The Power and Shortcomings of Facebook Marketing

As my team were playing with the idea of a facebook ad campaign for Obata Shuzo, we were all surpised to find out the tremendous capability facebook offers in terms of reaching the target segment. On the other hand, we also noticed some serious deficiencies with the marketing on facebook approach.

Advertising on facebook is powerful because it allows the advertiser to target exactly the people you want. In the graph below, it shows the advertising page where you can choose the targeting based on location, demographics and even interest (Yes, the ones you fill in the Interest section)


In the next section, you can choose from even more specific demographics information such as relationship status, language, education and workplace.


And finally, in the pricing section, the advertiser can choose the campaign length and budget, and either pay per inpression or pay per click option for the ad they want to run.


Hearing "privacy is dead" and seeing how it actually is in practice gives people quite different feelings.

However, this seemingly "dream come true" facebook tool for marketers is not with our shortcomings.

In order to test its effectiveness, we created a campaign targeted to a narrowly defined demographics. And then we made a fake profile of a person that fits exactly that profile. But when we log into that account and check the advertising section, we could not find our own campaign, because the ad section is bombarded with irrelevant ads that are apparently of no interest for our fictional character, making the really relevant ads (such as ours), unable to be seen.

So I guess the model only works when all advertisers understand their target segment well, and all set clearly defined targeting parameters when running their campaigns, which is a quite unlikely scenario.