I recently ran a campaign on Facebook to recruit Millennials to some focus groups. The “headline” seemed sure to capture attention: Earn $50 in 75 minutes. Thanks to the pay per click ad model the ad received lots of exposure – 932,917 impressions to be exact. But the clicks didn’t happen; just 160 responded for an appallingly low .02% click through rate. Too bad Millennials don’t need market research because it would have been a very cheap branding campaign. My 17-year-old, Facebook-addicted daughter explained: “Mom, no one clicks on Facebook ads”. Silly me. I should have reread my own Ad Age article, where Notre Dame students’ view of social media was explained this way: “Students do not think Facebook was invented for any other purpose that to facilitate their social lives.”

According to new articles by Adweek and Fortune, my experience is not unique. Adweek, “Social Ad Lessons”, points out that eMarketer lowered its forecast for social-media ad spending by 12 percent due to “tempered enthusiasm for meshing ads with social environments”. MySpace will miss its $1 billion U.S. sales goal by 11 percent and Facebook will take in 13 percent less than the $305 million forecast. In Finding Cracks on Facebook, Fortune explains the shortfall as due to the “blase attitude” media buyers have toward the company. The code on leveraging social media as a medium is not broken, but some are getting closer to the key by thinking of social media as a new form of product placement. Adweek describes successful efforts this way:

… Slide and RockYou are developing a new-era form of product placement that brings brands directly into the application experience, rather than relegate them to a banner on the periphery. One of Slide’s most popular Facebook applications is SuperPoke, which lets users to give each other virtual nudges. Slide has begun working in branded SuperPokes, like spraying a spritz of perfume for Estee Lauder and rolling a set of dice as part of a Vegas-themed Palm campaign. Coke brand VitaminWater ran a SuperPoke campaign in April that resulted in 9.7 million virtual versions of the brand being sent out.

Meanwhile, save your money on banner ads. They are simply wallpaper.