Adknowledge offers advertising across Facebook apps

by Kunal Dutta, Media Week 14-Aug-08, 10:00

LONDON - Adknowledge, the US-based behavioural targeting firm that acquired Media Run last year, has launched a UK operation to host advertising across Facebook's 33,000 applications.

The new service offer advertisers display and integrated ad campaigns across social media applications such as Scrabulous. As well as Facebook, the network will also target other social network sites, including MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster.

Advertisers will be able to target audiences split by categories, such as games, music, film and dating. The technology will match advertising creative with age and gender groups.

John Cole, UK managing director of Adknowledge, said the company, which claimed 10 billion page impressions in July, was looking for a 60% share of the social networking digital media market by next year.

Cole said: "The fact that we are offering something unique to the crowded ad market in the UK, along with our ability to deliver users in such a highly targeted ways, puts us in a great position."

He added: Demographic targeting has been around as long as advertising has been in existence, but now – with so many application developers using our system – we can take it to the next stage and show much more relevant ads to our users.

Clients already in place include Vodafone, Orange, Hotels.com and WWF.