everything else” that comes along with the social web, and I don’t think advertisers are prepared to deal with it yet.

Just being on Facebook and Twitter has turned into the mad rush to get a website up in the 90′s, and it’s not enough anymore. Having intelligent and friendly people behind those accounts continually engaging your customers are the only way to keep them.

No matter what new fancy and flashy ad unit some advertising network comes up with, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and engage. Otherwise, kiss your marketing dollars goodbye.

I’m here at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco and one thing is certain; as hard as Silicon Valley is working to create new social products, the advertising industry is working that much harder to keep up with the innovation.

Monetization is a dirty word when it comes to social services on the web, however, most of us forget that to create a sustainable product and business, making money from users is the only way to survive. Sure, you can raise gobs of money like Twitter, but even it has introduced its own ad model to rake in some cash to stay afloat.

In an era where everyone expects something for free, asking someone to pay a monthly fee for their Facebook account seems absolutely absurd. How can Facebook make money then? Advertising, of course. The problem is that the advertising model that has kept the web making money is old and isn’t performing as well as it has in the past. We’re all trained to skip over certain types of ads, and at some point our eyes simply won’t “see” them anymore.

How are these social services going to make the ads more relevant and interesting to us? Our data, of course. All of the things that you “Like” on Facebook and retweet on Twitter will be factored into the type of advertising that you see. The closer the ad is to your actual interests, the better chance there is that you’ll click. Makes sense, but it’s starting to kick up dust when it comes to privacy.

Recently, Senator Al Franken gave a speech where he delivered the line:

…accumulating data about you isn’t just a strange hobby for these corporations. It’s their whole business model. And you are not their client. You are their product.

We don’t mind telling Facebook who our friends are and what TV shows that we like to watch, but now that it wants to make money, people are starting to fuss about it and now realize how important their privacy online may be. It’s a fine line, and when it comes to social services that we pour private data into, it’s all fun and games until they try to make a buck off of us.

That leads us to the ad:tech conference, advertisers and companies who display ads are trying to come up with the right way to get us to “pay the bills” without creeping us out or turning us off completely.

Just how many companies are working on solving this problem? Take a look at a report compiled by a company called LUMA Partners, called the LUMAscape:

If you click through and see how all of the parts fit together, there are companies that sit as middle men between social networks and ad networks, middle men for those middle men, and more. I spent about a half hour last night digging through this mapping and it made my eyes cross.

At the end of the day, we’re going to be shown advertising whether we like it or not. Take “on demand” television for example. When I watch a TV show or Movie on Comcast, they don’t let me skip through the commercials. That’s my way of paying to see the content. Sure, if I wanted to see it ad-free, I could go to a service like iTunes and pay for it, but I enjoy “free”. Free comes with a cost, and that cost is our eyeballs and data.

There are companies here at ad:tech who are trying to make the advertising model more interactive though, while keeping our privacy safe. Companies like Google track our activity as we surf the web and display ads to us based on those preferences. It’s getting them into a bit of trouble though, and that behavioral tracking and ad display is starting to freak people out.

One company that’s paying attention to this space is called TRUSTe, and it launched an advertising platform at the conference that allows consumers to opt out of specific types of ads and give some feedback to advertisers on what they’d rather see. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we have today. Here’s an interview that my good friend Jake Ludington did with TRUSTe’s VP of Product, Kevin Trilli:

What Trilli keys in on is the fact that users are starting to think about their privacy and the best way to handle those concerns is to give consumers choice in return. Again, ads aren’t going away no matter what, so is this type of “choice” good enough? It’s the best option that I see right now, simply because users are already behaving in a social way on platforms like Facebook. Giving its users a choice on what they’d like to see, and how they’re targeted, is the best way to interact.

The more transparent the industry is, the quicker it can grow and monetize. Yes, thinking about being a “product” is a bit scary as a user, but as long as we have control over how our information is shared and with who, we can settle into the idea that this is nothing more than having to watch ads when you fire up On Demand on your TV.

Creating a sticky game that keeps players coming back for more is trick in and of itself. Once you’ve made the app and released it into the wild, finding a way to make money with it is even trickier. That’s where Kiip saw a need and came to the rescue with its genius real-world rewards platform.

The premise is simple, developers can create unlockable achievements in their games, and Kiip will reward those players with physical items from its advertising partners. With about 100 games using Kiip’s platform, its CEO Brian Wong told me on the phone today that is has opened up over 500 million new inventory spots for advertisers.

There is no shortage of advertisers looking to spend money, only shortage of spots to insert advertising. By building a relationship with top-tier advertisers like Disney, Pepsi, Popchips, and Sears, Kiip provides a way for game developers to make their players happy and rewarded with really cool stuff that they can even pass on to their friends.

Today, Kiip has announced that its platform is open for all developers to use, lifting its selective beta-like gates. The company has been selective in choosing developers to use its platform so that it could control growth and properly scale the product for this public launch. The time is here and now any developer can start including Kiip rewards with just a single line of code.

It’s a win, win, win situation

Kiip has found itself a fantastic niche for providing advertisers with new real estate, developers with a way to make money from their games, and take a cut of the action for itself. Wong told me that out of its 100 games using Kiip, 10 of them are in the top 100 games on Apple’s App Store. That means that the games themselves are sticky and Kiip is rewarding those gamers for coming back. In fact, Kiip currently displays 4 rewards every second in the apps where it is included.

To make it easy for developers to get started with Kiip, Wong says that the company worked really hard to create an onboarding experience that “walks the talk” when it comes to easy:

You can literally type in your app name or game and we’ll automatically pull in all of the details about your app and prepopulate everything.

Here’s a taste of what developers can expect when they sign up for Kiip:

The walkthrough takes developers through every step of the process including setting up their achievements and spitting out the necessary code for their app.

Rewarding the developers

While Kiip is building a huge niche for itself with its rewards platform, the company wants to give back even more to developers and reward them for using its offerings. In that vein, the company is also announcing a new $100,000 developers fund called “Build”, which will provide $5k to 20 app developers that the company will announce on April 20th. Developers can register for the Build program now in hopes of being one of the lucky $5k recipients.

Wong tells me that this fund is for developers who don’t have the capital to keep a game going after seeing success when it launches:

Some developers are really good at generating a lot of downloads on the first day of launch, but what about the days after? All of these developers have incredible passion for what they do and the indies are finally getting their chance.

Games that use Kiip are happy to use the platform, as Mega Jump developer Derek Van Vliet shares:

Kiip has helped us add a consistent incremental five-figure revenue stream to Mega Jump that was extremely easy to integrate without affecting our existing user experience and our game design canvas, while providing a genuine opportunity to thank our players.

By providing advertising opportunities that gamers see as welcomed rewards, Kiip has cracked open a new opportunity for brands to build relationships with consumers in a way that they haven’t been able to before. Now that the platform is open to all developers, expect more and more popular games to incorporate rewards like a free bag of chips for beating a boss at the end of a level.

➤ Kiip registration for developers

Early last month, Twitter revealed its new focus on simplicity and it caught some of Twitter’s hardcore users off guard. The site has become more streamlined to better serve new users who are just learning about the micro-messaging platform, and that’s a good thing.

During its redesign announcement, Twitter introduced us to something new for advertisers called “brand pages“. These pages feature a customizable header and the ability to make on tweet stick to the top of the timeline, as a way to introduce prospective followers to the brand.

At the time, a mix of 21 brands launched their brand pages, but not much was known about why or how they were added to the launch group. According to an AdAge report, we might know now.

According to the report, Twitter has sent emails out to its top advertisers and announced that it will be adding more brand pages starting February 1st. The only ask? That you already have $25k in Twitter’s ad ecosystem, be it for sponsored tweets or trending topics, just to be qualified. Of course Twitter have blessed some charities with brand pages for free, so it doesn’t appear that non-profits will have to buy their way in.

Not much is known about how effective these brand pages are, like the one above from Nike. However, it appears that Twitter is dangling the feature out there as an added incentive to get advertising dollars from new blood. By offering this incentive in the way that it has, Twitter comes off looking pretty desperate to make $25k. On Facebook, companies don’t have to pay any money at all to have a business presence on the platform.

This latest brand page thing sounds to me like the new verified account, as it’s something the company can toggle on and off in hopes of making a company feel special on its platform. In my opinion, it’s going to take a lot more than that.

In a comScore study posted today, we are reminded of what we already knew; Facebook is an absolute beast when it comes to cornering people’s time online.

For example, this stat seemed so insane, I thought it was fake at first:

Social networking accounts for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online in October 2011

Social networking is a hobby of 82 percent of the global Internet population, which sits at around 1.2 billion users. Just a reminder, Facebook has over 800 million users. Facebook most definitely owns social networking.

Stats and Thoughts

In October, Facebook reached more than half (55 percent) of the world’s global audience and accounted for 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world and 3 in every 4 social networking minutes.

Facebook’s users aren’t just loyal, they’re obsessed. These types of numbers show that the features that social network is building have one goal; to keep you on Facebook, and not let you leave. If you take a look at the most recent changes on the site, such as the Ticker and Timeline, they’re built to keep you digging into someone’s profile and content.

In October, Twitter reached 1 in 10 Internet users worldwide, growing 59 percent in the past year.

Facebook’s game is engagement, while Twitter is surging to touch as many people as possible. It’s safe to say that Twitter will never get anywhere close to the engagement numbers that Facebook has, and it doesn’t want them. With its latest redesign, the site is becoming easier to use, as Facebook is becoming more complicated. Twitter is betting that simplicity will win out, and eyeballs for any amount of time is key. The company actually has a shot to get more eyeballs in 2012 than Facebook if it stays focused and keeps being integrated into every mainstream property possible.

People age 55 and older represented the fastest-growing age segment in global social networking usage, increasing nearly 10 percentage points since July 2010 to 80 percent in October 2011.

Have you noticed that it’s not just your friends and college buddies on Facebook anymore? Mom’s using it, grandma’s using it, cousins, uncles, everyone. This will be an interesting trend to watch, because I think that this particular age group will be the one that gets Facebook to 1 billion users.

Survey says? We’re obsessed. Seriously, and in some cases unhealthily, obsessed with social networking.

Will the obsession turn into dollars?

2011 was the year of data collection. Facebook and Twitter have made its services easier to use so you can share more. The sites know a lot about you based on the things you’ve told them, so 2012 will be the year of capitalizing on it.

Facebook will be placing ads in the News Feed next year, and is hoping to collect your clicks and crank up those ad dollars before it goes public. Twitter is planning similar advertising approaches, hoping to capitalize on your obsessive use of the service, with an ad that fits your likes.

We know that ads are coming, but “will they work?” is the true question. Seeing as Google AdWords have done quite well for the company, they probably will.

Why? Because Google was the first online service that people got obsessed with. “Facebooking” is the next “Googling”, and the money will follow. We’re obsessed with TV, too. Advertising on television isn’t what it used to be though, mainly because of the Internet. What are we doing instead of watching TV? We’re on Facebook.

Get the picture? Obsession = $$$.

If you operate or work for a nonprofit organization, you know that the road to donations to keep you afloat is a bumpy one. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever to spread the word about the cause that you work so hard to support.

Twitter specifically has helped pair up celebrities and charities to build a megaphone of social good, giving free advertising to cash-strapped nonprofits who are on the service to get support for cleaner water, those dealing with cancer, and everything else in between.

Up until now, Twitter has helped some of those organizations get attention, although not officially. The company says that it has given over $300,000 worth of pro-bono advertising to 50 organizations to date by way of promoted accounts and tweets.

Twitter is now making this service official, calling it “Ads for Good”.

Here’s what the company had to say on its advertising blog today:

Today we’re expanding our pro-bono ads program – now called Twitter Ads for Good – and unveiling a new fund designated for non-profits in our hometown of San Francisco. By providing grants for San Francisco organizations, we’re extending a hand to the non-profits that work hard to make our city a better place to live.

To apply for a Twitter Ads for Good campaign, complete this contact form and detail how your organization would benefit from one of these grants. For FAQ on these programs, please see here and follow @twittergood for the global highlights.

The company is now accepting applications from properly setup 501c3 organizations, via its Hope140 site.

In addition to pro-bono advertising, Twitter has given 21 lucky organizations an enhanced profile page, which launched last week.

These organizations include @kiva, @jobsforusa, @roomtoread, @globalcitizenyr, @redcross, and @gaffta.

Who said ads were evil? Here’s a way to make advertising more relevant to users, by making them care about what they’re clicking on. That’s donation by action, folks.

It’s always nice to see a platform use its power for social good, and Twitter has been doing it in one way or another since launching. Now it’s official.

There’s no doubt about it, marketing on Facebook is something businesses are doing more and more as the social network grows closer to one billion members. The Facebook ad team has actually done a wonderful job working with engineers at the company to build an easy to use, self-service ad product that makes Google AdWords targeting seem silly and incomplete.

You can target Facebook ads to people of a certain age, location, or area of interest. You can get really focused with your marketing.

This infographic from Flowtown shows survey results the company collected about who is marketing on Facebook. Impressively, 69% of the businesses they spoke with are utilizing Facebook for this very purpose. The infographic also shows that Health Care is the most expensive industry to market on Facebook, and it would cost you upwards of $320,000 to get 300,000 likes on your Facebook page. Wowser.

Click here to see it in its full glory:

It appears that Cup of Noodles is on an advertising tear in Japan, with the following video involving Yoda of Star Wars fame:

Speaking of celebrity endorsements, it’s safe to say that no matter what Yoda gets behind, it’ll be a hit. If only it had this playing in the background.

Today, Google announced a new initiative from its ad team called “Why these ads”. The reason behind the feature, the company says, is to bring transparency to ad targeting. The feature is available now for ads shown within search results, and will be rolling out for ads in Gmail soon.

Advertising is at a crossroads online. With content flowing, companies are trying to find new ways to make ads relevant and attractive to consumers. Google wants to show you a little bit of what’s in its secret sauce.

Here’s what Google had to say about consumers interacting with Google ads:

Our advertising system is designed to show the right ad to the right person at the right time. Because ads should be just as useful as any other information on the web, we try to make them as relevant as possible for you. Over the coming weeks, we’re making improvements to provide greater transparency and choice regarding the ads you see on Google search and Gmail. Soon, you’ll be able to learn more about these ads by clicking the “Why these ads” link next to ads on Google search results and Gmail.

Here’s a video about the two new transparency features from Google:

Along with “Why these ads”, Google now offers an Ads preference manager.

Why these ads

If you wonder why you’re targeted with certain ads, Google will now do its best to tell you why. Of course it has to do with what you search and click on, but showing the “why” is a smart move by Google. If consumers trust the ads, they will be more apt to click and act upon them.

This is what Google had to say specifically about “Why these ads”

“Why these ads” gives you transparency
The perfect search ad answers your query and gets you what you’re looking for quickly. When you click the “Why these ads” link, you’ll find information about why you’re seeing a particular ad and how it’s personalized for you. If you’re searching for a local restaurant while you’re on vacation in Hawaii, you would see ads for restaurants that are nearby, rather than restaurants in your hometown. Or if you’re researching flat-panel televisions, and performing a series of similar searches in quick succession, you could see ads based on the query that you just entered, or based on a few recent and related queries within a single browser session. By considering the language you’re using, your geographic location and various other indications, we’re able to show you the best ads possible. We’ve been showing ads in this way for years as a way to help you quickly find what you’re looking for.

Ads preference manager

Along with showing you why you’re seeing certain ads, you will now have access to an “Ads preferences manager“. The preferences manager lets you decide which ad providers are blocked, and gives you the opportunity to opt-out of personalized advertising altogether. Clearly that’s not something that Google wants, but surfacing it as an option certainly is putting it in the hands of its users.

This type of interaction with advertisements that you see online is the only way that big companies like Google and Facebook can get you interested in them again. Of course Google lets you “+1″ an ad that you find interesting, but it’s unlikely that ads alone are worth sharing. The reasoning behind why you saw a specific ad? Now that’s something to talk about.

We first met with Jason L. Baptiste and Andres Barreto, the founders of Onswipe on a snowy day in late January in New York City for an interview titled, Forget apps, Onswipe is the future of publishing. The two entrepreneurs were poised for the age of the tablet, both passionate writers who wanted to make their content look beautiful on the iPad. Armed with skills in coding and software development, and support from TechStars‘ mentors, Baptiste and Barreto, along with their third co-founder Mark Bao, have been tirelessly working to make the publishing experience more enjoyable for the reader from both the editorial experience and the advertising side. Today, Onswipe launches to the world.

“The tablet is the fastest growing piece of consumer electronics ever. In the future, everything will be touch. You already see little kids nowadays, confused as they touch their unresponsive television sets. Touch is going to be the entire web and Onswipe will be providing the premier monetization engine for it and its publishers. It will be the beauty of print with the scale and data of Google or DoubleClick… Yes, it’s an audacious goal. But we get a chance to change everything and rewrite all the rules. We want a completely different conversation. And we want people to do that with us. ”

-Jason L. Baptiste

To explain a complicated technical process as simply as possible, the Onswipe platform organizes a publisher’s content into a customizable, design conscious, mobile and tablet friendly format. In just under 3 minutes, Onswipe delivers an app-like experience within the web browser. Earlier this spring, Onswipe partnered with WordPress.com to power the tablet experience of over 18.5 million blogs via the service. And over the past few months, signups for the platform have been in the tens of thousands.

Onswipe works with publishers of any size, whether their audience consists of 100 people or 1 million and doesn’t charge for its platform but instead sees itself as a partner and monetizes by taking a small percentage of their advertising revenue. The revenue model is competitive with industry standards on other platforms, and is adjusted on a case by case basis, in particular with Onswipe’s Icon Partnership platform, which is for larger publishers that have their own ad sales teams. With Onswipe, the advertisers receive metrics and scale and publishers are monetizing web content at a much higher value than before. As the value of the CPM increases, Onswipe makes additional, incremental revenue.

“We don’t make money until you make money,” says Baptiste. But Onswipe has already made publishers a significant amount of money, according to the 25-year old CEO. Onswipe’s 8-10 launch partners include The Next Web, Gary Vaynerchuk, Hollywood.com, Stocktwits and Geek.com, as well as Icon partners Marie Claire, in an ad partnership with American Express and Slate, in an ad partnership with Sprint. Credit for the creative goes to Ogilvy and Mindshare for the two launch campaigns.

“We want to optimize Slate for every platform so our readers can consume Slate content wherever, however and whenever they want,” said John Alderman, General Manager of The Slate Group and Publisher of Slate. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with OnSwipe and Sprint on this latest incarnation of Slate that leverages HTML5 to bring an app-like experience to the iPad browser. “

Onswipe is the technology that joins publishers and advertisers together in the tablet web era. For the publishers who have resented the way technology has changed the industry in the past decade, Onswipe is helping them to maintain the beauty that advertising creatives deserve. Baptiste tells them that “apps are bullshit” and it’s all about making money off the tablet web. ”The banner ad is on life support, it just doesn’t work on the web or the tablet,” says Baptiste. Onswipe aims to deliver ads that people would want to rip out and put on the wall, to the tablet web.

OnSwipe believes its ad platform for tablets will trump both Apple’s iAd mobile advertising network and Google AdSense. “We’re creating something that the best creative agencies around the world can get excited about. No one ever remembers a Google ad. In fact, we dont think Google AdSense will work in the tablet world. But if you think of the past few decades of advertisements, you remember Got Milk, Just Do It, etc.,” says Baptiste. So far, the feedback from brands and agencies has been extremely positive.

“Think about those beautiful full page ads in magazines like GQ or Marie Claire. Let the art work and the photography speak for itself. We want to take your existing print creative, upload it and layer on slight modular activity such as geolocation so users have the ability to see stores nearby. We let you build something that is as beautiful as a print ad in the time it would take to set up a Google Ad words campaign,” says Baptiste.

Co-founder and CTO Mark Bao (the brilliant 19-year old entrepreneur whom they convinced to leave school), came aboard officially in June and has started working on “myOnswipe,” a feature that allows Instapaper-like offline reading, in the browser and in HTML5.  myOnswipe will allow readers to see what their friends are reading as well. So you’ll be able to take the subway in New York and continue reading an awesome TNW article on your iPad. It’s like having the Internet without any Internet as well.

Onswipe raised $5 million in a “Series Awesome” round led by Spark Capital, Lightbank, Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SVAngel, Betaworks, Morado, Eniac and Thrive Capital, totaling $6 million in funding to date. Baptiste hopes to use the funding to scale his current team of 10 to 20-25 people in the next year, introducing a mix of engineering and business development positions.

But just a little bit of that funding money might go towards celebrating (deservedly!). This week, the Onswipe gentlemen will be renting out New York’s posh Soho House to celebrate the launch of their long-awaited, brilliantly easy tablet publishing platform. The event will bring together all the partners, advertisers and people who’ve been involved with Onswipe, featuring a 15-minute keynote talk by Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN, who’s an advisor and close friend to Onswipe.

As one of Onswipe’s launch partners, be sure to check out how stunning our site looks on your iPad or iPhone this week. More announcements to come.