Useless advertising
I sent an email to Facebook support a month or so ago about their basketball promotion:
Why, if the competition isn't open to non-US residents, is it being so heavily promoted in the UK to users who are members only of UK networks? Just a thought.
I got a fairly boilerplate response, albeit from someone in the team responsible for the promotion, so at least it had ended up in the right place.
The other day I spied a News Feed ad for the US Army; I’m guessing that I’d have to be a US citizen to sign up, so that’s another wasted ad impression, and another slightly pissed off user.
These aren’t mass-market banner ads; these are campaigns built in to the Facebook platform, and so it seems bizarre that an organisation which only hires young, smart, technical people hasn’t put more thought into this.
All in all, Facebook has an advertising platform which is outmoded, and serves its users poorly. It may be that it’s cheaper and easier to do it this way, and that the ultimate loss in revenue from those wasted ad impressions doesn’t count for much. Still, as the online ad market advances apace, it’s unlikely that advertisers will want to put up with this for very much longer; it’s not as if context sensitive or even geo-targeted ads are something new.
Personal data
Facebook have lots of it; their business proposition revolves around providing a safe place for people to share personal information with others. I’d gladly give them more of it if they used it to provide a better service.
In fact, their privacy policy states:
Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they’re more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don’t tell the movie company who you are.
Looking beyond the fact that this is actually a very clearly worded privacy policy, which I admire, it gives Facebook the freedom to personalise the ad experience.
Question is, why aren’t they doing it?