From a business perspective, it was my impression that one of the great promises of Facebook and other social networking sites is that they can offer extremely selective ad targeting. Facebook users willingly provide large amounts of enormously specific information about themselves, from their age and location to their artistic interests and sexual preferences.
Why, then, are Facebook ads targeted in such a transparent, startling, even offensive way? Here’s one sidebar ad I’ve been getting lately that makes my eyeballs curdle.
Who’s going to look at this and think, “wow, they made it just for me!” Here are some alternate versions I made that seem just as effective.
It seems that few advertisers are really taking advantage of the opportunity, nor is Facebook promoting it successfully. And the thoughtless transparency of the real ad at top (“Look, I know how old you are from your profile!”) shows how little craft is informing the production of such ads.
Perhaps its no surprise then that I see such a small number of ads on Facebook. Ignoring the service’s controversial attempt to share purchasing data, the more ordinary banner call-outs are few in number (take a look, there just aren’t that many) and the newsfeed ads are infrequent.
Maybe one of the problems is assuming that successful hypertargeted advertising can even be accomplished with traditional banners and large-scale ad buys. But as I discussed in Persuasive Games, advertising agencies revel so much in the media buy, its impossible for them to think of another way. And for their part, Facebook hasn’t exactly provided a place on their platform conducive to targeting in the way that Google did with adwords.