Facebook rewrites the rules of adland Facebook has pitched a series of new marketing tools to advertisers, including mobile advertisements and more sophisticated Facebook pages for businesses, as it attempts to increase its appeal to marketers before its launch as a public company in the coming months. The social network's first big event for advertisers, held in New York on Wednesday, will generate new business not only for itself but also for the range of third-party advertising and marketing intermediaries that have been quietly building a marketing infrastructure for the social web. IN Media "It's not us, it's we," said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, addressing a room full of executives from these companies. If we're going to make marketing truly social, it won't be us, it's going to be you. These companies, unlike the gaming or music companies integrated with the social network, are unknown to Facebook users but play a big role in how the site makes money. "This isn't like Zynga," said Brad Reback, managing director at Oppenheimer, the investment boutique. You don't know who's powering the Coca Cola Facebook page or the McDonald's Facebook page, and you don't really care. The more Facebook introduces new ad products, the more complicated it gets for big companies such as Coke and McDonald's to manage the hundreds of Facebook pages they have, in multiple countries and multiple languages, or target and deliver the millions of dollars-worth of Facebook ads they buy. With Wednesday's announcement, consumer companies had to worry about reshaping their Facebook page to fit the new timeline design, which gave companies a "launch pad" to tell their "stories," said Mike Hoefflinger, Facebook's director of global business marketing. Then they had to work out how to take advantage of the various paid distribution channels on the site to spread those "stories," from the traditional ads column on the right-hand side of a user's page to the user's mobile NewsFeed. Groups such as Vitrue and Buddy Media, which license page management software to companies for a monthly fee, as well as TBG Digital and Brighter Option, which buy social ads for the companies, then keep a percentage of the sale, are earning healthy revenues for themselves at the same time as they feed traffic and ad dollars to Facebook. "Other people are making a tonne of money on the back of Facebook," said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. I'm sure it's a billion-dollar industry, if not more. Reggie Bradford, chief executive of Vitrue, said the social network's new offerings would increase his roster of new clients and boost his contracts with existing clients. "The complexity is hard for marketers to get their arms around," he said. We're seeing a really strong uptick in adoption and growth. Investors and bankers are increasingly beguiled by the rapidly growing revenues at these companies and the business models that promise regular income via monthly subscription fees. Mr Reback said many of these companies had grown more than 100 per cent in each of the last few years and showed promise of sustaining 30 to 50 per cent revenue growth for the next three to five years. "Couple that with the size of the Facebook platform and this idea that buyers of the product are moving from the experimental stage to the truly operational, and it will be an integral part of every day marketing programmes," he said. Hoping to ride the growth, venture capitalists and bankers have made a string of new multimillion-dollar investments in start-ups in this field recently, with others being eyed for their own potential initial public offerings. Goldman Sachs has called the chief executives at both Vitrue and TBG Digital in recent weeks, the companies said. The bank has been vigorous in contacting companies in this field as it attempts to position itself more prominently with technology companies, after landing top underwriting spots behind Morgan Stanley on some of the hottest tech IPO filings - most recently Facebook. "It's no secret that Goldman Sachs is the next prettiest girl," said Tony Zingale, chief executive of Jive, a social networking tool for businesses that just went public in December. Everyone starts calling on you as your company becomes more successful.