Given the likelihood of Facebook buying Microsoft’s Atlas platform, lots of speculation has swirled around what the social network company would want to do with the ad server. The popular answer: Facebook is looking to take Atlas’ capabilities at operating across the Web, combine them with Facebook social graph data, create a new ad network and go after the third-party ad serving business. In other words, the argument goes, Facebook is looking to go head to head against Google/DoubleClick.
That might be part of the play here. But I hardly think that’s the whole answer.
To my mind, an Atlas play would really be about attribution.
After all, it is attribution that’s the biggest driver of ad dollars online since day one. Google is a perfect example here: It’s incredibly easy to draw a straight line from the keyword you advertise on, to the text you deliver to a searcher, to the landing page you send the searcher to — and finally to the sale (or failure to make a sale). It’s that ease of attribution that made Google into the most successful direct marketing property in history.
