Facebook looks for more ad dollars

Regional - Facebook has stepped up efforts to attract more advertisers in the region to its platform, with the appointment of ihub Media as its advertising sales representative for Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan.

Under the agreement ihub Media will market the range of advertising products available through Facebook Ads in the mentioned markets, although the company's chief operating officer George Foo declined to reveal details on the terms of the contract: "Both parties are interested in growing this into a long term partnership."

The company is now selling Facebook's "integrated ad unit" which includes the homepage and video capabilities but because of "competitive" reasons, Foo would not discuss pricing strategy nor reveal the identity of the first regional advertiser to sign up via ihub because the campaign breaks "in the near future".

"What we want is to make sure advertisers get an impactful campaign," Foo said.

"Facebook's DIY [model] is an unsold inventory strategy, with no guaranteed impressions and it's a bidding system. Whereas what we're selling is guaranteed impressions."

In a statement Mike Murphy, Facebook VP of media sales, said: "We are very excited about how this relationship will enable even more marketers in Asia to forge trusted connections with consumers."

As a result of the new win, ihub has setup dedicated local Facebook sales teams to reach out to potential advertisers, something which the company has done in the past when it formed dLive Media to be the exclusive sales partner for client Microsoft Advertising Singapore.

"There's always a lot of confusion about our position and what we do - people say, ‘hey what's the difference between you and an agency'. There's no way you can be a seller and an agency because there's a conflict of interest here," Foo says.

"We're the only ones selling the premium sites in the countries. While others are very much selling blind buys these are grey areas which we don't go into normally."

In the Asia-Pacific region, Facebook's growth in the total number of unique visitors as of June 2008 was up 458% on an annual basis, according to statistics compiled by comScore.