Facebook has announced the launch of Atlas, an advertising platform which they say has been rebuilt from the ground up to “tackle today’s marketing challenges.”
Facebook describes today’s marketing challenges as being able to reach people across devices, and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases. Atlas will purportedly tackle those challenges with a solution that’s being called “people-based marketing.”
Erik Johnson, Head of Atlas, describes people-based marketing in a release:
Atlas delivers people-based marketing, helping marketers reach real people across devices, platforms and publishers. By doing this, marketers can easily solve the cross-device problem through targeting, serving and measuring across devices. And, Atlas can now connect online campaigns to actual offline sales, ultimately proving the real impact that digital campaigns have in driving incremental reach and new sales.
This launch comes at a time when the average customer’s path to purchase, both in store and online, is being profoundly impacted as the customer is exposed to ads across multiple devices.
Atlas claims today’s technology for ad serving and measurement, which we all know as cookies, are flawed when used by themselves:
Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world.
The release also states that Atlas has been rebuilt on an entirely new code base, with a revamped user interface tailored especially for media planners. It comes with built-in targeting and measurement capabilities, and aims to simplify cross-device marketing with new ways of evaluating media performance.
Atlas will be partnering with a number of companies to bring “people-based” measurement to more channels and platforms by offering seamless integrations.
As an example, Instagram is partnered with Atlas as a publisher, which means mean the platform is integrated with Atlas to both measure and verify ad impressions. For Atlas advertisers who are already running campaigns through Instagram, Instagram ads will be included in Atlas reporting.
If Atlas interests you as an advertiser and you’d like to learn more, you can take a full product tour here.
