While not the first company to do so, Scion released a new promotion last week that uses Facebook Connect to put you directly into an advertisement. The campaign, which resembles the Doritos advergame and the Prototype game trailer, places you and your friends in a video in which you are the featured D.J. at a local club and you are driving to the event in your new Scion tC RS.
The only problem with the new Scion promotion is that it takes an immense amount of time to load once you log in with Connect. No, this isn’t a few seconds that you are waiting … it’s many minutes. I was willing to sit through the delay in order to capture the video of the promotion below, however I seriously doubt that most viewers will be willing to do the same.
My guess is that the primary cause of the delay is the rendering model that the developers behind this site chose to use. Regardless of the technical issues facing this promotion, it’s still a rare occasion when Facebook Connect is used to pull in profile information directly into a video promotion. While I believe this form of advertisement will be used in the future for television promotions, this provides a glimpse of what we can expect in the future.
If you want to see what it looks like to have yourself in the ad, you can go check out the Scion rSTC. While I think these promotions will be able to optimize which friends are selected and will eventually be able to avoid tiny errors like having your face cut out in photos (as was the case in one of the images in the promotion below), this is definitely a step in the right direction.
What do you think of the new Scion promotion?
So they want us to click "Facebook Connect" so that an advertiser can pull any and all of our profile info and then wait several minutes to show us an ad? Hmmm I'll pass, thanks!
Comment by Facebook User — March 1, 2010 @ 6:23 am
Thanks for making it quick and EZ to check that out.
Last comment illustrates the most common misunderstanding. in this execution the advertiser actually never gets access to any of your content rather they get the access to display your content to you. They just get random FBid#s.
This is the KEY to why FB is such a great solution for both advertisers and people. It is an amplified and safe openID.
My sense is the generation coming online does get this.
Comment by Paul Malin — March 1, 2010 @ 7:21 am
Well, I always thought using Facebook Connect gives the same permissions that using apps does; however, even if I am wrong about that, this over-personalization of ads is not a good thing for consumers.
Comment by Facebook User — March 1, 2010 @ 7:51 am
Didn't take several minutes for me… Took about 10 seconds. It's pretty cool. Looks like they're using a 3D engine to render that stuff on top of the video.
There are multiple ways to do this, but if you check the server traffic, it looks like the wait time is due to the fact that the page is waiting to download images from facebook.
Cheers.
Comment by EducatedInterloper — March 4, 2010 @ 4:15 pm
This is actually pretty cool! The people that popped in my video were actually people I'd want to party with. Cool car too.
Comment by Philly D — March 4, 2010 @ 4:32 pm