To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Facebook is the worst social media platform for marketing and fundraising except for all the others.”

Make no mistake.  Facebook is  the world’s biggest fishing pond for fundraisers and marketers. Ignore it at your peril.  Use it at your peril.

Anyone reading this who has ever done any fundraising or marketing on Facebook will have their personal experience with the byzantine, opaque, capricious, obtuse, random, subjective, fickle and downright frustrating world of Facebook ad buying.

NOW…add Facebook’s latest round of “cancellations”

Under the guise of “protecting” consumers from ads using information that Facebook collects and stores about its users here is but a short list of what will now be canceled on Facebook. By canceled I mean if you enter in any of these keywords or thousands of others in these genres you’ll get nothing, zippie.  It does not compute, does not exist….except it does, but more on this in a moment.   I’m unclear if the vast majority of agencies and charities noticed this latest round of cancellation.  We sure did as all our ad buying is about matching a highly tailored message to a highly tailored audience.

1. Democrats and Republicans
2. Conservatives and Liberals
3. Damn near any media outlet or personality of note – Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, both canceled
4. Feminism
5. Black Lives Matter
6. Social Justice
7. Same sex marriage
8. Judaism
9. God
10. Bible
11. Jesus

It’s really hard to argue that your ad platform should be protected by free-speech, as Facebook has long advocated, while also denying free speech to so many who choose to employ the now-banished terms like those above.

This latest round of Facebook cancellations reeks of cover-your-ass syndrome and window dressing as the company attempts to ignore bigger problems while myopically trying to avoid the ire of Congress and getting dragged up on Capitol Hill for another public flogging.

What bigger problems?  You know, minor stuff like sex trafficking, housing discrimination and contributing to mental health issues linked to increased drug use and suicide.

First off, in what world does Facebook live that it thinks this latest round of restrictions will protect it from aggrandizing and grandstanding members of Congress, of both parties, opportunistically and publicly shaming Facebook for publicity and political points?  With this latest wave of cancellations Facebook has emboldened Congress, not silenced it.

And now to the litany of unintended consequences. Or perhaps intended but ignored consequences.

We target ads to increase the efficiency those highly targeted messages.  Facebook’s latest restrictions took away interest categories we regularly use.  We’ve spent the last month doing testing while those highly targeted, tailored, personalized existing ads are still live (until mid-March) to find workarounds for the now canceled affinities.

We’ve been largely successful, especially with our Personality targeting.  But, there are still some tough nuts to crack, not least of which, religion.  It is very hard to be a Christian charity and directly aim your ad at like minded Christians.  Same for Jewish groups.  Why?  Why take away the ability of these legitimate organizations trying to market to their audience to help the poor or hungry?   Three answers I can think of.

• Facebook hates it when you narrow your audience or target with affinities.
  • Their business model much prefers turning over the targeting to their black-box modeling.  How and why?
  • The “why” is because they have billions of users who likely see very little advertising and a far lesser number who see a lot.
  • That isn’t good for business.  Turn it over to them and they’ll be able to better distribute those ads on your dime.
  • “How”?  Spend a lot of money. Their model, like all models, only gets smarter with lots of data and that data has to include success and failure.  Facebook wants you to spend a ton to create lots of failure so they can, eventually, build a model that gets more accurate and efficient over time.  All black-box all the time on your dime.

• Facebook couldn’t care less about smaller, much less start up groups.
  • The alternative to spending a ton of money to buy Facebook failure data to make its model better for you is to upload your donor list.  If you’re a really big, existing charity with lots of Catholic donors, for example, you’re in good shape.
  • Upload the list and market to it while also having Facebook “build” a look-alike model.  This is the world’s easiest model build.  Why?  It’ll amount to nothing more than serving up your Catholic branded mission to people who, wait for it, that’s right, have shown some interest in Catholic related content.  All that religious and political and what they now deem, “sensitive” affinity data isn’t gone, it’s just hidden from you.  But not the Facebook look-alike model. 

Works great if you’re a big, existing brand or an incumbent politician with a big list.  Not so much if you’re small or a start up,  or a wanna-be politician looking to knock off a well-funded incumbent.  It’s ironic that any of those incumbent office holders now even further insulated from challenge could easily be the next ones in line for a Facebook flogging.

Facebook finds it too hard to police bad actors. So, once-again they’ve taken a sledgehammer to solve a scalpel problem.

As this latest round of Facebook restrictions becomes better known and understood and as its intended/unintended consequence of locking in the advantage of big organizations and incumbent politicians becomes better understood then we’re all but certain to see Facebook scamper to its well-thumbed, defensive playbook. No doubt they’ll claim they’re doing all this to protect the sensitivities and consumer interests of their users. BUT..

• I’m  sure if someone’s using Facebook religious data for nefarious purposes, they could stop them. Or even prosecute where the law allows.
• Further, Facebook could use its big brains to find scumbags using its data to build look-alike model for other scumbags.

The truth is, Facebook is in the ad selling business.  It’s not in the ad effectiveness business.  And it sure as shit isn’t in the free speech, right of association, build a better world business.  Lots of legitimate, smaller charities with social, political, religious and advocacy roots or needs have lots of would-be consumers interested in their causes.  Those are the folks who lose out.

Kevin