Tag: facebook

Like’s Labour’s Lost – Facebook Advertising

Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,
Not uttered by based sale of chapmen’s tongues.

So, like, what’s a Like worth anyway?  I mean a Facebook Like.  Well, for starters, like, Facebook is valued at like more than 120 times its earnings, so, like, the concept “value” is like, y’know, hard to define. Likes are indeed currency, though good luck trying to figure out the exchange rate.  For most of us, a Like is just a casual, and usually literal, means of expressing appreciation among friends.  Like the new baby pics, Like that smart or funny comment you made, Like that you wished me good luck or Happy Birthday, and so on.  And while all that Liking does yield data for Facebook, which is fed into the box of dark magic that conjures what may or may not be useful market research in the social media age; Likes for business, organization, or cause promotion are another matter altogether.  And you know this because if you create a Facebook page for one of these things, Facebook will immediately let you know that you can broaden your exposure by paying for Facebook advertising.

There’s a classic advertiser’s quote, often attributed to David Ogilvy (though maybe not correctly), that says, “I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”  Waste is the advertiser’s dilemma; nobody wants to spend money advertising to people who will never be customers, and the best traditional solutions to this have been based in demographics and broad market research, which trades in old-school likes (e.g. consumers who like football also like beer).   The advertiser of a sports car, for instance, can’t entirely avoid waste, but he can put commercials against programs known to be watched by his most likely customers based on market research.

The Internet is supposed to do better than that for advertisers. Rather than spray-and-pray sports car ads at men in a target demo, the hope has been that the advertiser can reach Steve, who is actively looking for a sports car right now. Much of the design of the Internet as we know it is built with an aim to achieve this goal and not whatever altruistic, social progress is being spun in the PR departments of social media giants.  One irony, to me anyway, is that I actually find Facebook to be a largely positive social network, which is not where it derives its market valuation; yet, I am very skeptical of its worth as an advertising network, which is where it derives market valuation.  I won’t lie:  I’ve enjoyed connecting with old friends, making new friends, keeping up with people, and kibitzing on Facebook; but I bet I’m not alone in saying that I am probably less brand aware today than I ever was in the days when I only had one screen in my life and a limited number of channels.

If anything, I find the obvious advertising on Facebook is either utterly missable or utterly obnoxious.  The only times ads have caught my attention on the network have been negative attention.  For instance, when Facebook tells me that a friend “Likes” a certain big corporation (e.g. Sam Likes Bank of America), it only attracts because I know it isn’t true, and I find myself wondering a) where Facebook gets the nerve to say this?  b) what idiot thinks this is good marketing for BofA? and c) what am I endorsing that I don’t know about?  Similarly, I’m sure we all notice that Facebook will very quickly feature ads for items we browsed online within minutes of said browsing, and maybe this is an effective sale closer sometimes, but certainly not if it’s an item we just bought. In this case, the ad just elicits a well-deserved sneer.

So, in the pursuit of “Steve,” that real customer, I often wonder whether these rather ham-handed efforts do not represent the new “waste” in advertising, particularly in light  of what has surely been lost in recent years, which is consumer relationships built on brand identity.  In the 1990s, advertisers were still very much talking about relationships, but today, it seems the word is engagement, meaning interactions through social media.  And believe me, I honestly think there are a million smart ways to build relationships through these platforms, but it’s not clear that there is much value to the Facebook Like.

The owner of a business, organization, or cause page on Facebook can purchase Likes through two mechanisms — one supposedly above board, the other not so much.  Paying for Facebook ads is the legit, and at least somewhat organic, way to attract valid, engaged interest in a page.  The not so kosher approach is to buy clicks through a third party that simply pays foreign labor in what are called “Click Farms” to sit and click on things at a rate of about $1 per 1000 clicks.  (I know, it’s a job that just screams innovation and prosperity, right?)  But this is how many a Facebook page acquires tens of thousands of Likes, which are less than worthless in the pursuit of engaged prospective customers, readers, or supporters of your cause.

Unfortunately, according to Derek Muller, creator and host of the YouTube science and tech series Veritasium, buying Facebook ads seems to generate roughly the same worthless pile of Likes as buying third-party Likes.  In fact, Muller explains that, based on the way Facebook algorithms test and then broaden the reach of posts in response to apparent engagement, having tens of thousands of bogus Likes actually reduces exposure to people who are legitimately interested in your page. The reason Muller gives for the Facebook ad buy attracting just as many fake Likes is that Click Farmers actually click on stuff for free (i.e. pages they haven’t been paid to click on) in order to hide their identities in the vast confusion of clicks throughout the network.  In short, so that nobody notices a sudden Like spike on one particular page from, say, the Philippines.  Muller doesn’t accuse Facebook of intentionally selling fake Likes, and this is probably fair; but I still wonder what a real Like is really worth.

I recommend watching the video.  Muller is very entertaining, and the whole series looks great.  Had I first seen it on Facebook, I like totally would have Liked it.

Vicious Cycle – Speech Now Rewards the Oligarchs

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, about the challenges and the opportunities facing the next generation — those millennials about whom everyone has a theory and whose attention everybody wants.  They are, after all, the next big generation, equalling the boomers at about eighty million with us Xers weighing in at a paltry fifty million.  But as the father of three of these so-called millennials, I’m not so much interested in them as a demographic, trying to understand their habits and tastes so I can figure out what to sell them and how to package it.  And I certainly worry about their entry into cyberspace, sharing information about themselves with Zuckerberg’s data mining organization before they reach adulthood.  But above all, I wonder whether or not millennials are up for the big social and political challenge of their age and whether or not us Xers are able to lead the charge. At the moment I’m not so hopeful in light of this report from Public Citizen entitled Mission Creep-y, explaining how Google is becoming an ultra-powerful political force and continuing to expand its “information collection empire.” Just the first few lines of the introduction reads as follows:

“Google may possess more information about more people than any entity in the history of the world. Its business model and its ability to execute it demonstrate that it will continue to collect personal information about the public at a galloping pace. Meanwhile Google is becoming the most prolific political spender among corporations in the United States, while providing less transparency about its activities than many other of its politically active peers. Despite its mantra – “Don’t be evil” – Google’s ever- growing power calls for keeping a close eye on the company, just as it is keeping a close eye on us.”

I do think the challenge of this half of this century is whether or not we’re going to allow the unfettered power of a new oligarchy to flourish.  Plutocrats have risen before in American history, but what is unique this time is that the means by which we perceive we can combat unchecked power actually waters the seeds of that power itself. To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to Occupy Wall Street.  Remember Occupy?  It was trending not that long ago.  In my opinion, this series of protests was borne of anger and frustration with exactly the right problem — wealth consolidation.  For more than a half century now, Americans have fostered both policy and business culture that has resulted in a tiny fraction of society holding the greatest percentage of wealth.  Meanwhile, opportunity continues to shrink for everyone else — the 99% championed by OWS.  Thus, the targets of Occupy were the financial industry and the government that failed first to regulate and then to punish those who practiced predatory and fraudulent schemes that led to near economic collapse five years ago.  This particular rage aimed at those particular institutions was a reasonable start, but the narrative written by OWS actually contains an ironic twist I doubt many of its founders or followers ever considered before, during, or since those days in Zuccotti Park.

If we’re going to be honest, OWS produced nothing tangible to address the fundamental problem of wealth consolidation in the U.S.  No serious grassroots political force was founded, no OWS-backed candidates were elected to office, no dialogue has even really changed much as a result of those protests.  Instead, what OWS produced was a great deal of theater. And that’s normal.  Protests always produce some measure of theater that doesn’t translate into progress, which doesn’t mean protests don’t serve a purpose.  The irony, however, with this particular spectacle in the age of social media, this free show comprised of shared photos, videos, tweets, and updates about kids tussling with city police, was that it could not exist without putting money into the pockets of the wealthiest one percent of the one percent. For every one of us who watched a video of Officer Bologna pepper spray a young woman and thought, “that’s wrong” and then went about our day, the Internet billionaires made money. The top search result of that video alone has just under a million views on YouTube, and there are I don’t know how many related videos representing how many thousands of views.  But suffice to say that long after the goals of Occupy have been swept up with the detritus from the park, Silicon Valley’s elite few continue to make money from the from the free media circus performed in the name of restoring power to the many.  This Catch-22 scenario applies to just about any cause, any protest, any movement around the world.

I wrote broadly on this theme after supposed co-founder of OWS, now Google employee (yep), Justine Tunney called for a libertarian’s coup that would install Google chairman Eric Schmidt as chief executive of America. I really don’t think it’s alarmist to say that we are spawning a new generation of Vanderbilts with a social agenda that goes beyond mere greed, and that in the end, we won’t even get a railroad out of the deal.  But what is truly different about this era’s breed of Robber Baron is that this time he owns the medium through which we naively imagine we can protect our civil liberties against his caprice and callousness.  With every tweet, status update, an even blog post just like this one, we are feeding the very monster we think we’re fighting.  This is the real conundrum of our times and for the next generation to solve:  How do we speak truth to power when that power is made stronger by every word we say?

Are advertisers using unlicensed endorsements?

Is any of this legal?

Penn

This has been chronic in the Facebook news feed lately.  I’ve seen Hugh Jackman, Matt Damon, Sean Penn, and John Travolta featured so far in these ads for “men’s health products” all of which imply these movie stars are endorsing whatever secret ingredient or method is being pushed.  Click on the link, and Facebook warns the user the page they’re headed to “might be SPAM.”  Ya think?  Are these apparent endorsements unlicensed?  Probably.

I like this one in particular . . .

Travolta

That’s not Travolta’s head Photoshopped onto another guy’s body?

Unless these movie stars really are endorsing these products on terms they’ve agreed to for use of their names and likenesses, I hope their lawyers do something about it.  Because if millionaires who can afford to stop this kind of activity don’t defend their rights, what does that mean for us everyday folks when advertisers decide to use our personal images or names for unlicensed endorsements?  We’ve already seen this happen in a limited way. My news feed has told me things like a friend who’s a vegetarian “Likes” McDonalds, which is a little bit amusing except that it isn’t.  Now that advertising is embedded into the news feed, the line is a bit blurry between friends’ updates and paid sponsorships.  When the ad is clearly an ad, I don’t think it’s a problem, but I do think the anything goes, free-for-all is a problem.

Assuming these examples are the kind of sleazy false advertising they appear to be, Facebook is not responsible for creating the ad or boosting the celebrity likenesses; but if these ads are misleading and/or violating the celebrities’  rights, they do violate at least a few sections of Facebook’s own terms for advertising on its pages.  And if these ads do violate those terms, why are we seeing them?