"Shady promotion, sex trafficking, and data mining are just some of the tricks of the trade for Facebook's growing population of fakers"

http://www.dailytech.com/Fakebook+Pt+I+From+The+Chive+to+Ask...

On dating websites' use of stolen images:

" He said: "We'd steal someone's identity through say My Space or something, we'd take someone from a totally different country, ie. Spain or wherever it may be. [...] We'd take the person's photos online and we'd start knocking out messages. It was all fake and under the pretence that it was real."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1020771...

And yes, I have met people who have had their profile pics used elsewhere. TinEye is a great tool for discovering such incidents. Then again I used to work in the entertainment industry (film) and now teach a forensics class to young people at a local college so I probably run into it more often than the average.

It's good that you could find me articles about fake Facebook accounts and how some dating websites contain fake profiles. But, I know both of those things already.

Instead, you made a claim that Facebook was a poor choice of medium because women aged 18-25 are walking away from the service in droves. You said they were walking away because:

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.

A statement like that needs some proof. If you have any, I would love to read it, but until then, I'll argue that Facebook has an immense amount of data and extremely fine-grained targeting options. Therefore, if you plan and monitor an intelligent campaign, it remains a decent advertising medium.

I hear the argument that teenagers aren't on Facebook any more, they are now on Snapchat, Instagram etc. It always seems like their argument implies that teens use a single social network. I would guess that many teens use multiple social media platforms. Facebook has over a billion users, there's likely a few teenagers hanging around.

You say that the parent has poorly reasoned anecdotes. Then you provide two personal examples with just as low of a value when it comes to special insight.

You proclaim advertising does not work like that, and provide no proof or substance to back up that claim.

How was your post any better than the one you were criticizing?

I read comment after comment where people say, "Facebook advertising is broken, Facebook has lost the young, or Facebook is toast." Yet, despite that, Facebook's actual operating results indicate that:

a) They have greater than one billion monthly active users. b) They pull in over $3 billion per quarter in revenue.

I assume that Facebook's results are legitimate and are not the result of massive fraud on their part. So, if those numbers are true, either:

a) advertisers are incredibly stupid and keep pumping money into a medium that earns $0 in revenue. b) because of their fine-grained targeting capabilities and diversity of monthly users, there are opportunities to get results with Facebook ads.

If you're going to claim 'a', you need to back that up with something. The market shows me that Facebook remains a decent advertising medium and that you can get a positive return if you do a good job of managing/monitoring ads.

You're talking like you have some special insight, yet all I'm finding is a poor understanding of television commercials. (see how that works?)

A television commercial can easily top $600k for just one minute of advertising, not even counting the high cost of production. Here is a short list of the cost for 30 second spots from 2014.

NBC Sunday Night Football (NBC) 2014: $623,425

Thursday Night Football (CBS) 2014: $492,500

The Walking Dead* (AMC) Sunday 2014: $413,695

Monday Night Football (ESPN) 2014: $397,898

The Big Bang Theory (CBS) Monday 2014: $327,885

see:http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/tv-ad-prices-football-walkin...

I wrote:

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.

If you spend $600k on four days of advertising anything using any medium (and then quit), the odds are that you will not meet your goals. It doesn't matter if you spend $600k on one thirty second television slot, a full page ad in the newspaper, or 10 million Facebook ads. Advertising takes more than four days - after four days, you won't even know if your basic theories about market/message hold water. Hell, after four days of advertising, you likely will not even see an uptick in the most basic of awareness measures (unless your creative is extremely above average).

This cautionary tale of someone who lost $600k in four days should actually be a cautionary tale about expecting quick results from advertising. Advertising needs to be sustained - a $600k budget will do more over one month than it will over four days.

> If you spend $600k on four days of advertising anything using any medium (and then quit), the odds are that you will not meet your goals. It doesn't matter if you spend $600k on one thirty second television slot, a full page ad in the newspaper, or 10 million Facebook ads.

I disagree with you based on personal experience.

I know several companies with an online marketing cost per order of say (number fuzzed just in case someone links me, but order of magnitude), <$5 and average order size of $100 and gross margin of 40%, and average time between entry and purchase of an hour or two.

I've heard several instances at these companies of someone saying "let's make our end of month numbers look better" and subsequently blowing extra cash (sometimes millions) on online advertising with immediate results, and little change in company CPO. The budget is literally a function of what capital is at hand to be allocated to marketing. E.g. you don't want to grow too fast or you get operational issues, so you cut marketing spend a bit and sales slow down a bit so the warehouse can catch up.

At a (very high) CPC of $1 those $600,000 are up to 600,000 visitors... that's a lot of data to think about. Spending it in chunks, optimizing for ROI instead of fluffy "KPIs", and doing a bit of stats, is usually enough. As the original article effectively says.

What is true is that how "X" is doing (where X can be any marketing platform, channel, magic solution sold by slick suited, Rolex wearing sales guys) is impossible to generalize. I was fortunate enough to see the same methodology used in around 40 countries around the world and yield vastly different results: sometimes Facebook display ads are your best channel, sometimes they cost you 100x what you make back; sometimes Google is amazing, other times display retargeting is it. You should always try everything and make decisions once you have enough data.

And sometimes it even changes after a few years: e.g. a country which goes from blackberries to large screen touch phones with massive CPUs is going to see an improvement in display ads. So you keep dipping just in case. It's a high dimensional problem, further complicated by the quality of your own team (and evolution of the product) - as Ogilvy wrote at length, the intrinsic quality of the ad goes a very long way towards its success.

A much better answer. The original statement was unnecessarily smug and did not precisely reflect what you meant. Generally speaking, I agree with the gist of your adjusted comment. Yet it is possible to spend millions on a Superbowl ad or tens of thousands on full page New York times ad to meet an immediate goal, for example: the goal is to broadcast single statement and gain immediate awareness.