[renewiltord]

Advertising is a super creative industry. One time we targeted people who worked at a particular (large) company in a certain capacity with ads that were specific. This is just standard Account Based Marketing, but we had great conversion rates and one of them was like "I saw your guys' product advertised to me between Words with Friends turns like 'This is how [our company] can help [his company] with [problem we anticipated they'd have]' and I was like woah this is cool, is it kinda creepy? I don't know. But it's cool!".

That needed some pretty clever set up from the marketing folks, company-specific graphics and stuff, and the pipeline to be per company. It was cool, man.

I mean, yeah, sure, lots of you guys would be like "OMG I would hate your company for that" etc. etc., but it turns out that's not how directors at big firms think.

[xemdetia]

A campaign who's willing to do the legwork to actively identify potential customers/decision makers and advertise to them in innovative ways is perfectly reasonable. The issue is always going to be how they identified the targets and if the sources of data are ones actively consented to, which is different than what Facebook are collecting and providing. A lot of these firms are assuming consent and then reaching as far as they can, and that's always been the problem. I consent to plenty of sources of advertising data through contests, conferences, newsletters, accounts and actions on a particular service, public social media, and so on. If you want to aggregate that consented to information from multiple providers it is fine as long as their privacy policies make that clear. What I don't consent a single provider assuming they can just leech off other providers through device snooping/super cookies/other shenanigans. When some of these inputs are coming from these shady or overreaching sources the campaign itself and anything that's an outcome of that becomes fruit of a poisoned tree. If you look at it from that perspective what becomes 'good' compared to 'bad' becomes straightforward.

If facebook wants this correlating data for outgoing traffic they should be asking to buy it from individual providers instead of assuming consent and scraping it via a side channel on your phone.