I've been seeing these new Facebook-ish Google ads in Gmail for the last several days.
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They appear in the right-hand column. When you click on the ad, the email content area turns into a landing page for that ad. Then you can click through the LP to the advertiser's site.
Here's the landing page within Gmail:
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Just googled it (lol) and came across this post from Jay Weintraub:
http://www.jayweintraub.com/2011/07/...-facebook.html
Definitely has a lot of potential. But probably not for shady affiliates like us 
Dang that's really cool! Haha wow you could get super creative with that...
Are these ads open to use yet? I hadn't seen anything on those
the fact that you can save the ads to your inbox or forward to your friends suggests to me that this could be google's groupon type coupon/daily deals service.