

A FB ad targeted at one person (my wife) - kylebragger
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/a-fb-ad-targeted-at-one-person-my-wife.html

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TomOfTTB
I guess I'm just a cynic but my take away from this was "regular users of
Facebook get so good at ignoring ads that you can literally put pictures of
their own children in an ad and they'll still take forever to notice"

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lftl
One issue with this may be that for awhile FB let you use create ads that
would pull from a user's and their friends' profile pictures. This led to some
pretty amusing ads for dating services with people's signifcant other being
protrayed as looking for love. Not sure if FB still lets advertisers do this,
but it may signifcantly contribute to ad blindess for ads like this.

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Sukotto
hmm... so if you were a divorce lawyer you could run a "looking for love" ad
using a picture of a loved one and a "need a divorce?" ad right underneath it.

Evil, but possibly effective.

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riffer
Mega creepy ads may work for selling certain products and services, but nobody
wants to trust a creepy lawyer

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hugh3
I read that as "FBI" and thought it was pretty creepy.

Even having read it as "FB" it's still pretty creepy.

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erlanger
Or even FSB.

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chwolfe
A college buddy of mine recently started a wedding photography business. He
has had great success with FB ads. Word of mouth and referrals are starting to
ramp up but FB was where he got his first 10-15 contracts (it helps when you
can target "Women who are Engaged in Metro area"). The only thing that drives
him nuts is that he hasn't figured out a way to not advertise on
apps.facebook.com (games) because the bounce rate is obviously insane.

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ivankirigin
This is really easy. I did the same thing a few months ago, and made the ad
picture something I knew my wife would recognize. I made a landing page where
I set a chartbeat alert for even a single visit. Then I made a form on the
page to ask who the person was.

I didn't tell anyone about this, and hoped my wife would say she saw this
funny ad.

Turns out she had seen it for months and just didn't click it. She thought it
was some spammy ad that had a personal photo of us. It was hilarious to learn
it worked right away, but that targeting an individual doesn't actually
matter.

The ad system is actually awesome wrt privacy. Advertisers never get personal
information, but can still target with agility.

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anigbrowl
_targeting an individual doesn't actually matter_

But is that because your ad was funny? Suppose I target an individual with a
very serious message: say, _911 ABDUCTION ALERT!_ and a photo of their kid -
that could well generate a reaction, especially if said kid were away at camp,
or the subject of a custody dispute. Someone with ill intent might be able to
leverage such a tactic to great effect, though I imagine FB probably has some
filtering in place to prevent such obvious abuse.

But suppose I take a more subtle approach...say, I target members of a FB
group for sufferers of a particular medical condition, but only those who
don't have a college degree and are also in a group devoted to some dumb
conspiracy theory. People like that might be quite vulnerable to social
engineering attacks.

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ivankirigin
The latter example has little to do with identifying individuals, but with
targeting in general.

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vaksel
the reason facebook CTR is so low is because people go on facebook to use
facebook. They aren't in a buying/browsing mood, so they tend to tune out the
ads.

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lftl
I definitely think thats part of the picture, but I feel presentation is part
of it too. Google has spent a TON of time testing their ad formats to get the
right measure CTR without annoyance. I don't get the feeling FB has invested
as much time in their format, and that they have a lot of options on improving
ad performance while still not MySpacing themselves.

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smokey_the_bear
If I see an ad I'm interested in on Google, I'll click it. That happened to me
once on facebook, and I got dozens of pop up windows that popped under more
when I try to close them. I don't trust then enough to click on one of their
ads again.

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watty
I wonder how much he ended up paying total. I may have to try this for an
upcoming anniversary but i'll probably have to point it out like he did.

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epi0Bauqu
Essentially 0. $1 CPM.

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WillyF
I'm still astounded at how little Facebook has done with such a powerful
targeted advertising platform.

There are some affiliate marketers making bank through Facebook ads, and there
are some job seekers who have landed jobs through Facebook ads, but what other
success stories are there?

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codejoust
That's why you don't put in so much personal information. The oddest, though,
is when looking at a site that has nothing to do with IT, there are contextual
ads for IT stuff below.

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WillyF
That's called retargeting. Not sure if the Facebook Ads platform offers any
kind of retargeting options (besides targeting based on Liking something), but
many ad networks do. For instance, I spent some time looking at Photoshop on
Adobe's site. Ever since, I've seen a ton of ads for Photoshop. It's a really
effective tactic, since you've already prequalified the user's interest from
an earlier online action.

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idoh
The way it works is that the ad network puts a pixel on the photoshop page.
When your browser sees that pixel you get cookied by the ad network. Then when
you see an ad placement from that ad network then you'll maybe see campaigns
targeted to the BT profile.

With ad network pixels it is hard to get reach. This is were companies like
BlueKai fit in. They make a deal with Adobe and lots of others to put their
pixel/JS on Adobe's page. Then when an ad network gets a campaign that needs
to target photoshop users, they buy profiles from BlueKai.

Basically, BlueKai will piggyback the ad network's pixel on the BlueKai
placement, either by injecting it via javascript or by doing a 302 redirect.
This has to run for a couple weeks until the ad network has got enough reach
for that profile, then they can start the re-targeting campaign.

That's how it generally works, I don't know if BlueKai actually has a
relationship with Adobe.

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stellar678
Do you know if Google does this with products other than AdSense?

I guess for search ads a user's intent is more explicit, but it's probably
still a useful signal.

Analytics in particular seems like it could provide a lot of data to them. I
hope they're not doing that.

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idoh
I don't believe that they are doing this but I am not sure. They certainly
have the reach to dominate the space if they switched it on.

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ct4ul4u
I did this with a few people at work. It seems as if the ad is not served at
all if the target population isn't over some threshold. I was not able to
target 2-3 people, but was able to target 30.

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dpritchett
I put in an ad for my wife around Valentine's day and specifically targeted it
to her (it helps that she's the only Memphis-area fan of a fan page I run).
She saw it early on the first day of the ad window. I think setting my cost
per click at the high end of the range was important.

It wound up costing less than a dollar for the successful campaign.

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romland
So ad's in its current shape aren't working.

A business model for Facebook that just might: Offer insurance companies to
pay for repeated privacy option changes which you have to opt out of.

Or heck, just sell a feed to the firehose to them.

Yeah, I guess this is a troll. But I must say I'm getting pretty damn fed up
with all this Facebook noise everywhere right now.

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nakkal
With people using ads to target potential employers, surprising loved ones...

Is there a ad potential for User->Business targeting, User->User targeting
complementing the current Business->user targeting?

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vijayr
Its just a matter of time before somebody proposes through FB ad (imagine if
it ends up going to the wrong girl ;))

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mkramlich
And of course the most important data he left out: did she actually click
through and buy the baby?

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mkramlich
talk about taking the Long Tail strategy to the extreme!

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hackermom
Stuff like this just creep me out. I do have an account on Facebook (required
for viewing certain albums etc.), but each and every privacy/marketing issue
with FB that pops up really deters me and pushes me one step closer to erasing
the account.

As has already been noted by people in this thread, FB users really seem to
just "tune out" and not notice the ads. My observation is that the people
making _that_ observation also "tune out" and don't notice the really scary
privacy issue at hand :)

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natrius
How is this a privacy issue? This exposes no personal information. You could
create separate ads with different settings and use the differences in the
URLs they point to to connect visitors with demographic data from their
profile, but you still wouldn't know their name, friends, etc.

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WiseWeasel
Think of the targeted social engineering attacks you can do with this. If you
know that an individual has access to a sensitive computer network you want
access to, you can make them a targeted offer they can't refuse and point to a
site with some malware rootkit or something. I'm sure there are endless
devious tricks that can be pulled with this system, beyond your harmless
pranks like these. Now that I'm aware of the possibility that an ad I see is
only seen by me, I'm much less likely to trust them with a click.

