By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO

On Feb 13th, Business Insider broke a story about Facebook changing its PMD program that caught the attention of a lot of people in the social ad:tech space. AdExchanger picked up on the story as well. What’s going on? Facebook has changed the rules regarding new entrants to its Preferred Marketing Developer program – the single most important program for a company like my own, Kinetic Social, for conducting advertising on Facebook.

In the AdExchanger article, Zach Rodgers’ writes that Facebook is now telling “prospective PMD partners … (that) they’ll need to prove their knowledge of its ad products and their ability to “influence your clients on media spend.” Zach adds, “Facebook has stopped accepting new badge applications while it reshapes the PMD requirements and works its way through a glut of badge requests. The company expects to open up the program again in about two weeks, albeit with a significantly higher bar.”

See the full AdExchanger piece here.

At Kinetic Social, we see this development as a very good thing. AdExchanger reached out to us today, as well as two other PMD partners, for our opinions … which tracked pretty closely to each other, interestingly. It seems that the industry overall is looking for a “higher bar” and hoping to see the wheat culled from the chaff, as I discussed in a post last week.

Here is what we told AdExchanger:

“This is one more step in FB’s ongoing effort to improve the ad experience. They are raising the bar here, and that’s a good thing for the serious players … less noise in the ecosystem, more focus on actually adding value.

A potential concern would be with the emphasis on inside referrals, which could be good or bad. The current PMD program already seems to be heavily weighted in this direction … for the smaller players that have superior products but less penetration into the internal world of FB, this represents a hurdle which could work at cross-purposes with improving the program.

Bottom line: overall, we think this is good for the PMD program. It represents FB putting increasing emphasis on working with partners with real technology and demonstrable value-add, and who can guide brands on how to fully harness FB. It should help thin out a glutted space (have you seen the Lumascape recently??) and, in turn, make it easier for marketers to make a PMD choice based on skill. It probably isn’t such a good thing for the newbies with no FB relationship, or for the established PMDs who have pursued a ‘reseller’ business model.”

Find the full article here, well worth the read with astute comments from Rob Leathern and Jeff Dachis.

This development is part of a phenomenon I blogged about last week, The Smell of Social Desperation.

Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM
Connect with Don on Google+

Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a company launched in 2011 with a core focus of marrying “Big Data” to social media on behalf of large brand advertisers.  He also serves in the active reserve of the US Navy, where he is the Commanding Officer of a highly deployable, selectively staffed, joint-service combat logistics unit that supports forward deployed war-fighters.

Full Profile