"People consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant."
I am assuming the "people" he is referencing are the advertisers, not the users.
I am assuming the "people" he is referencing are the advertisers, not the users.
People shown their News Feed with relevant ads regularly mention that this was interesting content and do not point it out as ads. This is not an exception, but common for brands with certain characteristics. One example of that is music of film trailers. They however regularly describe as Ads and resent the presence of content that was not sponsored (at least not to Facebook). MLMs and “influencer”-type of content is a caricature; other objections are more idiosyncratic.
There are some ads that are seen as such, but those are generally from brands who don’t use Facebook self-optimisation tools or insist on a reach that doesn’t make sense (typically, solution vendors).
Overall, sponsoring isn’t correlated with interest.
The real question you're asking is: Would you rather trade some of your data so we can show you ads that you are more likely to click because we have ascertained that these value propositions are likely to drive some kind of an action? (And by the way action is all we really ever know, and is a so-so proxy for "relevance" or value to the user, c.f., clickbait.)
When you ask this question I'm inclined to say some users wouldn't consider this an awesome trade. That's being modest.
Disclosure: I make digital ads for a living.
This seems a wrong and misleading way of looking at it. Facebook has the data either way, and advertisers aren't getting the data either way. You aren't "trading" anything; the algorithms can either show you something relevant, or show you something irrelevant.
Personally, I'd rather see something I might find amusing. I was about to say "it hasn't happened yet", but I actually have clicked on one FB ad (ever) - the mysterious package company, which actually does look interesting. Not enough to give them my money but still, it's a start.
I've learned to mentally block out any ad-space-based advertising a long time ago, in the Warez-site era of the late 90s, early 2000s. I mostly just get annoyed by the disruption of useful space but I don't even really process ads, I couldn't tell you what the last ad I've seen was, even tho I'm watching a YouTube video with mid-roll ads right now.
I don't trust ads. Especially since I've grown up in Eastern Europe, ad-spaces were always littered with dodgy things here. It's still not a common thing to see ads for products from big brands, etc. Last year I've seen Jesus-cult (not kidding, it was some weird religious sect advertising), Russian singles banner ads on YouTube itself. Oh, and I forgot about the one for "winning the luxury cruise of your dreams".
The only exception to pointless, dodgy and creepy ads I see daily are the e-commerce site product carousel ads. Those more than often advertise products or alternatives to products I just bought. Very useful!
I would very much like to be left out of "personalised" advertising. If this is what my data gets me and gets you as an advertiser then we're both better off with me keeping it to myself anyway.
If I want to hear from your products, I'll subscribe to your newsletter or visit your site.
I work in advertising. I have heard it all, and all of it essentializes an unrealistically infantile and helpless audience. If the audience is so helpless, how could we even reason they have the means to purchase the product being advertised? It really makes no sense.
The answer is extremely easy for me: Give me the irrelevant ads and stop collecting my data.
Unless now you are like I don't even want FB to rank the news feed and show me posts from fraudulent accounts..
2. I do NOT want FB to rank the newsfeed. It should be deleted or ranked by time. The more parts of a social media product handed over to a ranking or search or algorithmic feed, the more chance they have for anti-user patterns: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/08/social-me...
3. How would a fraudulent account show up on a feed? I'm actually curious. Do they need to be friended first?
Even if you do carefully research your purchases, you're influenced by which products you're exposed to, which are reviewed, social media chatter, etc. This is all heavily influenced by marketing efforts which are a lot more subtle than banner ads.
sorry to paint such a bleak picture but this stuff is ubiquitous, both online and offline, and it will eventually and consistently break your mental defenses in a way that you might not even notice.
[1] I use generally and not specifically since on average the ROI is positive but for some advertisers the ROI is negative too.
Do you want to see ads?
> No
You have to. Now would you prefer those ads are relevant or irrelevant?