hackbash

When you’ve had a hard day and you doze off in front of the telly, you can tell how long you’ve been asleep by the calibre of the adverts greeting you when you wake up. If the internet was TV, Facebook’s ads would mean it was 4.30am and you’d been asleep leaning on the ‘channel up’ button for an improbably long time.

I’ve written before on how easy it is to create your own Facebook ad, or to inadvertently star in someone else’s. The bastarding things keep catching my eye for all the wrong reasons. First there’s the simply ironic:

And then there are ones that stand out even from credit cards offered at 39.9% APR:

But today, the offensively cynical:

I’m guessing this is shown to men listed as in a relationship, but no doubt there’s a version for the ‘ladies’ too. I wouldn’t be surprised to find further versions for men interested in men and women interested in women, and there’s an interesting point here.

A lot of the focus with regard to Facebook’s privacy (or lack thereof) is on what you choose to display on your profile, but applications may still be able to see what you hide. Adverts can’t, for the moment, although they can be targeted by basic demographics and interests, and even by your workplace.

But Facebook’s advertising performance sucks, and the platform needs to do something to justify its sky-high valuation. Is there a danger, perhaps, that advertisers will get to target ads based on more detailed profile information?

What if, without allowing advertisers to see the information, Facebook introduced a more advanced ad platform that let them drop details from your profile into an advert template?

Or, to put it another way, the same advert, but using the name and photo of your partner.

UPDATE: I originally named a credit card brand in this post. Here’s why I took it out.

Tags: advertising, Facebook, loans, Sniff