In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook has changed the photo experience. Some will “Like” it others may not. One thing is clear though, for marketing and targeted ads, it’s a winner. When you’re looking at a photo in the new viewer there’s a lot less visual noise and any ads being displayed will get more attention than the current ones you’re used to seeing on your News Feed wall. If photos are tagged with a branded restaurant, retail stores, entertainment venues, I can see those specific ads working well. 

The folks at Facebook did a great job of explaining the process they went through to redesign the photo viewer and their goal was to improve the experience. Sharing photos is one of the most used features in Facebook so it makes sense they’d want to improve it.  Reliability, reading comments, load times, are among the problems they decided to address. However, it’s hard to look over the fact that this will be a much more compelling space for advertisers.

Good thing it’s been a long time since we first experienced a targeted ad in Gmail. I remember the first time I saw ads on Gmail that were obviously getting keywords from the content in my email and displaying what they intended to be relevant ads. It was a bit unnerving at first; yes of course Big Brother haunted my thoughts for a bit. But now that we’ve come to accept that if we’re putting ourselves out in the digital space, the data will be used in some way, at least it’s not a surprise anymore.