This post by Chris Brogan where he complains about the prevalence of ads for things he has no interest in, plus what I recently noticed in the Facebook ad targeting interface come together to suggest an interesting method of filtering.
Let’s face it, some ads are annoying to some users but there’s not much of a way to prevent your ad from showing up on someone’s page ahead of time, over and over. Sure Facebook put an X there for the user to say ‘I don’t like this ad’ but it seems they don’t pay it much attention – the “Over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant ads to our users.” doesn’t commit them to taking any action.
The keywords option when setting up an ad is rather random and provides only for positive associations or occurrences of words in user profiles.
Create antifans
If you’re advertising something that polarises opinion, you could create a Fan page for people to become an antifan. Link to it from the landing page for your ad. Mob Wars could create a fan page for I Hate Mob Wars or Mob Wars Sucks, to borrow from the meme that was popular a few years back (e.g. paypalsucks.com). When they set up an ad they could specifically exclude people who dislike them enough to say so. The power to target only people who have not openly stated a hostility to you is surely of interest to an advertiser?
Why should advertisers do this?
- If they’re paying a CPM then they’ll save money
- If they’re paying on a CPC basis, they remove the risk of paying for malicious clicks
- They’ll annoy less people
Why wouldn’t advertisers do this?
- Nobody wants to admit people hate them, even if it’s the truth.
- It could create a groundswell of opinion against them
- It takes time
So, who’s going to be big enough to admit that they’re not universally adored and take advantage of that fact to make their advertising more effective and less irritating?
Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker
