I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
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Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#2"And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: “and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else would they be making the pitch?
The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically."
This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it will be.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#3Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent.
To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting if a payday loan company runs ads segmented by zip code and picks the best performing areas that happen to be predominantly black.
EDIT: This should teach me to read the entire article first, since I made up an example that was literally used in the article. My bad.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#4"The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke."
Woah. They're asking to be regulated.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#5The problem with any platform like Facebook (though Facebook happens to be have the richest seam
of user data, at scale and across devices) is that the segment with the highest clickthrough rate will inevitably be one which draws on shady factors.
It will be the segment deliberately concocted to find that most vulnerable / subsceptible to buy. If you're looking to ship garbage self help books, you're going to target people who like garbage self help book writers. Rinse and repeat for preppers etc.
To prevent this you essentially either have to ask marketers to hobble their own search terms even when they know there is likely a higher CTR out there (like payday loan companies willingly deciding not to advertise on daytime TV), or asking Facebook to hobble its own platform.
Until there is some kind of regulation or FTC pushback I can't see the situation improving.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#6Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent. To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting…
The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy.
Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#7Misleading title - since when did FB product managers become executives?
Though completely believe FB will use their data in any way possible to make money, ethical or not.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#8So wait, remind me why we should believe Antonio Garcia Martinez?
The guy trumpeted the fact that he lied to his investors as a point of pride:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...
"Trust me, they're lying, I know because I'm a liar" doesn't seem terribly convincing.
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#9Ahh the old "so what" argument.
So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads?
So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform?
So what?
Re: I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
#10Ahh the old "so what" argument. So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads? So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform? So what?
There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks.