» As if you didn’t know already, Facebook display is now a big draw for European media buyers. I’m hearing of big chunks of media spend being shifted into the FB channel by the big agencies. You’ve got to follow the eyeballs, and the micro-targeting isn’t bad either. To confirm Facebook's growing influence in display, Glow Digital announced this week the on-boarding of its two hundredth advertiser on the One Media Manager platform. One Media Manager enables advertisers to manage and optimise media spend on Facebook. The self-service platform has been incredibly popular with European media buyers, and is currently used by a number of the large agency groups to buy Facebook display inventory. The press release is available here, and contains some nice visuals on CTR uplifts for previous campaigns.

» There was a speculative piece this week on Clickz on whether or not Facebook was looking to launch an ad network - which generated some interesting industry commentary. Some argued that Facebook would leverage its social graph, strike up some publisher partnerships and go straight to the agencies with highly targeted display inventory in hand. Others made the point that Facebook would not want to go down the resource-heavy ad sales route. Nor would they want they want to jump into the incredibly competitive arena of publisher acquisition. Instead Facebook should build its own DSP. With its own proprietary data and the publisher data it’s acquiring through the omnipresent “Like” button, it could develop a FBDSP proposition. Automate the buys. Go to the agencies and let them put masses of media spend through it, while charging a nice healthy cut of ad volumes traded. Is it going to do any of these? If I was going to take a punt, it would probably be the latter strategy. If advertising is the main driver for revenue growth, watch Facebook look to explore this opportunity in the next twelve months. But it’s hard to know what Facebook is planning to do as company execs rarely talks to the media about display strategy – and when they do it’s generally something completely unrelated to the question asked.