I use an ad blocker on my laptop. It can’t filter Facebook’s “sponsored posts” in my newsfeed, but when I’m visiting FB via Chrome, I don’t have a big proliferation of ads. Using the FB app on my phone, however, is an entirely different experience. Every third “post” is an ad, and they’re quite intrusive. I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking ALL of them. For the past 3-4 days, I’ve been getting the exact same ad (same picture, same copy) because no matter how many times I block it, it just instantly rebrands itself under another name and pushes the ad at me again.
The product in question is an overpriced laundry basket with
a turtle on the side with the compelling copy “Love it. Order Here.” Facebook has
decided since I’m a female over the age of 34, I must really be excited about
laundry baskets I guess.
I noticed that the links served up in these ads were all “Rebrandly,” so I spent some time on Google to learn more. Rebrandly advertises themselves as a URL shortening and link management service. It sounds innocuous enough, but the questionable deluge of spam for junk products tells another story.
I Googled rebranding and found lots of friendly, helpful
articles about legitimate rebranding techniques to use when you change your company
name or want to launch a new brand under your existing company umbrella.
Next I searched on how to dodge ad-blockers. Again, totally
legitimate advice on providing quality branded content, native advertising, and
other techniques that any company that’s serious about their marketing ought to
be doing.
Clearly there’s an ugly underbelly of social media advertising that just isn’t getting media attention. I figure there’s one of three dynamics going on here.
- The retailer has paid a sketchy social media marketing firm to get them as many impressions as possible and doesn’t really care how it’s done.
- The retailer has purposefully chosen this questionable marketing technique figuring that if they flood people with ads, sooner or later enough of them will click through and buy that it’s worth the money.
- The advertiser isn’t a retail company at all. They’re just an affiliate site getting paid by clicks not conversions, so they’ll do anything to get clicks no matter how low the quality.
What depresses me is that FB clearly has no safeguards in
place to prevent this type of spamming, utterly disregarding the quality of
user experience so that they can maximize advertising profit. Even if you
block these advertisers, you will see their ads again. On occasion I’ve even
clicked to the advertiser's FB profile, reported it as a fake, and subsequently
blocked it. The fact that FB gives you no mechanism for blocking a page unless
you report it is problematic too. Their arguments that they have algorithms to
prevent harmful targeting practices are obviously completely hollow. Without
regulation, they will do NOTHING that would remove even one ad from your feed,
and they’ll continue to make it as difficult as possible for users to influence
their own experience.
So, as a business owner, when FB prompts me to pay to boost
a post, I just laugh. As if boosting a handful of posts would allow me to
compete with the spam turtles? As if I want to be just one more ad that
frustrated users automatically block because they’re so fucking sick of the
spam?
