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Had an interesting night at the ‘SF Bay Area Facebook Meetup’ last night hosted by Sudha Jamthe at AOL in Mountainview, with  Altura Ventures CEO Lee Jay Lorenzen as guest speaker. As Lee went through his excellent and very interesting presentation it occurred to me how strange that many of these wonderfully interactive Facebook Apps relied on plain old banner advertising for their revenue streams. Isn’t this whole social network environment meant to be populated by people who don’t want ads pushed at them. It seems to me that the Facebook app developers are way ahead of the ad agencies here. They are deliberately creating highly viral applications (Ad execs read “Free Media”, “Cut Through” “Brand Building” etc) but relay on banner ads to monetise their efforts. Surely the ad industry should be making a huge effort to link the highly engaging nature of these apps to disengaged consumers.

One of the apps demo’d last night was Sumit Gupta’s Pumpkin Man, that allows users to carve virtual Jack O Lanterns. It was obvious that some people had spent a long time carving their pumpkin – especially the guy who carved the naked lady! Advertisers would spend big time for this type of brand engagement, but apparently there are few branded applications in the thousands available at Facebook.  I would hazard a guess that no one from the ad industry attended last nights show, but would recommend they attend the next event – They’re clients would love them for it.

If Sumit can carve Pumpkin, then I’m sure he can chop up salad, which gives me a great idea for a Safeway application – or is that ad!