John Koetsier is a journalist, analyst, author, and speaker. FORBES
There’s an unlisted Facebook video on YouTube with over 37,000 views and 132 likes.
It also has 5,200 dislikes.
It’s part of Facebook’s “Good Ideas Deserve To Be Found” campaign. On the surface it’s all about small business succeeding. But essentially it is about the benefits of personalized advertising, and ultimately is about you clicking OK when iOS 14.5 hits early this month, you install an app, and it asks for tracking permissions.
Personalized ads are only possible if advertising giants like Facebook and Google build and maintain vast identity graphs. They use smartphone identifiers like Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) or Google’s GAID (Google Ad ID) to measure which ads work and track your app installs over time. That helps them build a profile of who you are and what you like, and over time as you link your Facebook or Google accounts, they can enrich that profile with more data.
(Smaller adtech companies can do this as well. The same technology enables profiling similar to what Cambridge Analytica used for political campaigns.)
Now that they know what you like and what you do and what age you are and where you live and many other things, they can vastly increase advertising efficiency over merely contextual targeting (think finance ads in a finance app).
Facebook has said, in fact, that personalization accounts for half of the value of advertising.
That increased efficiency means brands can isolate very specific sets of people to target new products or services: extremely helpful for startups, small business, or smart large companies. It also means that the best advertisers can charge more for their ads because they’re more effective at generating results.
But Apple’s new iOS 14 data privacy protections threaten that efficiency and effectiveness, throwing an $80 billion industry into upheaval and putting as much as $25 billion of Facebook and Google revenue over the next 12 months at risk.
Hence Facebook’s campaign.
But people aren’t having it. While comments on the video are closed, over 5,200 people have rated the video thumbs-down. That’s a 40:1 ratio of downvotes to upvotes, given the 132 likes the video has received.
Interestingly, even mobile marketers, the core audience that you might suppose would be in favor of the ecosystem that drives increased advertising efficiency, are also not in favor, calling the ad “weird” and and reacting with comments like “what in the world …” on a marketing Slack channel I’m part of.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Facebook is not very straightforward in the ad, which is mostly focused on businesses succeeding and only in the last few seconds draws an explicit link to personalized advertising.
Suggestion for Facebook: just be straight up.
Say: we do personalized advertising. It helps businesses send ads to you that make sense given who you are and what you like. That’s better than random ads that aren’t relevant to you. If you want to keep your ads relevant, click OK in iOS 14.5.
At least, that’s how I would tackle it.
Then people can make up their own mind, and Facebook can live with the consequences. Whether you click “OK” or “Don’t Allow.”
