Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

Advertising pulled from Facebook

Following on from the last post about Facebook, according to Auntie Beeb, the likes of First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and the Prudential have all withdrawn ads from Facebook. The line they have given is that they could not control where their ads appeared. OK, so this may be true, but across the site how many pages are actually dedicated to the likes of the BNP? I may just be cynical, but in this world of spin do people really believe this line? Isn’t there is a much more simple explanation - money?
I was looking through the blogs of a few people that spend a great deal of time and money running ads for other people’s products (they are called affiliate marketeers) and apparently many of the social networking sites like Facebook cost them a fortune in ads and produce very poor results (they don’t specifically mention Facebook.com but give YouTube.com and MySpace.com as examples of domains that do not convert into sales very well) However, the big advertisers come up with a load of *&^% to justify their decision. I’m not sure if they just don’t want to lose the association with something ‘cool’ like Facebook, but rather than just say that Facebook traffic doesn’t convert very well, they throw out some line about withdrawing due to social concerns and pandering to the ‘Angry Mob’ (copyright Kaiser Chiefs!) Amazing how it all happened at once isn’t it? Did one of them came up with idea and all the rest quickly followed suit, thinking ‘brilliant ruse, why didn’t we think of that earlier?’
I know I am just feeding my own cynicism with theirs but their cynical attempts to manipulate an economic decision just annoys the tits off me. So, as a point of pettiness I’m going to find a load of First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and Prudential ads and click on as many as I can find to waste their ad budgets…..