intrigued as I was by the process by which I became the target for ads that obviously recognised me as a fat bald oaf pretending to be cool I was duly compelled to investigate the ad service on facebook and try it for myself to unravel the not so mysterious mysteries around audience targeting and social actions. this did require that I actually shell out some cash in order to get the whole thing off the ground but since my great british pounds buy me lots of stuff priced in us dollars these days and I never actually go to the us to spend anything it wasn't too much of wallet-creak to set the adhairball rolling. something inoffensive. not about your personal appearance. or diets. or smileys. hmm. what's left after you've discounted those?

in the end I naturally designed something that means absolutely nothing at all just to see if there was anybody bored enough to actually click through. I mean, I know I would have:

so, really nothing there that might be contentious. or useful. or even worth looking at. but in the week I let it run I managed to generate a healthy 0.12% clickthrough rate with a cost per click of around $0.20. pretty pricey I think but then its cheaper than putting it on the side of a bus or something. for anybody actually compelled to click the ad their reward was to find themselves on this page which is scant reward indeed but then it does effectively say 'don't click this' which I guess was the point. I expect it was an inversely proportionally effective campaign as anybody who did end up here from there undoubtedly immediately took themselves elsewhere and determined that I was a complete arse but that's like any ad campaign as far as I'm aware.

having successfully deployed 1 pointless ad via the facebook ad manager I thought I might just mix it up a bit and try another. well, when I say mix things up a bit I mean a might change a couple of words and target a more specific group that is to say target the people who are probably the only people who read this anyway so as to try and close some kind of circular ad loop and probably implode into a black hole of irrelevance. there's really not much to choose between them, other than the target:

having created the ad it went off to whatever hole in the ground it is that is home to the people who have to spend a purgatorial existence reviewing these ad submissions before they allowed to be unleashed onto a bored and largely uninterested public as I waited for the all clear before I spent more good money on some futile experiment which would only really prove in the end that in fact I am an arse but who's interested enough to work even that out anyway.

it took a little while before the ad came back. and how it came back. denied.

I'm really not concerned about contravening what seems akin to the geneva convention for social networking that is randomly targeting users who have opted in without expressly stating up front what you're up to by way of specifying exactly what you're selling which in this case is nothing, but, you know, spot the difference. I didn't say anything in the first ad about what I was what I was doing or why. sorry, actually, I said all of those things explicitly but didn't mention the company I don't have or the product I don't make or the brand that I'm not. but that ad was fine. in fact, in the second ad I do include the brand name in the title since it links directly to a Sun blog but maybe the grammatical wretchedness of myself was too much for the review process and being so clever about making no sense was the undoing of my own campaign. I suspect however rightly or wrongly since I didn't have much to go on that the target I chose for ad 2 changed the rules and that since I specifically targeted users in the us all sorts of alarms went off because the same ad in the uk is probably alright because we read any only rubbish and most of it you can't understand anyway because its deliberately obtuse. it might be that I targeted a specific company which changes the rules even if you belong to that company and are advertising a link to that company using the company name in the ad title.

its probably because dave reviewed the first one and christina reviewed the second one and they interpret the rules differently. perhaps dave thought it was funny. although that's unlikely.

© Tim Caynes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Disclaimer: I work for Sun Microsystems, but this is nothing to do with them and it's all my fault, even though I might sometimes mention Solaris or something.