Another missed opportunity by Facebook’s advertisers

I love Facebook because it lets me read what my friends are doing, see pictures, share parts of my own life with friends, and play an occasional game. I would not do any of these things if it cost me money (well, probably; I hope I'm never asked to pay). But I'm not an idiot, either, so I understand they need to generate revenue somehow. That means ads, and I'm okay with that.
You may have heard that advertisers aren't loving their returns from FB ads. "Monetizing" the social media platform is challenging because people are there to interact with their friends, not advertisers. Well, that may be true. It does seem more invasive that ads are targeted to you more precisely based on your profile information, but hey, FB needs to make money somehow, right? TechCrunch posted some leaked info on FB's financial situation that doesn't look too positive. Right now, ads are the only way to generate income from this sort of site.

They *almost* had it right... not.

But advertisers aren't doing a good job, at least those whose ads FB thinks are targeted at my demographic. I saw an ad to "Tattoo my wife's name on my profile." Hmmm... not sure why I'd be inclined to do such a thing. But yeah, maybe Jen deserves to see her name in digital lights on my FB profile. Oh wait—my wife's name isn't Jen, as this FB advertiser should know. I've Photoshopped the ad next with my status box so you can see the mistake. If that ad had read "Crystal" instead of "Jen," I may have been inclined to click through and see what it's about. (Whatever it was, I doubt it's really free as they claim.)

I can think of a couple reasons this might not been possible:

1. Privacy - FB doesn't share that level of details from user's profiles with advertisers. Meaning, they target me to the level of "male, married" but not "male, married, wife: 'Crystal'."
2. Technical - The advertiser didn't want to figure a way to dynamically-generate ad images based on the name.

If it's due to reason 1, that's good; it's nice to know there are some things FB won't sell out about me. If it's #2, then that's really a missed opportunity for the advertiser who took the easy way out. Sure, it'd be tricky to do: you'd have to query the user's profile info, render that spouse's name after addressing issues of name length (it's no mistake they chose a three-letter name), and deliver the image for the ad. It's a lot of work compared to serving up a single image, but it might be worth it. As it is, the ad came across as half-baked and kept me from clicking it (though it did get me to write a blog post!).

Am I being too critical? Perhaps. But advertisers need to step it up on FB and other social media platforms that offer more ways to target users. Advertisers need personalization—but done well—to get through to savvy users. This ad missed the mark.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find out who this Jen woman is...

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