Tag: Meta

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Social Media

Meta Makes Changes to Facebook’s Ad Targeting

Starting January 19th, 2022, advertisers on Facebook are no longer be able to create new ad sets utilizing certain Detailed Targeting options, including:

  • Health causes (e.g., “cancer awareness”, “obesity pandemic”, etc.)
  • Sexual orientation (e.g., “LGBTQIA+”, “trans rights”, etc.)
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Religious groups (e.g., “Islam”, “Catholic Church”, “Hannukah”, etc.)
  • Political beliefs (e.g., political movements, political candidates, political parties, etc.)
  • Social or political issues (e.g., “Black Lives Matter”, climate change, etc.)

If any of your ads are currently running utilizing these targeting points, they will continue to run until March 17th, 2022, at which point the targeting segments will b e automatically removed. Any significant changes made to ad sets between now and March 17th may lead to a removal of these targeted segments, so it’s recommended to keep any changes to the minimum (i.e., budget changes and the like, at most).

These changes come as a result of pressure being levied at Facebook’s parent company Meta, following the release of the Facebook Papers and multiple controversies surrounding use of sensitive data and discriminatory practices in targeted online advertisements.

Why Remove Detailed Ad-Targeting?

Facebook, like a lot of other tech giants, draws its revenue primarily from advertising and has been leading in its ability to provide advertisers with the tools to pinpoint who sees their ads, and when. It makes sense that a company making most of its money from advertising would aim to provide a targeted service for online marketers.

But that specificity came at a cost. Privacy concerns surrounding Facebook (and more recently, Meta), have become more frequent in the past few years, especially as numerous scandals surrounding the company’s use of data came to light, from Cambridge Analytical to the more recent Facebook Papers.

Under pressure from lawmakers and mounting discrimination lawsuits, Meta has ended the use of certain detailed targeting points. Meta For Business specifically notes the potential for abuse and negative experiences of underrepresented groups as a result of the removed targeting segments, as per their findings. As an announcement blog post points out, “we’ve heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups.

“We routinely review, update and remove targeting options to simplify our ads system, provide more value for advertisers and people, and reduce the potential for abuse.”

This decision does not come at a cost to Meta’s commitment to targeted advertising, and being an advertising service. In the same post, the company outlines ways advertisers can continue to meet their goals while delivering ads on Facebook, including the use of broad targeting and other strategies.

Broad targeting will continue to be an important tool for advertisers on the Facebook platform, allowing them to make sure their ads are seen by segments of the population sorted by age, gender, and location. Meanwhile, Meta suggests:

  • Using Engagement Custom Audiences to retarget people who have previously interacted with your content and products on the platform, and the rest of the Facebook family of applications and websites. Engagement Custom Audiences can be generated through video clicks, lead forms, Facebook or Instagram Shopping, Instagram Profiles, Facebook Events, or an interaction on a Facebook Page.
  • Utilizing data gathered through Engagement Custom Audiences to generate Lookalike Audiences, by which Facebook takes the factors that are common between the people in your Engagement Custom Audiences (as a Source Audience, with ideally 1000 to 5000 minimum people) and uses that to find more potential customers to reach out to.
  • Utilizing Location Targeting for services that rely on local business.
  • Utilizing homegrown customer lists from user data your company gathers with the user’s permission.

Other Ad-Targeting Changes

In addition to removing certain targeting capabilities, Meta has also announced that they will continue to expand user control over what kind of ads users will be able to see. This means users will be able to opt out of certain kinds of advertising, or choose to see fewer ads of a certain type.

For example, at the moment, users can decide to opt in or out of ads that focus around:

  • Parenting
  • Politics
  • Alcohol
  • Pets

In 2022, Meta aims to expand these controls and let users opt out of advertising about gambling, weight loss, and other unmentioned ad types.

What This Means for Advertisers

At a glance, the first and most significant impact will be that advertisers are given less control about who they target with their ads. This matters because advertisers paying for ad views will want as many of those views to be from users who have the most potential interest in the respective service or product the ad offers. It isn’t about sheer eyeballs – it’s about the quality of your ad targeting, and how many leads each campaign generates.

Less targeting means fewer leads, as it may take time and a few stumbles to generate a custom audience reliable enough to have a customer profile worth advertising to.

Facebook and Instagram will be the first to implement Meta’s changes, but the shift in interest towards more user control, more user privacy, and fewer targeted ads is prevalent throughout the tech sector. Google has announced the removal of third-party cookies in 2023, and Apple has made several pledges to user privacy, to the point of giving users greater control over what permissions their apps have.

These may not be the last of the targeting points Meta decides to remove over time. The company has explained that they will continue to analyze the potential for abuse in their advertising system, which may mean advertisers will need to take a closer look at what detailed targeting interests most closely relate to their target audiences, and how else they might be able to target them.

Overall, creating a targeted ad campaign on Meta products has just become a lot harder. Companies may need to begin experimenting with targeting options and retooling their ad campaigns after March to lessen the long-term impact this may have on conversion rates.

It’s important to work with a competent team when setting up your ad campaigns, especially amid major changes in the advertising industry. Give us a call, and we’ll help you work through the necessary changes.

Categories
Social Media

Facebook Rebrands: Tech Giant Is Now “Meta”

When Facebook first launched in 2004, no one had any idea of the scope it would have just a decade later, or the way it would participate in a societal shift towards digital platforms and new social technologies.

In an effort to preempt future technologies this time, and build on the impact of the platform, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a rebranding and change in his company’s vision.

That new brand is Meta, and its vision is to create a whole new virtual reality (VR)-based social experience called the metaverse. Zuckerberg’s founder’s letter, published in late October of this year, goes into further detail on what that means.

Why Meta? What is the Metaverse?

Speculation and metacommentary aside, taken at face value, Facebook’s rebranding is part of a completely new direction for the company, but one that still remains true to what it’s been focused on over the years – social networking, and the ability to connect and remain connected through the Internet. Except rather than relying on the interface of an app or website, and the medium of a screen, Meta’s metaverse will be utilizing virtual reality.

With the news being so new, there are very few concrete details on what the metaverse will look like, or what it intends to consist of.

What we have are a few details from Zuckerberg on his vision for the project, including his hope that “within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.” Meta states that it seeks to invest $10 billion over the next year alone to further develop the technologies needed to build the metaverse.

This tells us two things: First, Meta is extremely invested in this. The financial commitment is immense, and with it comes a massive manpower commitment as well.

Secondly, Meta intends for the metaverse to be as ubiquitous as Facebook is now. It’s more than a potential new avenue for games. As Zuckerberg claims: “You will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.”

Virtual reality is far from a new venture for Facebook. The Facebook company purchased VR company Oculus VR in March 2014, for $2 billion, seeing the creation and commercial release of the Oculus Rift and Rift S, following several development kits, and associated software (the Oculus Home and Oculus Store). Oculus’s VR technology has seen applications in gaming, sports, television, education, and media since its purchase by Facebook.

The investment in VR was more than just a way for Facebook to diversify.

Facebook and VR

John Carmack, who was behind much of the technical development of Oculus’ VR technology and joined the company after spending decades programming revolutionary game engines for id Software, spoke up about Oculus VR’s acquisition under Facebook as a sign that the company “get[s] the big picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen. You don’t make a commitment like they just did on a whim.”

However, he has been bullish on the actual creation of the metaverse since before the acquisition of Oculus. “I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse,” he stated at his Facebook Connect keynote following the announcement by Zuckerberg.

“The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox. I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything.” Roblox is an online game platform marketed as the “ultimate virtual universe”, first released in 2004, with an average of over 224 million monthly players.

His arguments against the intentional creation of a metaverse under Meta’s new direction is that its walled-garden nature would make it too vulnerable to collapse under the weight of individual bad decisions by the application’s managers and executives.

“But here we are,” Carmack ultimately stated. “Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning, and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made.”

But not all of what he said was sceptical. Concurrent to the announcement, Meta also marketed its VR products Horizon Workrooms and Horizon Worlds, both of which attempt to provide context for what something like the metaverse might look like, on the smaller scale of workspaces and public media events, respectively. With respect to products like that, and the technology associated with them, Carmack stated that: “interacting with other avatars in Workrooms, in particular, can be much more enjoyable than staring at a wall of Zoom faces”.

But these are ultimately small-scale applications with up to 16 other people, versus the envisioned application of VR as a virtual world, where live events with thousands of concurrent users would be possible.

“Everybody that wants to work on the metaverse talks about the limitless possibilities of it,” Carmack said. “But it’s not limitless. It is a challenge to fit things in, but you can make smarter decisions about exactly what is important and then really optimize the heck out of things.”

What Does This Mean for Facebook?

There’s a lot of work left between the proof-of-concept VR technology Oculus and Meta have provided, and the vision Mark Zuckerberg presented this year. But $10 billion is no small investment, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

If the metaverse, as it’s envisioned, is the next step in social networking, then we might be looking at a literal new plane of reality for in-person events, content creation, large-scale gatherings and small private meetings alike.

On other concrete notes, Meta will start trading under the stock ticker MVRS on December 1, 2021, and Meta intends to report on two new operating segments related to the metaverse in the fourth quarter of 2021, titled Family of Apps and Reality Labs.

Does This Affect Me?

If you’re a marketer for a major global brand, then it might affect you sooner rather than later. Zuckerberg has already alluded to new opportunities for companies interested in digital goods, and as we’ve mentioned, the metaverse will undoubtedly become a new “frontier for advertising”.

But smaller companies shouldn’t write this off as a billionaire’s pipedream, or an elaborate attempt at sweeping headlines related to recent whistleblowing revelations under the rug. If the metaverse is indeed coming to a VR headset near you, it’s sure to present more than a few interesting challenges and opportunities to engage with audiences in a way that’s never been done before.

Was this a good move? Who knows. Scepticism and backlash are certainly at an all-time high, and Meta isn’t exactly the best rebrand we’ve ever seen (far from it). But only time will tell.

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