I don’t normally logout of Facebook, I’m usually on a computer that I know no one else will be using, so the privacy and security risk of staying logged in is minimal for me. However, the other day, for some reason, I did log out and I noticed something that I had never seen before. On the Facebook logout screen was a huge, full-screen ad for Bing.

I didn’t think much of it because I know that Bing and Facebook have had a very strong partnership for several years and my immediate assumptions were that most people are like me and don’t log out of Facebook that often. But then I saw an article from Ad Age that revealed these logout page ads are part of a Facebook marketing program that costs more than $700,000 per day!! In the article they say that the logout ad component of that program is around $160,000 per day. The Ad Age article shows an example of the ad that the movie Titanic is running for the re-release of that movie. Here are a couple of other examples that I found.

Bing

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Blackberry

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Now all three of these examples are from large entities that presumably have some marketing dollars to throw around. I’m a huge fan of testing things, that is the only real way to know if a particular tactic is going to work for you. So, I’m very curious if this is working for these brands. Are they getting clicks? If they are not getting clicks are they seeing a lift in other metrics like display impressions, visits to their websites, etc.? The Ad Age articles provides some data about the number of people that logout of Facebook everyday in the US and the numbers are big, 37 million people per day. But they highlight some concerns regarding the frame of mind the person is in. My belief is that when someone logs out they are already moving on to the next site they want to visit.

I would love to see a large hotel company or travel entity try this and then share some of their learnings. I think that could help all of us better understand the trends in the growing social advertising space. As Facebook moves rapidly towards their IPO expect to see more and more of these monetization tactics being launched and talked about.