Facebook has nearly 2 billion users, and at the touch of a button it could deliver a message to every one of them.
Yet when it really wanted to get a message across, it didn’t “boost this post.” What did it do instead? Buy full-page ads in national newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Why? Because a physical ad in a newspaper carries credibility that words on a screen don’t. It also led to discussion in the public sphere, both in real-life and online, that extended the value of that ad purchase far beyond what Facebook paid. The fact that someone is willing to pay for a print ad shows they are serious about whatever message they are trying to convey.
Businesses in Columbia and Marion County can benefit from those same features inherent to newspaper advertising every day, whatever their message may be.
In Facebook’s case, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was trying to convince users that it wasn’t selling their personal information to outside companies.
“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it,” the headline in Zuckerberg’s ad said.
Facebook has been oblivious to privacy concerns up until this point, so the ad is the first start in the right direction. Of course, good advertising alone can’t save your business if you don’t follow through on what you promise in the ad. Now it’s up to Facebook to prove it’s serious about doing better with how it handles its vast trove of user data; frankly, we’ll believe that when we see it because the company’s entire business model is built on mining user’s personal information to send targeted ads.
Which brings us to another point.
This is a disturbing era of seemingly all our actions being tracked. But unlike the predictions made in books like “1984,” it’s not the government watching us but rather private corporations like Google and Facebook. Search for any word, and you’ll be seeing ads for that product on every website you visit for the next 17 months.
A cartoonist recently came to a solution: A heading says “This miraculous technology allows you to browse with zero data collection,” and the drawing shows someone reading a newspaper saying, “No one knows which articles I read because I ‘click’ on them with my mind.”
— Charlie Smith
