I Just Don’t Get Facebook Advertising

About three scandals and one stock market plunge ago, Facebook launched an advertising campaign to apologize for fake news, privacy breaches, spam, and other social media offenses.  This lovely ad promised that they’d fix these problems and get the platform back to its original purpose.

The ad was very effective and even made me choke up a little.  No surprise there, because I’ve found that the big tech companies produce the most compelling advertising.  I’ve also loved every Google ad.

But here’s the thing.  When Facebook wanted to apologize to a large audience, it ran a TELEVISION ad.  Facebook controls a huge amount of the country’s online advertising inventory but when the chips were down it used the same platform used by Texaco, Norelco, and Frosted Flake in the 1960’s:  the one-minute TV spot.

Facebook undoubtedly knew that limiting its apology ads to the online world would have minimal impact.  Successful advertising requires good storytelling – through words and images – and the online world is generally unsuited for that.

Online advertising can be effective for transactional messages (i.e., “to buy this razor now click on this link”) but not so effective for traditional brand ads.  Google ads I understand because I can see the value in buying prime space during product searches, but Facebook I don’t get.  And yet major ad agencies have twisted themselves inside out to shift their focus to Facebook.  What gives?

I ask this question as a Facebook stockholder myself, albeit a very tiny shareholder.  I certainly do not regret the huge run-up in the Facebook stock price since its IPO.  (What I do regret is that I didn’t buy a hundred times more shares!) But I don’t really understand it.  I admit this as someone outside the ad industry and would welcome feedback from insiders who can produce evidence on the usefulness of Facebook ads.

I am not among those Facebook users who get wigged out by the company sharing my personal data with advertisers.  In fact, I prefer it because I’d rather see ads that are relevant to me.  I’m just not sure if it’s that effective.  When I look at my Facebook page today I see an ad for L.L. Bean.  Fair enough. I’ve been buying apparel from L.L. Bean since the days when you had to fill out a form from their catalog and mail it back to them.  But I am so familiar with L.L. Bean that a Facebook ad will not sway me in the least to purchase again.

The “sponsored posts” in my Facebook news feed seem somewhat more compelling.  I usually just blip over them, but for the sake of this column I just went back and took a close look at what’s there and here are the first four sponsored posts.  Offers from:

• SeaVees, apparently a laceless canvass sneaker. I probably wouldn’t buy one, but it’s not crazy for them to think I might.
• Allbirds.com, another sneaker company.
• The Sundance clothes catalog. Again, I have bought jewelry for my wife from Sundance but am unlikely to do so again until Christmas and I won’t decide that based on a suggested post.
• Vanity Fair magazine, offering a one-year subscription for $8. This is more like it.  I would actually contemplate this offer but already get too many magazines at home so used my willpower to decline.

So at least one of the four suggested ads piqued my interest.  Is that a good rate of return even if there’s not a sale?  I’ll leave that to the analysts to debate.

It’s probably unfair to say Facebook advertising is ineffective based on a handful of ads at one moment in time.  I am rarely moved to go out and buy whatever product is shown on TV either, although I am much more likely to at least see a TV ad, since I usually sit through TV advertising but almost always scroll past those suggested posts on Facebook.

I also wonder how Facebook makes money given how seemingly cheap their ads are.  The company recently reported that the Russians have tried to interfere in the 2018 mid-terms by placing 150 political ads.  The cost of those ads?  $11,000. At that price, you can’t really blame Putin.  Even I, as cheap as I am, would spend $11,000 if I thought I could affect the outcome of the upcoming elections.

Although I’m a skeptic about Facebook effectiveness in promoting big brands I am a big believer in what they can do on behalf of non-profits, nearby cultural programs, and local businesses.  I’m on the board of a small nonprofit and have seen the value of raising awareness through targeting a few thousand potential donors.  I’ve also attended concerts and art shows that I’ve learned about on Facebook.

Unfortunately there’s not much money in promoting non-profits and small local businesses. Still Facebook, has convinced the major brands they need to be on this platform.  Will this hold? Maybe.  It says something about our political climate that Facebook is more in trouble for allegedly helping Donald Trump become president than for not being an effectively advertising vehicle.

When a TV Star Dies

Over the past six weeks three well-known writers have died.  All of them received big send-offs on the front page of the New York Times and respectful appreciations in The New Yorker and other high-end publications.  But only one of them was rewarded on social media with an outpouring of grief; that was largely because this writer also hosted a TV show.

These would be Philip Roth, America’s most respected novelist, and Tom Wolfe, our most renowned non-fiction writer, both of whom merely got the full-respect treatment; contrast them with the food and restaurant writer Anthony Bourdain, who was also widely mourned on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.  To be sure, part of the grief over Bourdain is that he was 25 years younger than Roth and Wolfe, and died by his own hand less than a week after the designer Kate Spade had also committed suicide.  Still, it was remarkable that the passing of these two literary lions was so overshadowed on social media by a food writer.

The reaction to Bourdain’s death was another reminder, as if we needed one, of the power of television to create the illusion that we actually know the people we experience on the screen.  These people come into our living rooms and bedrooms, sometimes when we are at our most vulnerable, and it feels like they’re our friends.

I started musing on this phenomenon because I only knew Bourdain through his books and articles.  When I heard that he had died, I did feel sad, as I would hearing about any person’s death, but I didn’t feel the deep personal loss that so many others did.  What was I missing?  And then I realized, “Oh, he had a TV show.”

The social media outpouring on behalf of Bourdain reminded me of the even more profound grief following the suicide of Robin Williams and the passing of Leonard Nimoy, two other deaths that caught the public by surprise.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that TV celebrities are not our friends.  These are very one-sided relationships. They don’t post about us when we die. There’s a psychological term for the way we think about celebrities: “parasocial relationships,” which are defined as relationships where one person extends emotional energy, interest, and time while the other person is completely unaware of the other’s existence.

The benefit of a parasocial engagement is that you can’t be rejected by someone you admire from afar.  But here’s the problem with parasocial relationships and the mass media.  Because celebrity culture is so pervasive, there are hundreds if not thousands of people with whom we have parasocial relationships.  We feel connected in some way to anyone who ever starred in a TV show we watched, and by the rules of chance dozens of them will die every year.  That means a lot of mourning about people we’ve never met.

Now it’s one thing when someone like Abe Vigoda dies at age 85.  You might think, “gee that’s too bad” even though you might have thought he was already dead.  It’s the completely unexpected ones, like Bourdain, former “Glee” star Cory Monteith, or Robin Williams that hit us the hardest.

And yet, although that sense of loss is real and not imagined, I’d like to see a little more restraint on social media when there’s a celebrity death.  Sometimes Facebook becomes an echo chamber where each post about a dead celebrity magnifies on the feelings of other Facebookers until they’ve just got to post something to unburden their social-media-heightened feelings.

Regrettably, it doesn’t take long on social media for everyone to be sharing the same warmed-over platitudes. One or two of my Facebook friends posted reminiscences about the times they met Anthony Bourdain and I thought that was great because it illuminated my understanding of him as a person.  But a lot of what people posted seemed self-indulgent and focused more on their own personal loss rather than on Bourdain himself.

Here then, is my general rule for social media posting after we lose a TV star.  It’s an inversion of the old adage that if you can’t think of something nice to say about someone then don’t say anything all: if you can ONLY say something nice about a person don’t say anything at all.  Platitudes actually diminish the deceased by reducing them to abstractions.  Exert yourself to say something original or interesting.  Or maybe just don’t jump on the grief bandwagon in the first place.

 

Can We All Just Relax About Facebook?

There are times when I wonder if I am really so out-of-step with the day-to-day zeitgeist of our wonderful country.  How did it come about that everyone collectively decided that Facebook was practically the worst company in the world and that Mark Zuckerberg needed to be frogmarched to Washington and keelhauled before a couple of Congressional committees?

Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” the our public thinkers are supposedly shocked! shocked! that Facebook leverages our personal data for its advertisers.  But anyone who didn’t know until last month that advertisers were using our Facebook data to promote their own products is, not to put too fine a point on it, a moron.  Did they not notice that Facebook is a free service and that the only way to support all those servers and graphic designers was through advertising?  Didn’t they think it was odd that when they clicked on an ad for a particular product they were subsequently barraged with more ads for the same product?

The truth is that I don’t really care who has my personal Facebook data.  I just downloaded my file to see what was there and it was pretty dull.  It includes my name, email, age, school, job history, political leanings, marital status and Facebook friends current and former.  That is already publicly available on my page.  It also includes the Facebook sites, ads, games, quizzes and other ephemera that I clicked on over the course of the last ten years.  The fact that this might become available to strangers does give me a slight pause because maybe I don’t want people to know I once played Farmville, but there’s nothing truly embarrassing in this data.

Here is what Facebook does NOT have on me that many other online sites do:  my social security number, my credit card number, my medical history, my drug prescriptions, my income, my online shopping history, or my criminal record (which is nonexistent, by the way).

And they don’t have my search history, thank God.  If Google had been the one that was  a little sloppy with my personal data I would be REALLY pissed.  Some of that could be truly embarrassing.

If anything, my gripe with Facebook is that they don’t do a good enough job of dispensing my data.  I almost never notice the ads in my feed because they are so irrelevant to me.  If there’s a true scandal at Facebook is that they are charging advertisers good money for spots that are ineffective.

But let’s be honest, people aren’t really mad at Facebook because of privacy.  Instead this tantrum is about making it into the latest scapegoat for the election of Donald Trump.  I think most of Facebook’s critics understand that the company didn’t really do anything to swing the election.  I mean seriously, have any of these people ever even been on Facebook?  If there is any voter who decided to vote for Donald Trump because of something he saw on Facebook, I would like to meet him and commit him to the home for the dangerously naive.

Those of you who lived through the 2016 election probably remember that Facebook was a toxic place that ruined friendships; if anything the nasty posts and counter-posts only served to reinforce voters’ existing leanings, doing little to convert potential voters from one side to the other.

Facebook first came under fire in the fall of 2016 with allegations that it had allowed Russian trolls to plant “Fake News” on users’ news feed (remember those innocent days when “fake news” meant stories that were literally made up and not just news pieces that the President doesn’t like?)  No one could seriously argue that these stories had any significant effect on voting and the early grudge against Facebook slowly died away.

Then came the big revelation about Campaign Analytica.  It transpired that a conservative data firm had tricked Facebook into giving them the personal data of 87 million users, deceitfully held onto it when Facebook demanded its return, and then tried to help the Trump campaign develop targeted Facebook ads.

The interesting thing is, the Obama campaign essentially did the same in 2012 (see more on that here.) No one screamed about Facebook being careless with our personal data when the news media’s favorite candidate was playing fast and loose with our privacy.  In fact, I distinctly remember stories about what digital geniuses the Obama campaign were (here’s one New York Times story where the digital team admits to grabbing data without Facebook’s permission and not being forced to give it back once Facebook figured out what was happening.)  The Obama team even bragged about how the pulled the wool over Facebook’s eyes.  As Investors Business Daily points out:  Obama’s campaign director, Carol Davidsen, even tweeted that “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”

I doubt that anyone really thinks that the Data Analytica breach swayed any votes.  Among other things, the Trump campaign claims they didn’t actually use their data for targeting because the Republican National Committee’s lists were better.

Look, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to get off Facebook: 1) It ends up draining your time and hurting your concentration; 2) it makes you dislike your friends who just won’t stop popping off about politics or posting pictures of their meals; 3) it makes your life seem inadequate when you see what your friends are up to.

But you’re just kidding yourself if you think you’re making a moral stand about the 2016 election or protecting your privacy.  There are plenty of worse actors to boycott than Facebook.