Consumer Driven Consumer Targeting

Consumer Driven Consumer Targeting

In a recent article, Facebook revealed that it would be providing users more say about  the ads they see in their news feed. While users have already been able to "like" or "hide" ads for quite some time, Facebook is now making those actions more influential in determining which ads to show to their users. The premise is that if you like an ad, ads will show up more frequently and the counter of that for ads that you “hide”. Pretty simple, right?

Well, it’s also no secret that Facebook has some of the lowest performing ads in the market. Despite the immense amount of knowledge they have on users, people don’t want advertisements getting in the way of them interacting with their friends. In doing so, Facebook advertisements have always resembled that of a well informed waiter on a date, you may actually like what they are recommending, but you really just want them to leave you alone.

While a general push to make advertisements more creative and interactive has reduced some of this friction by making advertisements resemble good content, rich media advertising demands healthy premiums and these type of advertisement alternatives are rarely available on a platform like Facebook.  Zuckerberg’s latest move, however, may change all of that. As a consumer, if I know that I will see LESS ads that I hate and MORE ads that I like, I feel incentivized to cooperate with the ad and have it learn more about me. This basic incentive creates a dynamic for the consumer to engage with the ad (albeit briefly), but more importantly think contextually about the ad to determine if I want to be marketed to. By liking the advertisement, a user informs the marketer that they not only saw the ad (a tremendous attribution effort in itself), but devoted enough time and thought to the brand to opt into future marketing efforts. As users scale the number of responses they feed into the system, Facebook’s ad network will undoubtedly improve upon its existing performance and offer targeting capabilities that simply aren’t available elsewhere.

While this is a revolutionary concept for Facebook, it has the potential to have an equally revolutionary impact on the rest of the ad tech ecosystem. By getting consumers more engaged with the way they feel about advertisements and branding, Voice-of-Customer (VoC) approaches can be incorporated into all aspects of performance attribution to take the guessing game out of digital advertising. As solutions incorporate machine learning techniques that encourage users to engage with advertising, targeting can become more focused on optimizing the ad experience, rather than simply guessing the nature, interest and intent of the user. At the end of the day, this is all about incentivizing mutually beneficial behavior to improve the efficacy of advertising, and Facebook’s latest effort may be the first step in getting consumers and marketers on the same side of the table.