Nothing so small caused as large a change in advertising as the humble Like button. Overnight, that tiny thumbs-up became a new KPI for marketers, agencies, and content creators, regardless of its actual effectiveness. Now the entire industry is looking at another one being unleashed.
It's fairly certain it will not be an actual 'dislike' button since the ability to create hate campaigns directed at specific groups (or brands) is way too much of a risk for Facebook to allow. More likely, it will be something that, according to Mark Zuckerberg, represents "empathy".
On its face this sounds like manna from heaven to advertisers, pure measurement and targeting catnip. It's a richer signal, which would give us richer intelligence with which to make decisions. Sounds awesome, right?
There is an inherent danger in here though. Many of my colleagues will be as surprised as I am to hear me say it, but there IS such a thing as too much data.
The danger of any empathy data coming from a mega-scale platform like Facebook is that it comes to drown out all other information, and becomes the de facto single measure of truth about our behaviour. We've already seen this happen with Google, who are rarely challenged as a source when it comes to telling us how we behave.
What this can lead to is advertisers and agencies coming to rely solely on this intelligence from data signals, at the expense of real, human interaction, analysis, and idea creation. With budgets stretched to breaking point, Facebook's new data pool will be another temptation for planners never to leave their desks.
This would be a shame, since great work does not come from data signals alone. Great work comes from ideas, ideas come from understanding human behaviours, and human behaviours cannot be reduced to the click of one button or another.
The data-hungry industry we all work in should be frothing at the mouth in terms of the reporting and targeting ability Facebook's new functionality will bring - and it will no doubt make Facebook into an even more fantastic channel for advertisers - but as an industry, we must ensure these new signals don't drown out the human noise that is the breeding ground for the very best ideas.
Alex Kirk is the group planning director for The Entertainment Division (TED), a specialist entertainment unit at MediaCom.