top | item 10233723

What you should learn from the man who lost $600,000 on Facebook ads

42 points| smalter | 10 years ago |adespresso.com | reply

26 comments

order
[+] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
It's a women's fashion publication. By the age of the models they use, their target market is girls age 15-25. (As opposed to tabloids or mags targeting an older range of women, see http://www.zoomermag.com/). Given that target market I can see why facebook might have been appealing ... ten years ago.

The young are walking away from facebook, women in particular. Most walked the day their grandparents and highschool teachers joined. But young women are really walking away these days because they find any picture of them on facebook is quickly harvested for use by some shady dating website. As one student expressed it to me, facebook has a "serious creep factor". So nobody should be surprised that a fashion mag lost money on facebook ads.

I'd suggest which form of social media is better for this market, but as I am not a teenager whatever I say will just make me look old and out of touch.

[+] hluska|10 years ago|reply
You're talking like you have some special insight, yet all I'm finding are poorly reasoned anecdotes. For one, I have never met a single individual whose photo was actually harvested. Have you? For another, I cannot think of one sub-25 female friend who is not on Facebook. As for your comment how their activity is not conducive to advertising, show me some proof.

The actual problem here is spending $600k in four days. Full stop. You, or this article can try to intellectualize that as much as you want. But fundamentally, advertising does not work like that. If you spent $600k on four days of television commercials, billboards, mascots, etc., the odds are overwhelmingly in favour of your failure.

The only solution is to treat advertising as an engineering discipline.

[+] matt4077|10 years ago|reply
> any picture of them on facebook is quickly harvested for use by some shady dating website

I doubt that even one in 10,000 people has noticed this happening. I also know about 50 women aged 18-25 and all of them are on facebook.

[+] herbig|10 years ago|reply
I keep hearing this mantra that young folks aren't on Facebook, but all of the young folks I know (younger cousins mostly) are on Facebook. I'm skeptical that this notion is true.
[+] t0mbstone|10 years ago|reply
The real problem is that facebook fans are useless, because even if you have them, 95% of them still won't see your posts unless you pay to boost them. Fans are effectively an illusion.
[+] commentzorro|10 years ago|reply
Is this an ad or an article? It's Both! Extremely well done job of blurring the line between the two while keeping things compelling. Kudos to you, Adespresso.
[+] DivByZero|10 years ago|reply
Lol ... it's Content Marketing :)
[+] Xyik|10 years ago|reply
Hmm, so instead of Facebook Ad we should create click-bait articles as a form of free advertising. Thanks.