Meta Platforms, Inc.
Tool for third-party creation of advertisements for a social networking system

Abstract:

A third-party advertisement creator builds a template for an advertisement using a markup language provided by the social networking system. The template may include a function to call information from a user's profile as well as a function to perform an action in the social networking system and/or external to the social networking system. An advertiser selects a template, add content to the template to create an advertisement, and then requests that the advertisement be published by the social networking system to a viewing user. At runtime, the social networking system parses the markup language in the advertisement to use tags with the viewing user's personal and social information and/or function calls to perform the action (e.g., to make the user a "fan" of a page). This allows personalization of interactive advertisements generated by a third party while protecting the user's personal information maintained by the social networking system.