own/experience these things, too. Facebook gestates intent better than
any promotion or advertising channel. Once in pursuit, we go to
Google or Amazon to see where to get it. Thus Facebook is higher up
the funnel than Google. It suggests the “what,” while Google supplies
the “how” and Amazon the “when” you will have it.
Historically, in marketing, scale and targeting have been an
either/or proposition. The Super Bowl offers scale. It reaches around
110 million people and feeds them nearly identical ads.^8 But the
overwhelming majority of those ads are irrelevant to most viewers.
You probably don’t have restless leg syndrome and are not in the
market for a South Korean car. You don’t, nor ever will, drink
Budweiser. At the other extreme, content presented to a curated group
of chief marketing officers, over a dinner hosted by eBay’s CMO, is
highly relevant to each person at the table. And the dinner for ten costs
eBay $25,000+. It’s highly targeted, but not scalable.
No other media firm in history has combined Facebook’s scale
with its ability to target individuals. Each of Facebook’s 1.86 billion
users has created his or her own page, with years’ worth of personal
content.^9 If advertisers want to target an individual, Facebook collects
data on behavior connected to identities. This is its advantage over
Google—and why the social network is taking market share from the
search giant. Powered by its mobile app, Facebook is now the world’s
biggest seller of display advertising—an extraordinary achievement,
given Google’s brilliant theft of advertising revenues from traditional
media just a few years ago.
The irony is that Facebook, by analyzing every bit of data about us,
might come closer to understanding us than our friends. Facebook
registers a detailed—and highly accurate—portrait from our clicks,
words, movements, and friend networks. By comparison, our actual
posts, the ones designed for our friends, are mostly self-promotion.
Your Facebook self is an airbrushed image of you and your life,
with soft lighting and a layer of Vaseline smeared across the lens.
Facebook is a platform for strutting and preening. Users post about
peak experiences, moments they want to remember, and be
remembered by—their weekend in Paris or great seats at Hamilton.
Few people post pictures of their divorce papers or how tired they look
on a Thursday. Users are curators.