The Ultimate Retaliation: Pranking My Roommate With Targeted Facebook Ads

This humorous blog entry sheds a little light on just how simply Facebook can help advertisers send very targeted ads to individuals.  In this case, the author played a retaliatory prank on his roommate.  

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).

It should be mentioned at this point that my roommate is a professional sword swallower.

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