Facebook Home ads show Facebook at its worst | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Home ads show Facebook at its worst

medium.com

151 pointsPasanpr42 comments

So there is an interesting "issue" with Facebook which is that Facebook has so many users that when even a very small fraction of them thinks Facebook should be something that Facebook isn't trying to be, its a lot of people disconnected from the "vision".

The issue is in quotes because for some this is a non-problem, these people don't get it and they will eventually move on. For others it is a huge problem because they see a potential product that they would like, and Facebook has some or most of the pieces, but it never completes the picture.

One has to assume that because a television spot requires review and approval and then insertion approval that it represents closely what the folks managing the vision of what Facebook home should be. And from these commercials they are selling a way to "hang out" with the people you really care about when you are hanging out with people you are near and perhaps care less about.

As with real relationships you bring your complexes to them, not the other way around.

That "issue" is something I've been trying to put into words for a while now and you did it very very well. I think that absolutely describes the dynamics between Facebook and the reaction of subsets of users every time the company releases a new product.

I think people don't always realize the scale of Facebook's user base. With one billion people if 99% approve of a change you've still upset 10 million people - 90% 100 million.

And the approval rating is probably much lower than that.

My first reaction on seeing the goat ad was negative. Why they chose to advertise this as an antisocial product which helps you disengage from ACTUAL social activity escaped me.

I once wrote a blog boat decrying the attitude of many of my European friends and family (who I see and keep up with on Facebook of course) for their attitude summed up on the phrase "I don't live to work, I work to live" ...while this sounds superficially appealing most folks saying it use it as a justification for letting life pass them by, taking Jo responsibility for themselves, making no effort in their job and then blowing their paycheck on booze at the weekend.

Facebook Home as portrayed in these ads appears to be for the folks zombieing their way through life in this way. The artifice if social networking replacing the actual social. It saddens me. Sharing "experiences" is nowhere near as good as actually having experiences, being present fully in the moment, in the company of others similarly engaged.

> My first reaction on seeing the goat ad was negative. Why they chose to advertise this as an antisocial product which helps you disengage from ACTUAL social activity escaped me.

Because they want to promote disengaging from actual social activities and browsing facebook instead.

> Sharing "experiences" is nowhere near as good as actually having experiences, being present fully in the moment, in the company of others similarly engaged.

Yes, but "actually having experiences" doesn't give you a chance to watch facebook ads, while "sharing experiences" does.

It's your business to know what's better for you and their business to know what's better for them. Facebook isn't a charity.

> Because they want to promote disengaging from actual social activities and browsing facebook instead.

Exactly. This is as honest marketing as it gets.

The behaviour of the people in the ad is exactly the type of behaviour that facebook can thrive off. Glance around in public occasionally and note that half the people looking at their phones are looking at facebook. I think this is the first time that facebook has so blatantly approved of that behaviour, though.

Side-note: Was the adversary in the recent Doctor Who episode (Bells of Saint John) a metaphor for this type of facebook behaviour?

Advertising Facebook as the perfect tool for the completely unconscious is a most unfortunate choice.

I have only seen the airplane ad and while I was watching it I was wondering if they are being ironic. The hero of the ad so to speak is this guy who thinks everything around him is oh so boring so he escapes to the colorful fantasy world provided by his facebook phone.

I was waiting for the punch line only it never arrived.

Have you ever boarded an airplane before? For me it's about two minutes of waiting behind people putting up bags, 30 seconds of stowing bags and sitting down, and then fifteen minutes of going through all my chats and social sites hoping somebody has said something interesting since they called my boarding group.

I have never been on a plane. I'd be nervous and excited, and would take in as much as I can see. I'd look at my stupid phone for exactly zero seconds.

Takeoff, landing, and the flight in between is awesome. I've not flown enough for that to get old. However, the time spend waiting to get ON the plane, or waiting for it to start taxiing, is _amazingly_ boring. Imagine waiting in line to get in an elevator, and then once you're inside, you have to wait ... and wait ... and then the elevator attendants give the mandatory safety spiel that you can't see well, and then finally it starts to move after ten minutes.

That's roughly what the pre-launch portion of an airplane trip is like, and I wholeheartedly empathize with someone traveling alone wanting to mentally escape it.

I understand the author's issues with the spots -- and agree with them -- but he seems to demonstrate a poor understanding of what the goal of an advertisement for a free Android overlay targeted mainly towards 18-35 yr olds should be.

The goals of such an advertisement are to be loud and to promote immediate curiosity, in my opinion.

The author, Josh Elman, has worked at Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and is now a principal at Greylock Partners with an investment focus on advertising and social (among other things). I'd say he definitely understands the advertising goals of a social media company.

I'm not trying to be glib, but he really doesn't demonstrate it in the article. His thesis is:

Facebook is celebrating all the wrong things. It advocates tuning out the people around you to see what else is happening that must be more interesting elsewhere. It foments FOMO.

Which sounds incredibly effective with the aforementioned target audience.

You could make the argument that he's talking less about the ads being ineffective and talking more about the ads being deplorable, which is fair -- but why does that matter? I can't remember Apple deployed a marketing strategy without the world 'magic', but I still think they're a great company.

Accomplishing the short-term goal while creating or reinforcing long-term positioning and/or framing issues (e.g. Facebook as a tool for tuning out) isn't actually a win.

These ads are a little strange, but perhaps Facebook is targeting the younger demographic with short attention spans? Perhaps in light of the recent market reports that suggest teenagers are losing interest in Facebook?

Assuming this might be the case, think back when you were a teenager.

Family meals were really monotonous when all you could think about is running back upstairs and resuming your IM sessions with your friends.

Boarding planes (not flying in them mind you) is hella boring and if you look around today, almost everybody who has taken his/her seat is glued to their phones to ease the banality of the entire process.

And the droning out of the CEO? Well, maybe that was Facebook's feeble, yet well-intentioned attempt to poke fun at themselves. Who can't appreciate a little self-deprecating humor?

Finally, I could be completely wrong and Facebook needs to hire a new agency to handle their media image.

they're almost the exact opposite of the ad I would want to see: for example, the family is having dinner, everybody is together and talking to each other, and at the end is the reveal that the oldest kid is actually alone in his dorm room, but he feels close to home because, well, facebook home.

on the other hand, i guess most people do in fact view their boss as a boring blowhard so it's more attractive to advertise that your phone can help you ignore him than it is to advertise that it can help you listen. but aren't ads supposed to be aspirational?

I hate to do this.. but..

" The Morlocks could have descended from today’s social network or hedge fund owners, while the ancestors of the Eloi undoubtedly felt lucky initially, as free tools helped them crash on each other’s couches more efficiently. What is intriguing about Wells’s vision is that members of both species become undignified, lesser creatures. (Morlocks eat Eloi, which is about as far as one can go in rejecting empathy and dignity.)

source : Lanier, Jaron (2013-03-07). Who Owns The Future? . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

It's a truly horrible ad. So un-Facebook, so unlike their landing page. Or maybe it's the Facebook I didn't notice but is normal for everyone else?

How is this ad persuasive or even feel-good?

When Facebook tries to drive engagement to their site, is there "meaningful content" qualifier that management uses? Because as far as I can tell, things like "frictionless sharing," "sponsored stories," reposting old likes and even harvesting them from user messages & mere brand mentions in updates have absolutely ZERO to do "meaningful content."

As far as I can tell, Facebook wants users on their site constantly: clicking, and interacting with it in just about any capacity, even an automated one.

Perhaps, mission statement-speak aside, these ads show facebook at its most honest, if even in an idealized way.

I still don't know why I click medium.com links here, the site does not work on android thanks to shit CSS

Works fine here nexus 4

We'll look into that. Thanks.

Basic Opera Mini support would be nice too.

https://twitter.com/sausaw/status/320064095321722880

I didn't realize that old Android browsers don't support overflow:auto, I was trying to get rid of some fixed position elements to improve layout performance. Will fix.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2911

It looks to me as if Facebook is attempting to represent a product that immerses the user into any experience that they desire, regardless if it's "social" or not. It's obvious that by presenting the viewer with fast-paced, exciting content ready at the flick of a finger, it in turn captures the viewers attention enough to evoke curiosity of the product's possibilities.

If Facebook were to take an intimate social approach with the ad campaign, it could lead to negative results as well. Although I don't have conclusive evidence, I believe a large portion of Facebook's user base uses the platform to feel closer with people and organizations that they don't have immediate relations with - or an actual follower base that will appreciate what they post.

From my point of view, Facebook is more of a content consumption platform than a broadcasting platform -- that's kind of a weird statement, but I'm just partial to believing that most people use it to consume than to produce, hence presenting all of these immersive experiences that users can escape to.

I should add that I agree that this may be harmful for Facebook's long term image, but if the campaign's goal is to get this app into users hands and trap them into the operating system, it seems like a good approach.

If these ads intended audience were grown-up, corporate they could have featured business trip and family time, but these ads targets a different demographics altogether.

These ads depicts turning boring into fun, features interruptions every few seconds, showing people unhappy with life looking for a way to escape it and wanting to be entertained. In the center is the phone.

Now what demographics has a short attention span, a low tolerance for boring, is unhappy with life because it sucks and constantly want to stimulated ?

So facebook is targeting teenagers as loosely the 10-25, to the surprise of OP who's an investor, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Teenagers are going mobile, sometimes mobile only at an unmatched rate and they are the major driving force of any so called "social networking website", as demonstrated with pretty much every of those websites in history. I believe it is a known fact that facebook was losing users from this vital demographics and mostly due to a shift of usage towards mobile.

The unexpected part in these ads is that they seem to be truthfully honest, to me the ads shows facebook home as disruptive, obnoxious and unwelcomed constant feed void of interesting content pushing people towards not living in the moment which pretty much sums up facebook IMHO.

The next installment of the Facebook Home commercial...

A guy at a party staring at his phone watching a guy at a party staring at his phone watching a guy at a party staring at his phone watching a guy at a party staring at his phone watching a screaming goat.

All through the magic Facebook Home :)

According to this article, the commercials pushes an anti-social agenda. I agree for the most part. The commercial is a lot closer to reality than you think. We are so connected to our phones that we forgot how live without it.

Social networks could be a great thing. But, it should also be use as an amplifier of reality. I could go on an on about this topic, but I give up. People have their obsessions. Whether it is fast foods, TV, internet, sex, Honey Boo Boo Child, too much of anything is never a good thing.

I don't know. Beach pictures, drag queens (Shangela jumps out of a box!), cute kids, kitty cats, and club photos basically describes what I see the service as being used for by my chums. Not a bad diversion for keeping up with far-flung friends, in my honest opinion.

If these ads don't speak to you, you're probably not their profitable market.

It is interesting that one cannot see how many people liked or disliked the videos on YouTube, and comments are disabled. They clearly are not that confident about their campaign.

Indeed. Is using Facebook on a smart phone to slyly tune out people around you, coworkers, and family really advancing the mission of "making the world more open and connected"?

> [...]friends around the world who can celebrate with them immediately from their phones.

I get the part of the videos, but is this guy delusional? We don't live in an advert, so we don't send out PR quality photo's, or celebrate a friends something by 'like'ing a photo. You do that by calling your friend and congratulate. Social networks is marketing itself as a replacement for actual networks, which is catastrophic.

Was literally about to write the same thing. The ads focus on Facebookcas a cigarette break, not on the positive side of things.

Facebook is a hyper-successful product that, among some people, has a bad image for various reasons: uncool, invasive, socially destructive etc.

The goat ad is self-aware and funny. It is the opposite of faceless, bland, tech-centric, and obvious. It also deflects expectations that Facebook Home will be perfect straight out of the chute.

Seems to me it's just right.

The past decade has wrought a massive shift in the communication paradigm of humans. The context map of communication has completely changed. Over the next decade, we will begin to see the both the positive and negative effects of our collective shift in social perspective.

Its all about perception. I like Facebook Home ads. Its creative way of communicating the idea about app instead of just listing out all the services. I am not saying Chrome ad is bad, I lik them both, but Facebook ads got creative edge.

Those ads don't appeal to me either. But if they are aiming at a teen to mid-twenties demographic, which I'd imagine they are, it seems fairly spot-on.

"When you get messages, you don’t have to go into a siloed app to talk to friends, messaging is pervasive"

Facebook Home is the very definition of a siloed app.

I agree

agree

Fuck Facebook and fuck smartphones, too.

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