Facebook advertising preferences. The good, the bad, and the hilarious.
Admit it. There have been times when you've said to your roommate "Wanna get pizza for dinner?" and as you're scrolling through Facebook BOOM there's an ad for some food delivery service telling you to order pizza without even getting up from the couch. It catches you off guard. Every. Time. Perhaps you stop mid scroll. You look over your shoulders and think, "How did they know??"
It's no secret that one of Facebook's main goals is to profile its users. It tries to understand not only basic info (A/S/L), but also more sophisticated algorithms based on correlated arguments and your personal preferences. Some of the ads you see are determined by those lovely cookie crumbs you leave while navigating god-knows-what on the interwebs while others are sucked natively from the platform and your activity on it.
If there's one thing most everyone can agree on it's that Facebook's targeting isn't always spot on. From campaigns for women's bras on decidedly male profiles to engagement ring announcements for the newly single, the whole "personalized advertising" thing hasn't exactly been perfected by our friends at Menlo Park. Surely Facebook will work to bring the creepiness of their user insights to newer heights, but in the meantime, if you've ever been curious to know the dirt Facebook has on your "preferences" finding out is much easier than you think.
All you have to do is go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/edit/ while logged into your Facebook account. There you'll find a treasure trove of interesting information about yourself that even YOU might not know about! Once you've checked it out comment on the article for some of the #BestOf because there are some real doozies out there. For example, I am apparently interested in:
- Coach (sport) - as in horse and carriage coach
- Durex
- Exit strategy - no relation to the above topic
- Departments of Burkina Faso
- Japanese reggae
- Lorries - aka tractor trailers
#ThanksFacebook. Who knew that 10 minutes of browsing my advertising preferences could be so revelatory? No more book clubs, interest groups, or adult recreational sports needed. Facebook not only helps you deepen your personal interests, it helps you define them! Ok, maybe not, but extremely interesting and most certainly humorous for anyone curious enough to see what Facebook bases its targeting on.
I would be remiss not to throw a shoutout to perhaps one of the most amazing features of the advertising preferences page on Facebook: the photos associated with each category. I took special delight in discovering Facebook's image association and I hope it will bring as much joy to your day as it did mine. Ladies and gentlemen, a collage of some of my favorites:
So boys and girls, what lesson have we learned today? Sure, on a personal level I'm more in control of what I want to see via ads and I'm relatively autonomous in canceling some of those strange categories from my preferences. As a digital marketer it's important to understand there's not always tons of transparency when it comes to profiling with big platforms like Facebook and Google. Even if I say, "I want to target people in Zimbabwe who are interested in Antarctic excursions", some of the people who end up in my segment are destined to be totally random. This is something that we, and our clients, have to come to peace with until there's a way to justify the quality of the segment Facebook spits out when we include interest categories. I just hope advertisers aren't too upset when they learn I'm not on the market for tiny beaver top hats.