Michael Lazerow, CEO of social advertising company Buddy Media, discusses recent changes to Facebook's advertising system. Facebook has revamped its ads to make content a bigger part of brands' presence. With Facebook's new Timeline pages, the line between advertising and content is blurred as great content can also function as ads. Lazerow says Buddy Media helps brands manage both paid and organic social media together across different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

1. Buddy Media's Mike Lazerow: How Marketers Can Win With New Facebook Ads
With the coming Facebook IPO, attention has focused on the business of advertising on Facebook.
Recently Facebook revamped its ad system to make content a much bigger part of brands’
presence on the social network.
At the South By Southwest conference, we caught up with Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy
Media, the large company in social advertising with 900 customers such as Procter & Gamble,
Johnson & Johnson, Taco Bell and Sony, and 10,000 brand pages on Facebook. The biggest
Facebook change, with the content-rich Timeline pages, is the blending between what is
considered advertising and what is considered content. ”What (Facebook) has said is a future
exists in which great content is also the ad and the ad is also great content,” Lazerow says.
The Timeline changes for brands are substantial, but many marketers that understand the space
can react relatively fast, says Lazerow. Facebook typically launches a new product once every 12
to 18 months and often launches new features every week, so many are now used to that pace.
“We look at it and brands look at it as an evolution within a revolution,” he says. ”Facebook, when
they’re doing incredibly well, they just blow up their ad products. The best companies in the world
blow themselves up.”
The first big change, Lazerow says, is the new Reach Generator product, which ensures that 75%
of followers will see an ad instead of the typical 16%. Using the new system, marketers can take
their best content and make it into ads. “You buy the distribution,” he says. “You take the best
content and get it to your fans in a better way… There is no ad unit that doesn’t start with a post to
your Facebook page.”
Buddy Media recently acquired ad optimization company Brighter Option. The acquisition will
help companies be able to manage both paid and earned media together on social platforms. “So
what that means is instead of doing free publishing here and paid over here, it’s all the same,”
Lazerow says. In other words, ad creatives can be posted on a brand’s Facebook page as content,
while the best content can also become advertising. Buddy’s system helps agencies and brands
determine what ads or content gets the most likes, clicks or shares. The system also analyzes
which combination of text and image drives the most feedback from consumers. Rather than just
media buyers allocating a certain amount of dollars to certain campaigns, now consumers can
determine what ads people see.
But whereas before Facebook was pretty much the only social game in town, now brands need to
have a broad strategy across a variety of outlets, Lazerow says, including Twitter, YouTube,
Google+ and LinkedIn. Buddy Media’s tools work across these different services and will soon
add others such as Tumblr. Brands have to adjust how they approach each service differently.
”Facebook is not like Twitter. In Twitter everything goes by and you only see 8% of it. In

2. Facebook about 16% gets through,” he says.
See more above in our video interview with Lazerow.
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