Excerpt below:
And thus I conceived the most elaborate and manipulative prank of my life (so far).
It began innocently enough with me
snagging the email address he had listed on his Facebook profile, adding
it into an Excel worksheet, and exporting it as a .CSV file. I then
used the Audiences tool in Power Editor to upload the file to Facebook
as a Custom Audience labeled ‘My Roommate’ as you can see below.
You can do this with anyone’s email address or, if you don’t have that, you can very easily find their Facebook User ID using FindMyFacebookID and
use that. The wonderful, and devious, thing about this is that it
doesn’t matter if their profile is public or private – so long as it’s
searchable, you can get the UID. Again, just add it to an Excel
worksheet, save it as a .CSV, select ‘UID’ for the Data Type and upload
it as a Custom Audience.
EDIT: Facebook has since changed their policies and won’t allow you to market to any audience with less than 20 people. If you want to try this yourself, there’s a loophole. Let’s say you want to target one of your guy friends, add his email to a .CSV along with the emails of 19 female friends before uploading it to Facebook. You can then target anyone in that custom audience who is also male (thus eliminating the 19 women and effectively targeting a single person).
Again using Facebook’s Power Editor I
created a campaign (of course labeled ‘Payback’) and started with a few
blank ads. Under the ‘Audience’ tab I selected the ‘My Roommate’ Custom
Audience I just created as my only targeting and Facebook said that my
Potential Audience was fewer than 1,000 people.
At this point my plan was clever, but what I did next made it just plain evil.
It’s been proven time and time again that Facebook knows more about you than you know about you. While
advertisers are able to use that data in their targeting, it’s often
poorly executed (which is why I, a Jew-ish guy, often see ads for
Christian dating sites), but as a Facebook user you’re never able to see
WHY you’re being targeted. This was exactly what I planned to use to
exact my revenge. I was going to target him with highly personalized
messages that were focused on things Facebook truly shouldn’t know about
his personal life – things that weren’t even online, let alone on
Facebook. The goal, to make him unbelievably paranoid.
Since I didn’t want him to know that I
was placing the ads I opted to use sidebar ads and direct him to sites
that somewhat related to the message – although most of the links
associated were pretty random. This enabled me to target him with ads
anonymously whereas if I had done newsfeed ads I would have needed to
create and populate a fake Facebook page to maintain the illusion (let’s
be honest, I may not do things half-assed, but I still do them
efficiently).
Seriously though, he’s a professional
sword swallower and quite an amazing performer. He’s also extremely
talented at utilizing applied psychology to read body language and
people as a part of his shows. I don’t know much about that stuff, but I
know enough about getting in someone’s head to be slightly evil – only
when warranted of course. Seeing as I had lived with the guy for a few
months now, I knew enough about his personal life that I was able to
create some rather terrifying ad placements.
While my roommate is a professional
sword swallower who can down a 26” sword to the hilt, he gags every time
he tries to swallow a pill – oh the irony. While he didn’t broadcast it
publicly, it was the source of a great amusement to those close to him
that knew it – especially me who saw him attempt to take vitamins every
morning. For this placement the idea was to sell a fake product that
helped people take pills without gagging … and have it speak only to
sword swallowers.
Once the ad had been uploaded it became a
waiting game, but thankfully – I didn’t have to wait long. Two days
later I was at home quietly working on my computer while he was away on a
trip when he messaged me…
At this point I was LITERALLY rolling on the floor laughing.
I’m pretty sure I peed a little picturing him vigorously refreshing his Facebook page.
Read the full article: Pranking My Roommate with Facebook Targeted Ads
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