Why Facebook Will Never Be a Great Advertising Platform

Well, the awesomeness of Burger King's "Whopper Sacrifice"

online advertising

campaign has come to an end. The application still exists, mind you, but it has been severely de-fanged after Facebook forced the developer to change the way it works due to "privacy concerns".

Seems Facebook had a flame-broiled beef against the way the app notified all of your friends that somebody had been dropped in favour of the almighty Whopper (normally, friends removals are not announced over the news feed).

Unfortunately, that was the whole point of the campaign -- to let your friends in on the joke, and to spread the campaign virally by alerting others about its presence.

Now, nobody will get a notification when they are sacrificed, and all of your friends will think you're a jerk for dropping them with no notice. Yay!

Well, Burger King tried (and hey, they got a lot of press out of it, so this

social marketing

campaign was undoubtedly a huge success for them), but Facebook's unwillingness to play ball with these marketing and advertising agencies isn't doing itself any favours if it still wants to pretend to be a viable advertising platform.