The launch of Facebook Exchange (FBX) last year was met with considerable enthusiasm, and many in our industry rightly heralded it as a development with widespread implications for the online display ad market.

While there has been real excitement, the majority of discussion seems to have focused on retargeting through FBX, positioning the platform as the go-to place if you want to retarget. Some companies have even built their business around FBX and become specialists at retargeting through the platform.

Looking back to 2009 when real-time bidded (RTB) advertising was first introduced, there was much talk about a ‘targeting’ revolution. Yet today, all we seem to hear about is the ‘retargeting’ revolution! Don’t get me wrong, retargeting is useful and definitely has a part to play, as it is often critical in getting customers across the conversion finish line. However, what retargeting doesn’t do is something all advertisers want to do even more – find new customers!

Increasingly, marketers want to harness the full power and potential of RTB by using it to go beyond merely retargeting and to find new prospective customers and grow their business. We all want the programmatic industry to grow in-line with forecasts, but the industry seriously has to prove its prospecting mettle in the long term. If it doesn’t, marketers will eventually lose trust in display.

The majority of customer time online is spent consuming content, and a significant amount of this time – close to 20% – is spent on Facebook. According to comScore, 28% of all display advertising on the Web is served on Facebook, which is a massive percentage!

The FBX platform provides widespread reach and impressive access to high-quality inventory. This inventory is powerful for retargeting, but is even better for prospecting, as it provides marketers with the ability to utilise non-Facebook Web browsing histories to target users through the exchange. This means that if you have the data, you can now find prospective customers through FBX at significant scale.

Combining the astounding reach and engagement of Facebook with quality data and predictive modelling creates a really powerful opportunity. The results we have seen from FBX are extremely positive, and at Quantcast we see the platform as a fantastic prospecting engine for our clients.

In relative terms, FBX is still new, and the industry is still exploring how it can be used most effectively. In my opinion, a disproportionate amount of industry dialogue has been focused on FBX as a retargeting tool. With the right partners, Facebook really comes into its own for reaching new prospects at scale, rather than for merely targeting an existing pool of established brand ‘friends’.