Facebook has relaunched Atlas, an ad serving platform designed to help advertisers and digital media buyers to create, buy, measure and optimise their digital campaigns. The announcement from Atlas indicates that this is a complete rebuild of the original platform to address current marketing challenges such as “reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases”.

The new Atlas solution will use “people-based marketing”, moving away from the use of cookies which is the prevalent method to serve and measure advertising. “Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world. People-based marketing solves these problems,” writes Erik Johnson, Head of Atlas, on the Atlas blog.

Atlas Solutions is a Facebook company, after the latter acquired it from Microsoft for a reported $100 million in 2013. Not only will Atlas use data from Facebook to help advertisers with their targeting, but the data available to Facebook from different users of the Atlas platform is likely to be used by the social network to develop or customise its offerings.

The question is whether Atlas can become a viable competitor to Google’s DoubleClick solution.

- The NetMarketer Editorial Bureau