Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting in Unsealed Remarks
Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting in Unsealed Remarks
The
internal documents suggest that Facebook should stop positioning itself as a
champion of small business.
FACEBOOK IS
CURRENTLY waging a PR
campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously
injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy
features. But at the same time, according to allegations in recently unsealed court documents,
Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of
being fraudulent.
The documents feature internal Facebook communications in
which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities,
including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time and
that data behind a targeting criterion was “all crap.” Facebook says the
material is presented out of context.
“More than half the time we’re showing ads to someone
other than the advertisers’ intended audience.”
The documents emerged from a suit currently
seeking class-action certification in federal court. The suit was filed by the
owner of Investor Village, a small business that operates a message board on
financial topics. Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy
narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach “highly compensated
and educated investors” but “had limited resources to spend on advertising.”
But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village’s ad either lacked
a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims.
In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria
it had set for Facebook ads, it says.
The complaint features Facebook documents
indicating that the company knew its advertising capabilities were overhyped
and underperformed.
A “February 2016 internal memorandum” sent
from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and
powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time, reads,
“[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41%—that means that more than half the
time we’re showing ads to someone other than the advertisers’ intended
audience. And it is even worse internationally. … We don’t feel we’re meeting
advertisers’ interest accuracy expectations today.”
The lawsuit goes on to quote unnamed “employees
on Facebook’s ad team” discussing their targeting capabilities circa June 2016:
One engineer celebrated that detailed
targeting accounted for “18% of total ads revenue,” and $14.8 million on June
17th alone. Using a smiley emoticon, an engineering manager responded, “Love
this chart! Although if the most popular option is to combine interest and
behavior, and we know for a fact our behavior is almost all crap, does this
mean we are misleading advertiser [sic] a bit? :)” That manager proceeded to
suggest further examination of top targeting criteria to “see if we are giving
advertiser [sic] false hope.”
“Interest” and “behavior” are two key facets
of the data dossiers Facebook compiles on us for advertisers; according to the company,
the former includes things you like, “from organic food to action movies,”
while the latter consists of “behaviors such as prior purchases and device
usage.”
The complaint also cites unspecified
internal communications in which “[p]rivately, Facebook managers described
important targeting data as ‘crap’ and admitted accuracy was ‘abysmal.’”
Facebook has said in its court filings that
these quotes are presented out of context. The company attempted to suppress
the internal documents, obtained by the plaintiff through the legal discovery
process, on the grounds that they were “confidential” and could be harmful if
competitors were to read them — an argument rejected by the court, which in
November ordered the filings unsealed with minor redactions. The social network
argued further, in its rejected motion to dismiss the suit, that it’s never
guaranteed complete accuracy in its targeting, and that any claims of sophisticated
targeting the plaintiff cited in its decision to buy Facebook ads were
“generalized, promotional statements about Facebook’s advertising on which a
reasonable consumer could not rely as guaranteeing a specific accuracy rate.”
“Facebook’s argument that its ad-targeting regime is
good for small businesses is not only self interested — it is plain wrong.”
The lawsuit comes at an
awkward time for Facebook, which has recently taken out full-page
ads in several national newspapers claiming new iOS privacy safeguards will
strangle American small businesses, which are already struggling with the
economic cataclysm of the Covid-19 pandemic. Facebook calls this anti-Apple
effort its “Speak Up for Small” campaign. The Investor Village lawsuit suggests
that, far from being a pandemic panacea, Facebook’s ballyhooed ad targeting has
actually wasted the time and money of small advertisers it now says it’s
championing. “Facebook is no friend to small business,” said Steven Molo, an
attorney representing the plaintiff. “As detailed in the allegations of our
class action suit on behalf of advertisers, Facebook substantially
misrepresented its ability to deliver ads accurately, to the dismay of its own
employees.”
Though Facebook would like you to think it’s
not, its new spat with Apple is dead simple. Historically, companies like
Facebook have been able to monitor the way you use your iPhone (or iPad) in
order to attempt to learn the details of your life on a vast scale in order to
— as the pitch went to advertisers, at least — show you specific ads that
reflect your private hopes, desires, friendships, movements, and so on. But
starting in early 2021, Apple says this persistent surveillance will no longer
be turned on by default; rather, iPhone owners would have to explicitly opt-in
to be stalked by their apps, cutting off this firehose of deeply personal data.
This is a major shift in an industry where surveillance is a given, rather than
an option.
According to Dipayan Ghosh — a former
Facebook executive and current co-director of the Digital Platforms and
Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media,
Politics, and Public Policy — both Facebook’s anti-privacy PR blitz and this
new lawsuit ironically lead to a similar conclusion: Facebook isn’t anyone’s
friend but Facebook’s. “Facebook’s argument that its ad-targeting regime is
good for small businesses is not only self interested — it is plain wrong,”
Ghosh told The Intercept in an email. “Further, the recent [Investor Village]
complaint indicates clearly that, if anything, Facebook advertising is not as
effective for its advertising clients as it could be. The lack of transparency
coupled with the perceived low bang-for-the-buck of advertising on Facebook has
troubled marketers for many years — and it appears as though those perceptions
may well be true.”
Facebook could not be immediately reached
for comment.
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