Facebook’s gifting ad units have been around since the fall of 2009 – but it appears that Facebook has added functionality to the unit that displays gifts and messages shared between your friends. This change is inline with Facebook’s new social ‘widget’ strategy and is yet another example of using friends’ activity to encourage your own activity (see yesterday’s Groupon example here).

Below is an interesting premium Facebook ad unit labeled “Family Night In Gift” because:

1. It is actually a masked campaign for TBS’s Are We There Yet (which premiers tonight)
which I find confusing – but I would be interested to see how the click through / engagement rates change based on the ad creative

2. It uses Facebook’s gifting unit and displays gifts shared between your friends:

Like the previous version of the units, you can share with your friends directly within the ad unit. I like how the Facebook provides a hover instruction as you type (“include a message with your gift”) and you can see the message between your friends:

If you click on the ad unit, you arrive at the TBS “Are We There Yet” page and go directly to their gift tab. The gift tab features a richer version of the ad unit: users can choose among three different gifts to give their friends – and they can make them public or private:

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