
What you should learn from the man who lost $600,000 on Facebook ads - smalter
http://adespresso.com/academy/blog/what-you-should-learn-from-the-man-who-lost-600000-on-facebook-ads/
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sandworm101
It's a women's fashion publication. By the age of the models they use, their
target market is girls age 15-25. (As opposed to tabloids or mags targeting an
older range of women, see
[http://www.zoomermag.com/](http://www.zoomermag.com/)). Given that target
market I can see why facebook might have been appealing ... ten years ago.

The young are walking away from facebook, women in particular. Most walked the
day their grandparents and highschool teachers joined. But young women are
really walking away these days because they find any picture of them on
facebook is quickly harvested for use by some shady dating website. As one
student expressed it to me, facebook has a "serious creep factor". So nobody
should be surprised that a fashion mag lost money on facebook ads.

I'd suggest which form of social media is better for this market, but as I am
not a teenager whatever I say will just make me look old and out of touch.

~~~
hluska
You're talking like you have some special insight, yet all I'm finding are
poorly reasoned anecdotes. For one, I have never met a single individual whose
photo was actually harvested. Have you? For another, I cannot think of one
sub-25 female friend who is not on Facebook. As for your comment how their
activity is not conducive to advertising, show me some proof.

The actual problem here is spending $600k in four days. Full stop. You, or
this article can try to intellectualize that as much as you want. But
fundamentally, advertising does not work like that. If you spent $600k on four
days of television commercials, billboards, mascots, etc., the odds are
overwhelmingly in favour of your failure.

The only solution is to treat advertising as an engineering discipline.

~~~
sandworm101
"Shady promotion, sex trafficking, and data mining are just some of the tricks
of the trade for Facebook's growing population of fakers"

[http://www.dailytech.com/Fakebook+Pt+I+From+The+Chive+to+Ask...](http://www.dailytech.com/Fakebook+Pt+I+From+The+Chive+to+AskMen+How+Facebooks+Phonies+are+Born+and+Used/article37488c.htm)

On dating websites' use of stolen images:

" He said: "We'd steal someone's identity through say My Space or something,
we'd take someone from a totally different country, ie. Spain or wherever it
may be. [...] We'd take the person's photos online and we'd start knocking out
messages. It was all fake and under the pretence that it was real."

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-
order/1020771...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-
order/10207712/Online-dating-sites-use-stolen-data-to-create-fake-profiles-it-
is-alleged.html)

And yes, I have met people who have had their profile pics used elsewhere.
TinEye is a great tool for discovering such incidents. Then again I used to
work in the entertainment industry (film) and now teach a forensics class to
young people at a local college so I probably run into it more often than the
average.

~~~
hluska
It's good that you could find me articles about fake Facebook accounts and how
some dating websites contain fake profiles. But, I know both of those things
already.

Instead, you made a claim that Facebook was a poor choice of medium because
women aged 18-25 are walking away from the service in droves. You said they
were walking away because:

 _But young women are really walking away these days because they find any
picture of them on facebook is quickly harvested for use by some shady dating
website. As one student expressed it to me, facebook has a "serious creep
factor". So nobody should be surprised that a fashion mag lost money on
facebook ads._

A statement like that needs some proof. If you have any, I would love to read
it, but until then, I'll argue that Facebook has an immense amount of data and
extremely fine-grained targeting options. Therefore, if you plan and monitor
an intelligent campaign, it remains a decent advertising medium.

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t0mbstone
The real problem is that facebook fans are useless, because even if you have
them, 95% of them still won't see your posts unless you pay to boost them.
Fans are effectively an illusion.

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strictnein
The original article this is based on, if you want more info:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/mans-600000-facebook-ad-
disas...](http://www.businessinsider.com/mans-600000-facebook-ad-
disaster-2014-2)

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commentzorro
Is this an ad or an article? It's Both! Extremely well done job of blurring
the line between the two while keeping things compelling. Kudos to you,
Adespresso.

~~~
DivByZero
Lol ... it's Content Marketing :)

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Xyik
Hmm, so instead of Facebook Ad we should create click-bait articles as a form
of free advertising. Thanks.

