Coca-Cola Holding Out on Facebook Beacon Participation; Overstock and Travelocity As Well

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Coca-Cola Holding Out on Facebook Beacon Participation; Overstock and Travelocity As Well

Correction: See our correction on the story below, here.

Coca-Cola, who was one of the charter advertisers when Facebook’s controversial ad program Beacon was announced earlier this month, is taking a rain check for now, even after the social network modified its program yesterday. “We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s VP of global interactive marketing, in an interview with NYT’s Bits Blog. Kruse said she could see good uses of Beacon, if it is on consumers’ terms.

Other advertisers include Comcast’s Fandango, IAC/i’s CollegeHumour.com, Blockbuster, (NYSE: BBI) Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and eBay. Would be interesting to see if anyone else follows suit…

Updated: Overstock.com suspended the Beacon program on Nov. 21, and as of Friday, hadn’t reinstated it, according to Mediapost. Also Travelocity, although touted by Facebook as a launch advertiser, was troubled enough by the program that it had not started using it as of Thursday.

Rafat Ali

@rafatali Dec 1, 2007 3:10 AM ET

Posted In: Advertising, Companies, Facebook, coca-cola

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Aha Facebook one of best social networking sites. its normal that Bigger MNC using Internet to promote their products. and this one of best example

Model

I think that Coca Cola is smart in waiting to see how well their new ad program works before jumping the gun too soon. I think social networks are a great form of targeted advertising, but I think some modification is needed for it to be completely effective.

Steve Goldner

Facebook’s implementation breaks the most powerful unwritten rule of social networks ... Social networks’ strength is that they provide equal benefit to all users. There is a way for advertisers to partake in this equal playing field, but Facebook’s implementation has not captured this. Maybe the "vendor community" understands this better than the "social network provider". You will see an equal benefit playing field implementation soon (probably not on Facebook) ... stay tuned.

Steve Goldner
stevegoldner@optonline.net

Hooman Radfar

I wonder if the Beacon program is basically Newfeed 2.0. There was huge controversy and backlash when they released the feature. Now it is definitely one of the more popular features on Facebook. Only time will tell, but it should be interesting to see.

Jonathan Trenn

As much as I thought that Facebook deserved to get beaten up about this, I'm surprised that the participating companies have gotten off without as much as a scratch. Soon, we'll see that I think. Coke just walked away, but others won't and get hit. They deserve it in my opinion.

Jonathan Trenn