Facebook Advertising Platform

A short while ago Facebook announced the release of their advertising platform. Given that I had written about that previously, and was in need of some fresh ideas for advertising the Thursday Club (side-project), I decided to give it a go.

Setting up a campaign is a pretty straightforward process. You select the criteria for your audience segmentation, starting with the geography (I’d love to have the option to select ‘World’, but you have to start at a particular country – although you can run multiple campaigns simultaneously in different countries). You can also select gender, age ranges and target keywords to further define your audience. I do like the fact that as you select each keyword you are shown a tally of the number of people that match your criteria. I’m sure someone could reverse engineer some interesting statistics out of that.

It doesn’t appear that the keywords currently include group membership, or much other than a persons direct interests.

You can then create some simple text copy (think basic Google adword style) and optionally upload a picture. If you have a company page, you can also choose to include related information from that. Finally, select how much you’d like to pay per click or per view (I chose ‘per-click’) and that’s pretty much it. You can set timeframes for your campaign and maximum spends per day.

I would recommend experimenting with the CPC rate you bid as you can go from zero impressions to many thousands through some very small adjustments. You can see the effects almost straight away. Current click-through rates are pretty low, but that may be a function of my test ad-copy too 🙂

Overall though I like it. The operation is pretty much identical to how I perceived it might work, bar some limitations on granularity. It would also be nice to get some clarity on exactly where these ads show up.

I’ll let you know what affect this has on traffic to my site, but as of now (24 hours after starting) there have been 5000+ ad impressions which I don’t think is too shabby.

I’ll also be experimenting with some much more targeted ads with a small number of potential viewers.

Stay tuned!

Kudos Mr Grelis

You may recall a post I made a couple of weeks back regarding the annoying ‘Easy Off Bam’ advert and Martin Grelis? Well, imagine my surprise when I received a comment today about that post from Mr Grelis himself!

Fully expecting to get a blast from Mr G, he was instead very gracious and took my comments in good spirit. Nice one fella!

If there’s a better way to prove my point about not flipping the Grelis switch, I don’t know what it would be!

Still don’t like the ad (sorry Martin!), but glad Mr G turned out to be a decent sort.

Don’t Flick the Grelis Switch

I confess to being one of those people who’d rather keep switching channels than watch TV adverts. If I do leave them on though, there are some that are so annoying that as soon as they come on I have to hit the mute button.

Along with that crazy ‘bet you’ve seen these before’ blinds lady, Martin Grelis and his ‘Easy Off Bam’ is probably my current bete noir. From the first ‘H’ in ‘Hi I’m Martin Grelis’ I will be leaping across the room Starsky and Hutch style in a desparate grab for the remote. My partner thinks it’s very amusing and takes great delight in turning the volume up, forcing me to take refuge in the bathroom (oh the fun we have in our house!).

The point though is this: I’ve never met Martin Grelis. Almost certainly never will. I have no idea whether he genuinely is the most annoying man on earth, or simply delivering the product of a crappy ad agency. Or perhaps he’s supposed to be annoying so that you’ll remember the product.

Doesn’t matter either way. All I’ve done is mentally flick the Grelis switch. Do you ever do this prematurely with people you meet in real-life? Do you ever dismiss someone as a Grelis based on nothing more than one example? I know I do. Sometimes I’m right and they really are a Grelis. Other times .. well I’m not so sure that mentally muting them is doing me any favours. Maybe I should take another look and stop going around them.

Jim McCarthy called it flipping the ‘bozo’ bit. McCarthy’s advice was that everyone has something to contribute–it’s easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in future by setting the “bozo flag” to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the “bozo” ever again [from wikipedia].

I’m not sure whether I’ll let Grelis come on my TV and speak anytime soon, but next time I find an equivalent in real-life, I should at least try and keep this in mind. Would you do the same?

What the &@!* Is He Saying?

Have you seen the Schick Quattro ad? The one with the ‘scientists’ and the guy on the running machine?

What the bloody hell is the first old scientist saying?

Sounds like ‘to see if it really is off-da-hazy’.

What is ‘off-da-hazy’? It’s driving me mad!! I even tried turning on the subtitles, but nothing … Gah!