How Facebook is digging a grave for online marketing
This morning, as you do when you quietly settle in at your desk and get prepared for a long day at work, I logged in to Facebook to check what my social circle around the world is up to. For whatever reason, my eyes fell on the forbidden spot, the advertising in the right hand corner. Oh wait, I know why. It was ’speaking’ to me:
Look at that! Not only does it know I am 39 (nearly as old as Tim) but it also knows that I am female, and although I can’t say this for sure, this little ad also seems to have figured out that one of my favourite colours is … pink (No, I haven’t revealed the colour of my bra in my status line).
As it happens, super agency Made by Many is already supplying me with an awesome phone, but I got interested in this deal nevertheless. Not because the offer was appealing, but seemingly offered exclusively to me, I could not resist clicking on the ad to find out more. I wanted to know why this offer was made to 39 year old women… is this for real…? So I clicked the ad…. and…
Hello Vodafone.
Indeed, by clicking the link I landed on a Vodafone page offering a free (pink!) phone, but hang on… the terms aren’t right. As I’m browsing the page in hope of discovering the apparently well hidden and exclusive section for 39 year old women, suddenly there’s a pop up asking me if I want to chat with a representative. Sure..! Let’s save some time and cut to the chase.
But what followed is a miserable story: Not a single one of my 39 years nor my lovely female body make me special on the internet in any way. There’s no exclusive deal.
Furthermore – while you like me expected that any offer based on sex and age is a lie – you might be surprised to hear that the entire offer run on FB was false.
Read the entire hilarious transcript of my conversation with the representative below (click to enlarge). I throw my hands up in despair.
Poor Austin doesn’t seem like the smartest rep in the world (since when did Tweetpic start selling phones?) and he certainly gave me a proper crap customer experience. But I cannot blame him for Facebook’s & Vodafone’s dishonest exploitation of your personal data to lure you into clicking on offers that are not real.
When is this industry going to understand the damage they are causing themselves?
Chat with Austin from Vodafone part 1 - click to read
Chat with Austin & Naomi from Vodafone - part 2 (click to enlarge)
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About the author
Honed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Elin's skills encompass interaction design, information architecture and content. She is from somewhere very cold.
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Comments (19)
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Responses (1)
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Excellent, a real-life Skinner Box « Made by Many
[...] Frank: Konge!… [...]
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At least Austin had sense enough to transfer you to Naomi (who actually seem to understand the issue).
Clint
January 14, 2010
at 1:09 pm
Yeah. That really impressed me too.
Elin
January 14, 2010
at 1:15 pm
Did you take a sneaky peak at the tracking code on the FB redirect? Was it an affiliate code or something, er, more official?
Andrew Girdwood
January 14, 2010
at 1:26 pm
http://www.facebook.com/ae.php?i=AAAAAQAQebsr40pNprsCht8vzrJONgAAAOsK_Jw7QvyBqWSjRRP3oNhp6fTNN0AzLIqrItD-4Mjp6eWGF5ezVDxATYKJKzYnK2RtpnGfINAGna-wewwT-fc8Kq85JJA7F35t_tlQ9WAz7eqNyA8xOPPY2PO1jqfyctEabdTIL0mX9rJOW9PGSIPGtsI1U-3q_hu4i6EEutipRwk73m3JIOVYDBySBTnIvBTxbFwzs2ilSUDs4xoKL4y_uYiISrHgAY0aNrZmMm-Yi-gnPxMba7E4JSN0rNS9J4UmIK_f0hTZTw0tIgt5nO59qjSc4-lPuVOlw4fVVplSPSH_qyB_YL0TpQKM7BAGYiM%2C&f=0&en=clk&r=1
Elin
January 14, 2010
at 1:43 pm
It makes you wonder who was running this campaign. Obviously their measure of success was clicks, so they were probably buying by CPMs and trying to drive as much traffic as possible.
Did they mean third party dealer or third party agency?
I think you should call yourself Austin from now on, like Naomi said. If they aren’t truthful, why should you be?
Rich
January 14, 2010
at 1:32 pm
I think Austin meant dealer – he probably wouldn’t know about agencies…:)
Elin
January 14, 2010
at 1:45 pm
this is not done…..how can FB can post any add, atleast the company add should stand for what it says….public activity, pages, friend lists is just getting without control where FB is leading to?????
Nidhi
January 14, 2010
at 1:42 pm
I’d say Andrew is probably right in thinking this scam was sat up by an affiliate. Whereas Google has really upped their game in preventing this type of behaviour from spammers and affiliates, Facebook is still pretty much a zone for online pirates.
If this was done by Vodaphone themselves they’ll probably blame it on an over enthousiastic intern. ;)
Daan Jansonius
January 14, 2010
at 1:43 pm
Yes, definitely an affiliate. But that doesn’t excuse Facebook or Vodafone in any way. Facebook gives online platforms a bad reputation for allowing and facilitating the exploiting of their community’s personal data, and Vodafone has lost my respect for hiring an agency that market their services via lies. It’s dishonest from all three parties.
Ah yes, some poor intern with agency hiring powers is now shuttering with fear somewhere in a boxed landscape…
Elin
January 14, 2010
at 1:54 pm
Looks to me like ‘Austin’ is actually a semi-trained but incomplete CyberTwin, the type you can create with services like http://site.mycybertwin.com/
His command of English is as bad as his ability to intelligently deal with your enquiry.
Bet you’re gutted you haven’t got a lovely shell-pink razor phone winging its way to you. How will you survive?
Charlotte Hillenbrand
January 14, 2010
at 1:47 pm
Come to think of it, I mentioned to Stuart before Christmas that my iPhone is kaputt. Perhaps there’s hope of a pink iPhone? Perhaps Apple also should target 39 year old females…
Elin
January 14, 2010
at 3:54 pm
Wait.. isn’t being pink ENOUGH to make it a phone for a 39 year old woman?
This stuff goes on and on beyond FB, Elin (as you have no doubt experienced) – but perhaps only FB ads can get quite so age specific. Just because a marketer can segment by gender/age and so on, doesn’t mean it makes sense to do so. Plus, consumers do see right through it. Thanks for the great post.
Andrea Learned
January 14, 2010
at 2:22 pm
A friend of mine was recently complaining that he kept getting exposed to similar campagins, but unfortunately, since he has made the grave error of revealing his single status, gets insulted at the same time: “35 and still single?”.
Now I don’t have much information on Facebook so I haven’t seen the evidence myself, but I find it incredible that not only has Facebook started nagging you about not talking to your “friends” enough or whatever else it thinks you should be doing, its now taken to letting its advertisers call people sad and lonely TO THEIR FACES on the basis of relationship status.
How long before they start somehow analyzing your profile pic so they can point out how ugly you are too? That’d shift some spot cream.
Hannah
January 14, 2010
at 2:24 pm
Hand me the spot cream, Hannah! :)
I’ve never worried too much in the past but now I am seeing a connection with all the odd personal spam I get to the email addresses I have listed at FB.
Andrea – think you hit the nail on the head. Pinkness trumps all costs!
Elin
January 14, 2010
at 3:42 pm
Are you bother because you thought the offer was only for people with those characteristics or because they acted like they didn’t know you were part of that group? Of course FB usage of your data ain’t nice despite at the end it’s a pretty obvious way to differentiate with older online marketing media.
Christian
January 14, 2010
at 9:45 pm
I agree with you Elin, totally. I thought you post was about the opposite, that online marketing was being changed by the fact that FB is accessing highly relevant information about you, the user, and serving up ads that make other systems pale by comparison. LOL – guess not.
What you are referring to here is really the 800 lb gorilla in the middle of the living room. No, not the scammers and spammers, but the very nature of business models and the corresponding marketing and advertising campaigns, to wit: Giving people what they want, when they want and in a format that they can control.
Transparency, credibility and accountability.
Anti-marketing if you will. I think that one of the reasons we are not seeing highly creative, innovative and effective advertising online if that the fortune 5000 corporations are hanging on to an old business model, and refuse to accept the there in a new paradigm in town: Actually being willing to listen to their customers and deliver to them what they want.
This is one of the main reasons that there is such a huge reticence to actually participating in ’social networks’, blogs and communities. Corporate culture can’t handle the double edged sword that is the Web today. The companies that do understand this and are willing to change their mindset (business model – huge), commit the resources to support a two way conversation, and deliver on this are going to be the success stories of the future.
The Internet is not going away, even though at this point the Web is still a muddy backwater path, and companies that are able to ‘grok’ this are going to grow as fast as the Web, which is exponential.
But herein lies the problem. As people who are in the Web marketing business, we are far down the food chain relative to influence with these companies. Even understanding and pointing out the issues with this particular ad on FB belies a type of understanding of the core issues that is far beyond the capabilities of most mid-level corporate types, let alone the C-Level.
:)
Kit
January 16, 2010
at 1:09 pm
Elin
Apologies it’s taken me an age to post here what I DMed you in a whirlwind of amused rage on Friday night.
I really, really hate this stuff. Here’s another example: http://twitpic.com/y7dj0
Interestingly, when I closed the ad (which at least is an option..) I was asked ‘why’ I was doing so. I think I chose the phrase ‘ad was misleading’, since it’s obvious just looking at the thing that it’s scraped basic info about me from my profile and shoved it into an ad, simply to give the *impression* of relevance, as opposed to actually providing that. As communication it was also ugly as hell, but I wasn’t given the option of choosing that as a reason. That annoyed me almost as much if I’m honest.
That and the sad fact that if it’s possible to dislike a colour, I *hate* pink.
This sort of advertising takes everything that was terrible about old school direct marketing and dumps it in a new school space. I imagine it’s precisely this juxtaposition that gets us all so (amusingly) worked up…
On a more serious note, our expectations around who communicates with us and how are simply different in a social context online. By different, I probably mean higher. The funny thing is that my issue is not with the dumb advertiser – if this were an email it would go straight to spam and I wouldn’t see it – I have no relationship whatsoever with them. No, my relationship is with Facebook. For that reason and that reason alone, I will remember this for some time as a full-on Facebook #fail.
The one thing they could now do is make sure I NEVER get served up that kind of advertising again. Demonstrate that there is a sentient being actually reading the mini questionnaire I bothered to fill in about why I’d closed the ad.
I’m not holding my breath, but here’s hoping they do.
Mel Exon
January 18, 2010
at 10:26 am
Mel,
you’re absolutely right – it’s a FB relationship fail. This isn’t what you’d expect from their service.
I doubt that FB cleverly stops sending new ads you don’t like though – they probably just flag the offender and remove this particular ad from your page. I don’t think they try to learn much from it, but hopefully I’m wrong…
Elin
January 18, 2010
at 1:00 pm
Konge!
Frank
January 22, 2010
at 11:59 pm