New Ripple6 Units Put Social Conversations in Display Ads

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Social media services company Ripple 6, a division of PointRoll, today unveiled a pair of ad units that dynamically display social networking conversations in real time, making Ripple6 the second company this week to debut a display product that incorporates live social media content.

The units, known as Social Ad and Socialite, pull comments directly from an advertiser's social networking site and display them as scrolling text at the bottom of the ad. The Social Ad unit is for clients who want to pull comments from a community they are hosting on Ripple6's social platform, Social Hub. Socialite is for clients who don't have a Social Hub community and would rather pull comments from Facebook, Twitter or their corporate blog.

Users can click on the comments in the ads if they want to visit the sites they were pulled from. Clients have the option of letting comments display automatically, or pre-approving them. 

The hope is to foster deeper brand interaction with consumers by engaging them in ongoing conversations, rather than leading them to a static Web site.

"In the beginning, marketers saw value in putting customer views or testimonials on ads," said Sang Kim, CEO of Ripple6. "This is taking it to the next level and actually synchronizing the best conversations about their brands within a real-time ad unit."

The ads are designed to run on Ripple6s Social Hub, said Sang, but can be exported to any outside advertising network.

Earlier this week, BuzzLogic unveiled a display unit called Buzroll that allows advertisers to display content on any topic pulled dynamically from around the Web.