Marketing agencies, and the brands who use them, now have another distribution option to choose from: Atlas has relaunched its ad server, which serves up display ads on websites and mobile apps. Now, it’s powered by Facebook’s user gender, location, and age information. The buzzword-laden post announcing the news calls it “people-based marketing.”
What that really means is that users will see ads targeted at them based on their official Facebook profile information, instead of from user-profile deductions drawn from a history of all the websites they’ve visited. For example: A 55-year-old man in Kentucky who just happens to really like Jezebel and the SFist will see ads meant for 55-year-old Midwestern men when he peruses the web, instead of ads meant for 16-year-old girls from the Bay Area. Or at least, he’ll see the Midwestern ads when said ad has been served by Facebook’s Atlas ad server, instead of, say, Google’s DoubleClick.