Online advertisers missing the target

NET RESULTS: If Facebook's targeted ads are anything to go by, I'm fat, financially inept and menopausal

I HAVE seen the person Facebook thinks I am, and I am depressed.

You might think that you sign up to Facebook to present yourself artfully to the world as you wish to be seen, much like other profile sites such as Bebo, MySpace or (for the business crowd) LinkedIn.

To a certain degree this is true. But your personal content manipulations often fail to take into account that such sites see members as potentially lucrative recipients of targeted advertising. Sites like Facebook select the advertisements they think suit you best based on basic information in your profile, such as your date of birth and, presumably, all the other stuff you add in over time.

So far (and I am not a big Facebook user), Facebook thinks I need advertisements about menopause remedies, financial investments, facial creams, an MBA degree, and something called the “home fat reduction system”.

In other words, if one is a female no longer in the first phase of youthful adulthood and has supplied little additional information, Facebook believes you are a fat, financially inept, menopausal woman in search of natural HRT remedies.

Boy, that’s enough to send me to the fridge for some comfort eating. Or, at least, it makes my heart sink every time I log in to my Facebook account. I must add that I don’t think of myself as any of the above things, which makes checking in to Facebook an experience akin to being shown your own personal memento mori.

I’d question whether this level of “sophisticated” advertisement targeting encourages people to keep coming back to their profiles – or perhaps just those of us older than 30.

I know it bothers other people too. A friend told me recently that a female pal of his was so appalled at the advertisements she was getting on her Facebook page that she made a post about it, to the bemusement of those who read the post. The reason was, of course, that because it is targeted advertising, visitors got the advertisements on her page that matched their own profiles, not the advertisements she herself saw there.

All of this raises the problem of targeted advertisements. Sometimes, depending on the website and its affiliations in the advertising world, you get advertisements based on the cookies on your computer that have been placed by websites you have visited, which are in turn affiliated to the advertising company serving you the advertisement.

The assumption is that you visit websites of personal interest and therefore are more likely to click on advertisements connected to the general topic areas of those websites. But the weakness is that almost everyone looks at an awful lot of websites every week, many of them not at all connected to something they really like.

Meanwhile, Google’s free Gmail e-mail service, like others, delivers advertisements based on keywords in the e-mails you are reading. But as the advertisements are “stupid” and cannot understand the context of an e-mail, users can get advertisements that are the opposite of what they might want to see.

Free discussion-group e-mail services such as Google Groups and Yahoo Groups have the same problem. For example, I am on a couple of lists that discuss dogs. The advertisements regularly attached to the main website and the e-mails I get directly from the groups are often for the worst type of puppy farmer websites. Thus the advertisements serve to infuriate me rather than encourage a purchase.

I’d guess that the advertisements you are given on web search sites are probably the most appropriately targeted, capturing the web user at the point of a specific search, but these too can be clumsy and offensive. They are also increasingly meaningless, given that advertisers can buy keywords, including brand names, even though they are not the brand-name holder or have nothing to do with that (presumably popular) keyword.

All of this is a headache for advertisers too. They would like to give you more precisely targeted advertisements, but this requires the web user surrendering more information. But even web users who are not particularly interested in privacy issues have been very resistant, sometimes vociferously so, to sites and advertisers using private details – taken from their profiles, posts, e-mails and websurfing – to match advertisements to readers. The huge memberships of the big profile sites have come to blows several times with the site operators over how their details are used for advertising.

Most recently, this past week saw Facebook users rebel against the site for instigating a system where your personal profile picture could be used for advertisements seen by “friends” – which, for most of us, means lots, even hundreds or thousands, of strangers.

The system required people to opt out of it rather than opt in, rightly creating a discussion firestorm. I found it reassuring that people remain wary about at least some aspects of their privacy. But still, I’d be a lot happier if Facebook would see me as something other than a fat woman in search of HRT and a business degree. If only they’d look at my profile picture of a fit, active woman at the helm of a sailboat. But then, I just opted out of letting them use that picture, didn’t I?