ideasarehere

Facebook suggests the biggest advantage they offer for advertisers is higher relevancy of ads because they’re able to match them to the individual member’s preferences.

But what happens when members don’t want to expose themselves in the way they reveal all the movies they’ve seen, books they’ve read, music and activities and causes and religion and other worldviews they like, is spam. Because the ads they’re being presented are just as irrelevant as the one on the Altavista page in 1996.

Because if this info is not around, the ads you’re being presented are being calculated, it seems, on the popularity with Joe and Jane Average, or rather the negation of matches. The ads for the rest of us. Which should lead marketers, if they were smart and honest to themselves (which in many cases they don’t seem to be), to either demand better filtering criteria or think about their strategy and tactics.

Way to go for FB and marketers to keep their promises. Sometimes I doubt if they intend to. Otherwise, if they don’t care enough, it’s just a question of time till the whole thing starts slipping. It already does.