This evening I was browsing Facebook and stumbled upon the following ad that I’ve pictured on the left. The ad displays one of my friends and a book advertisement suggesting that somehow the two things are correlated. The only problem? They aren’t! If you take a look at my friend Krista’s profile, there is nothing that would suggest that she read the book unless the system somehow knew that she was active in social media and may have read the book “The rise of conversation”.
She didn’t explicitly state that she had read the book though. The other part which is confusing is that next to her it says that she recently “joined the group Jaffe Juice.” How is that relevant to the advertisement whatsoever? I understand that I may want to know what my friend is up to but when placing that information within an advertisement it doesn’t make much sense.
Facebook is in the process of improving their advertisement solutions but when it comes to Social Ads, it appears that they are still having some trouble. Just last week we wrote about Facebook’s Engagement Ads and how they could help advertisers. It makes sense that Facebook would release advertising solutions they can immediately sell but they should also be investing heavily in improving ad relevance.
I have to be honest, the advertisements on Facebook have been improving but many of them still aren’t relevant at all. I’m not sure if this is because big brands aren’t investing in Social Ads or if it’s because Facebook isn’t serving them properly. I’m not qualified to comment on how the system determines ads unfortunately but I know the one that they displayed in the picture above doesn’t make much sense at all.
Update
Wow … as usual I wasn’t the most observant person. Apparently the book that was displayed was by Joseph Jaffe. I confused the book “The Rise of Conversation” by Joseph Jaffe with the book “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. So apparently the ad wasn’t that bad after all!
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In the ad interface an advertiser can choose to tie social action to any pages, groups or events he or she manages on Facebook. Hence it was this advertiser's choice to tie this specific ad to the actions of Jaffe Juice group. Not sure why they decided this way, but they did.
Comment by prostoalex — August 23, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
I listen to Jaffe Juice which is a marketing podcast/blog which is run by Joseph Jaffe. I believe he is the author of the book The Rise of Conversation as well which would be why that ad is attached to that news feed. Maybe they should have made the correlation clearer?? Regardless… it is a relevant ad to the content in the newsfeed
Comment by Euphrosini — August 24, 2008 @ 9:00 am
seems the argument came full circle
no, why we all do not use our regular emails we send every day anyway to promote our business OR facebook page for that matter is beyond me. Then again this is what our company does, figured I'd give us a plug.There's also a Facebook version.
Comment by wrapman — August 25, 2008 @ 5:37 am