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Understanding Facebook’s Targeted Advertising

Hey look, I am in marketing and am all for advertising to the right potential customers. Lets face it, advertising can be expensive! Yet, what I really hate is when advertisers target based on demographic profile. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I don’t feel like I really fit the mold as “normal” or “typical” when compared to my demographics group. One of the companies that currently uses a demographics-based ad targeting system is Facebook. I understand Facebook’s need to serve ads and am not even opposed to seeing dedicated ad space while using their service, but some of the relevance of their ads really bugs me. Just recently I learned about this great sub-site on Facebook that lets you see (and control) the targeted ads that Facebook shows you.

The Facebook targeted ads sub-site address is: http://www.facebook.com/ads/adboard/

This site is great because it allows you to remove the ones you dislike and it gives you an idea of what Facebook things of you as a customer. Now I do have a wish list of things I would change on this site as well:

1. Add a remove all button
2. Add an “opt-out of targeted advertising” setting
3. If you’re going to target advertise at least do it well. As someone who is happily married, I don’t want to “meet a girl in my town”!

Overall I think this site is a step in the right direction for Facebook and I appreciate being able to peel back the covers and understand their advertising practices a little better.