So Facebook ads have been upgraded again. Now you can show ads to people who celebrate their birthday. Here’s what the control panel looks like:
You can be quite creative with this.
Target men who are celebrating their 21st, 30th or 40th.
Target men over 25 with an ad about “time to think about a pemsion”
Or target workers in Microsoft with an ad from google saying “We’d bake you a proper cake for you birthday cake if you worked for us”
You can see how many people will see the ad too:
As you can see in the Control Panel, you can filter ads based on if people are fans of your Business Page, have signed up to your event or use one of your applications.
This is great. MySpace was very good for this when I used it a lot more back in the day. Was able to access males of a certain age in key regions to invite them to warehouse parties for Coors Light a couple of years back.
Rather creepy, eh? As a prank once a friend made an ad targeted at _one specific known person_.
FB certainly do know to much! Now that they have their milions of users it seems to me that they have moved from a position of looking after their users to instead trying to milk them for every bit of cash they can get. Good business for business, bad business for users!
Love the Google, MS birthday day cake example 🙂
Meh, it’s creepy and it isn’t. Do I care that they have my age? Nope. Will I click on the ad? Most likely not and I’m firmly in the majority there.
Looking forward to trying out my very own facebook ads soon all the same 🙂
And that’s why I don’t do Apps!
(except for Fr Ted)
xx
My birthday is the least likely day I’ll be online (which is rare) and least likely that’ll I’ll purchase something for myself.
Now if you can target a man, whose wife’s birthday is today and he’s forgotten to buy a present; that’d be golden! There are apps that track people’s relationships, so it’s possible.
The ads I hate now are the ones that quote my age or the age I’ll be on my next birthday. “Be glasses and contact lense free by your 46th birthday.” Don’t remind me bud!
I’ve told Facebook I’m 89 and put in the wrong date of birth just to mess stuff like this up. Take that targetting marketing.
Mark,
I’d be interested to know what targetted ads you’re getting? (seriously)
Joe