I just wish I had an option to say I’m not interested.
If you give me extra wishes, I’d love three options, to either say that the ad is annoying, the brand isn’t for me, or I don’t want to be offered that type of product.
The quality of ads would skyrocket if I could just stop seeing efforts to get me to be interested in things that I will never buy.
Just before joining Facebook, I was living abroad and confronted to ads in a language I didn’t understand constantly. As my bootcamp task, I measured that this was 4% of ads shown to users. At the time, this was already billions of dollars. My manager deemed that to be a ridiculous and pointless exercise. One night at the bar (there were three bars in the London office at the time), I mentioned it to a guy who happened to be the big ad boss, who immediately prioritized the project, I got a couple of smart guys who joined after I was promoted for finding this.
A bit later, I checked the conversion rate by how many times you’ve seen the same ad before. It was a precipitous cliff: people click on things they’ve never seen before. Ranking ads from the same advertiser happens to be one of those SQL/Hive query that doesn’t scale well, so I had to use the fact I came to the office early and has 12 hours of uninterrupted server time before the daily queries were hammering anything, and I had to sample a lot—but I realized I could sample by server, which helped a lot.
I tried to mention it to the same guy, who said he knew about that problem, but empowering users like I suggested would not work: it would shrink the matching opportunities, AI was getting smarter, etc. In practice, the debate around privacy got very toxic, and Facebook couldn’t let people do that without some drama about storing a list of advertisers that they said they didn’t like.
One of Sandberg’s trusted lieutenants lost a child late in her pregnancy; it was a whole thing. She started seeing ads for baby clothes just after, which triggered an optional ban on alcohol, gambling, and baby stuff. That’s still there. I worked with her briefly a bit later (after months of bereavement) and asked if it made sense to expand the category. She replied that those were two legal obligations, plus her well-known personal drama that no one dared push against, so she was able to push for those three, but that the company had changed. No other categories could be added: at that point, it would be too difficult. Mark used to not care about ads, but he started having expensive ideas, notably AI (to ban horrendous content); he needed the money, and he started to care about raking as much dough in as possible. I had worked on horrendous content (instead of ad language) enough to know that it mattered, so I was very conflicted. It felt surreal how much things had changed in nine months.
All that still feels like a giant waste, not the least how much energy goes into making and showing ads to people repeatedly swearing at their screen, begging to make that annoying copy disappear.