I'm in ad tech, and believe me: FB advertising works. The vast majority of their ad revenue is coming from experienced ad buyers that are spending immense amounts on direct response campaigns, not branding.

If you want to see how things work, start a small ad campaign yourself of FB. It's all about ROI, attribution, cost per action, super detailed targeting, etc. It's the opposite of "throwing money at it hoping that it'll work", unlike offline advertising or even traditional display ads.

Exactly like this article states. You can give Facebook a list of phone numbers or email addresses and it will put your ad in front of only those people. Does anyone know how small a list you can target? List of one? List of one plus N number of dead email addresses? Therefore a list of one, but more expensive?

> The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people. You then need ensure you upload a list of only females or males which includes the one email address of the person you are targeting (the opposite to the one person that you are targeting). Lastly you need to choose the gender in the demographic filtering which matches the intended target. Here’s a step by step example below

"Sniper Targeting on Facebook: How to Target ONE specific person with super targeted ads" https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...

Informative article, mostly about how amoral this salesman is. I wonder if most people in sales think this way. Maybe the article was created solely as an ad for the author's company and the content is all lies. I'd have no way to know with out trying the myself and a fake article would be in complete alignment with the author's value system.

> can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way

This is key and undermines a lot of rational arguments. People buying ads aren't reading HN and then making a buying decision based on the general vibe they get there. They'll buy based on budget. Budget is based on decisions made in a meeting a year or two before. Those decisions will be based on a strategy. For many that strategy is to the tune of 'I keep hearing about this social media thing that's supposed to be the future. I notice we aren't spending anything in digital. We need to buy more digital'.

If public opinion sours on Facebook it may be a while before we see a significant drop in revenues.

Also:

- marketing companies they ask to run Facebook campaigns for you may be as clueless as they are

Source: I used to work for one (we had separate development and social media marketing departments). People doing marketing had no clue about statistics, they just shoved random whale graphs from Facebook's fanpage panel into a word document and wrote narratives that suggested everything is peachy. Customers read those reports, and since they had no way or skill of reevaluating the results on their end, they were happy and willing to pay. I'm not even assuming malicious intent on the part of the provider - just general cluelessness.

I'm increasingly convinced a lot of marketing on the Internet looks that way. Neither party understands the real meaning of the results, but as long as the buyer is happy, money keeps flowing.