Facebook thinks I like talking big-mouthed fish.

Posted by Garrett in Cognitive Marketing      2 comments

Nov
8

It has been brought to my attention, recently, that Facebook’s ad-targeting system is based partially on the self-reported “Interests” on user’s profiles. This should not come as a surprise to anyone; after all, what better way to target people than through the very keywords they chose to describe themselves. It should be a brilliant system that lets Facebook create a virtually unlimited portofolio of consumer demographic types: from rock climbers to sailors and to the perhaps more common beer pong enthusiast.

But my profile contains some interesting information. A long time ago, a friend of mine logged onto my Facebook account and added “Talking Big-mouthed Fish” to my interests per a recent inside joke we had going about southerner’s fascination with the famous talking electronic wall mounts. At the time, I thought nothing of it (I just appreciated the humor and comradre) and never deemed it necessary to change it back to my “real” interests. In fact, I had largely forgot about the ad until I saw an ad pop up on my Facebook experience related to (you guessed it) talking big-mouth fish.

Honestly, the ad was successful from my perspective. It was successful in gaining my primary cognitive attention, mainly because it was just so far from what I had expected of Facebook’s usual targeting affair (I mainly get all kinds of business ads that tend to get ignored as my peripheral cues have slowly adjusted to brushing them off). While the ad failed to convert my attention into a sale, I felt they had conquered what thousands of othe advertisers had attempted: gaining my attention.

In all reality, marketing is nothing more than stealing people’s attention away from their problems long enough to show them how to solve them. It doesn’t matter how great your product is or how well it resonates with your target audience – if you can’t get your customer’s attention, they cannot buy your product.

While the ad succeeded in one area, it failed miserably in the other – I’m not looking to buy a big-mouthed bass for my wall in the near future. The ad used mis-leading information to interpret the context of my purchasing decisions; however, that information was “forged” in the first place. This makes me wonder how many of our self-submitted profile information is actually correct anyways. I doubt very much that people actually put down all of their “favorite movies” or their real interests. In truth, these decisions are probably moderated by much broader social factors than just the need to express one’s personality. Just as people might fudge their online dating profile to maximize some other goal, it shouldn’t seem outrageous to think that people create mis-leading social profile information for other such purposes, such as inside jokes, not looking like a geek, or just a lack of time (I’d be willing to bet that many people on Facebook, especially those of us who have had accounts for a few years now, haven’t updated their “profile” in a long time).

This is probably why more vertical social networks like LinkedIn can get ridiculous $50+ CPM rates – not just because they have a deeply engaged audience in a lucrative task domain, but also the targeting information used to deliver messaging is quite simply just more accurate given the intentions of the users. LinkedIn users, after all, would not benefit from putting false information or attempting to connect with people they didn’t really know.

I’m not saying that Facebook is unmonetizable because of false information. In fact, I’m merely suggesting that perhaps there are even higher levels of potential targeting that is going unclaimed right under our very user’s fingertips. How amazing would it be if Facebook could algorithmically track all inside jokes between my friends and I? Then it could work with advertisers to adjust ad copy dynamically depending on that abstract social information. Can you imagine a Coors ad that led to a fantasy football micro-site which read, “Remember when Jim said your wife’s cooking sucked? Make him cry.”

The most important element here, though, is looking beyond written data to the more elusive concept of user intent and the “hidden” information that can let you determine that intent. Of course, it will also just take some smart marketers who both use their company’s products themselves AND interact with its customers on a regular basis to understand how the products we use in our lives affect us not just personally, but also socially, digitally, or in whatever other context the mind can contrive.