Lean in to the CHAOS

A newly betrothed Business Insider writer has a bone to pick with Facebook: Getting engaged ruined the social network for her. "Just like that, everything changed," she reports. "Facebook knew I was betrothed. And it didn't waste any time clogging up my news feed with ads" related to weddings, weddings and also weddings.

A few relatively-relevant ads are hardly going to make my Newsfeed any junkier than it already is. (Spotify! So-and-so shared a link! So-and-so likes Sprint!) As a newly-engaged woman, however, I've found the deluge of Facebook ads is only part of the story. The Internet and its advertisers, it seems, are all conspiring to make me a cuckoo-crazy-crackers bridezilla.

Here's a brief guide to what happens once you make it official:

First you change your Facebook status, and even as the congratulations roll in, so do the Facebook ads for places like the wedding dress brand Pronovias. (Also, the occasional gym ad? Let's not even go there, Facebook.) You're not ready to buy anything yet, but those ads are an insistent reminder that you've got about a year to plan this thing so you better get cracking, missy.

So you hop over to Pinterest, which suddenly becomes approximately one thousand times more interesting. There's an entire browsing category devoted to weddings, and if you thought the community's home decor pins were aspirational, you ain't seen nothing yet. Spend a few hours on the platform and you'll become convinced that an indie D.I.Y. wedding in a mossy forest glade where your bridesmaids carry baskets of apples and all the guests receive hand-painted umbrellas as party favors is a GREAT idea. And just think! Now brands can track all this.

You spend a lot of time on Etsy, running the numbers on hand-made invitations and wondering whether those cute lacy headbands would make you look like a doofus.

Then it's time to start really planning in earnest, which is when you graduate to The Knot, which looks a lot like Pinterest but contains real information about potential vendors. You begin calling venues and caterers and florists and perhaps keeping track of your options in a Google Doc (which is probably the only piece of technology you actually need during this process; everything else is an opportunity for up-selling).

You begin to receive near-constant email offers from The Knot's many, many, oh so very many sponsors.

You realize most of the vendors on The Knot cost a small fortune, and so you disappear into the rabbit hole of boards like Weddingbee and Wedding Wire, searching variations on "affordable nice wedding." You begin scouring Yelp. You spend a lot of time Google Image searching venues that sound suspicious affordable, on the lookout for decorations that look a little too Goodfellas. 

In the meantime, there's years worth of wedding shows you can mainline on Netflix. Possibly centuries. Say Yes to the Dress, Wedded to Perfection, Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway, Say Yes to the Dress: Randy Knows Best. (Oh and of course now people can see what you're watching on Netflix, so yeah, your groom-to-be is going to know about this new addiction.)

"Do we need a wedding website?" you ask yourself. "Wait, do we need a wedding app? At the very least we need an Instagram hashtag for day-of photos." Obviously.

Let's see what kind of targeted ads Googling "elope to Las Vegas cheap plane tickets" gets me.

Mr. Saverin (therichest.org)

Nowadays Facebook is very cautious around the third rail that is sexual orientation. Sure, there's a timeline icon just for gay marriage, but the company won't serve up ladies seeking ladies to advertisers. But that wasn't always the case.

Digiday has gotten its hands on an interesting piece of Internet history: the social network's very first pitch to advertisers, from way back in spring 2004. The site was still thefacebook.com, it was only available on select college campuses, Peter Thiel hadn't invested yet and that random dude was still chilling in the upper lefthand corner.

However, Eduardo Saverin was already talking up the site's biggest advantage: data, and the targeting that allows advertisers to do.

The deck promises that, on this "expanding online directory," brands could buy "targeted advertisement on the basis of any (or a combination of) the following parameters," a list including college, relationship/dating interets, political bent, courses taken and--oh yes--sexual orientation.

Digiday adds: "Saverin was asking for ad commitments of around $80,000 for targeted display ad placements that would reach 'thousands' of users."

Of course, it's not terribly surprising that a crew of undergrads--one of whom had already built Harvard its very own Hot or Not--would struggle a touch with concepts like "privacy" and "boundaries." This might actually be the more jarring tidbit: "the site has a built-in database of school courses and concentrations and automatically builds a user's class schedule."

Remember that brief, halcyon time when it seemed like Facebook might have some actual educational value, rather than simply becoming a massive digital-crop filled timesuck? Good times.

Mr. Mango (Photo: Practical eCommerce)

A Long Island-based startup called Limited Run (formerly Limited Pressing) has raised concerns about Facebook ad rates and accused the company of asking for ad revenue in exchange for a page name swap. Juicy!

On its Facebook page today, Limited Run published an extensive status update explaining why it will be deleting its Facebook account. The company claims that it was charged for ad rate clicks, but that it could only verify where 20 percent of those clicks were coming from. 80 percent of clicks were from users with Javascript disabled--a rare setting for a typical user.

After setting up a page logger, the Limited Run team says they discovered the real source of the clicks they were paying for:

The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes.

We asked Limited Run's cofounder Nick Mango if he could provide us with a screenshot of the advertising dashboard to confirm the accusations. "We don’t want to expose our budget to our competitors," he said. "I can’t give you a screenshot. I can tell you that we spent a month researching and we don’t have time to research for nothing."

That's not the worst of Limited Run's claims, though. Limited Run also alleges that when it approached Facebook to switch its page name from Limited Pressing to Limited Run following a rebrand attempt, Facebook agreed to do so only if Limited Run made a promise of its own:

They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage....This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They're scumbags and we just don't have the patience for scumbags.

Yikes.

"That I believe is the most egregious thing," Mr. Mango told Betabeat by phone. "They wouldn’t let us change our name without agreeing to $2,000 at least in advertising a month. We couldn’t believe it. We contacted them a few times about changing the name and they were like, 'Oh well maybe. We’ll contact you.' Then we got a phone call from someone there and that’s when they proposed [the advertising deal]."

Mr. Mango said he couldn't provide the name of the Facebook rep who suggested the deal. "I think we need to talk to someone in legal first," he added.

As for when they'll delete the page? "Probably in the next two weeks," said Mr. Mango. "Obviously everybody is linking to it now so we’re a little worried about deleting it."

UPDATE:

Facebook has provided Betabeat with the following statement:

We're currently investigating their claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.

(pulse2.com)

The quiet period is now over and Facebook has come out swinging, rushing to the defense of its besieged ad business. You just know they've been chomping at the bit for weeks.

The Wall Street Journal reports that comScore has released a study "partly commissioned" by Facebook and essentially claiming that yes, the social network's ads are effective. Research suggests that becoming a fan of a brand does lead to your purchasing that brand more often. The firm tracked Starbucks fans and found they and their friends bought 38 percent more frequently than a control group that didn't see the marketing.

Facebook's head of measurement and insight was not shy in assessment of the results. He told the Journal they proved "it's a myth that Facebook advertising doesn't work."

He suggested it was more a matter of perception:

Mr. Smallwood acknowledged the company has been told by some of its biggest clients that it wasn't doing a good enough job of showing the value of advertising on the site. "We heard we have to do a better job of demonstrating this x scale," he said, noting that releasing the study was part of a larger effort to prove that paid and unpaid advertising on Facebook leads to consumer spending.

So, guys, now that you can talk: How about that mobile strategy?