Targeted Advertising
The advertising on Facebook is profile-specific (generally speaking). When I had “video games” in my activities, I got advertisements for upcoming games, an unfinished college education gets you advertisements for online accelerated degree programs and so on. Depressingly, if you’re listed as “single,” you get obnoxious ads for online dating services: “What? You’re single?? What a loser! Get a girlfriend on our site, LOSER!” I finally discovered today that there is a “null” response for the relationship status field, removing it completely from your profile. This ended the dating service advertisements, but I noticed then that since I am listed as “liberal,” it shifted gears to showing me more political advertisements. Intrigued, I tried editing my profile to make it as completely neutral as possible to see what sort of advertising is targeted toward people that don’t give a fuck about anything.
After removing everything that could possibly be construed as an opinion from my profile, about 75% of my advertisements were for McDonald’s, which was hilarious to me because some marketing guy SOMEWHERE was paid to figure that out.
McDonald’s - breakfast of nihilists.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:37 am
that’s odd that you get advertisements on facebook…either I get them and NEVER notice, or I have NEVER had one. I don’t think I have ever had one single advertisement.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:44 am
You just must not notice. They’re on the left-hand side of every page.
January 4th, 2008 at 11:38 am
whos justin howard
January 4th, 2008 at 11:39 am
wow yous guys was up early
January 4th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Since you didn’t mention it, I’m guessing the other 25% of your ads must have been for penis enlargement/performance enhancing supplements because you don’t have to have an opinion to need a bigger phallus or be a sexual tyrannosaurus. Just like me.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Actually the other 25% was pretty much t-shirts and car insurance.