Interestingly, there are a lot of ads that are like this… just subtler.
If you’ve ever seen tee shirts and similar products in ads that say things like “This Kansas City redhead likes their coffee with whiskey” or some other uncanny specific junk, thats how this works.
There is a whole new category of products based around these ads. I don’t know what they’re actually called actually, but it was on HN sometime in the last year. They’re usually tee-shirts and other “made on demand” products, and they use the magic of software to generate images for the ads, and products that produce to a ton of permutations, and target ad demographics that fit all of description. The products aren’t real until someone clicks the link, and then software knows which ad you clicked and generates it for that permutation.
The whole idea that the un-canny match will be enough to attract buyers for the novelty, and they eschew the inventory risk by just printing on demand.
I built an ad engine for Kink.com (NSFW) which had ads placed on even higher traffic sites like PH. I built the original pixel tracker for Marin Software, and @stickfigure and I built GearLaunch, which was the backend that sold those t-shirts you're talking about.
Needless to say, you don't see as many t-shirt ads any more because FB cracked down on it... not because of the targeted ads, but because it became a copyright infringement game and it was easy to block the people creating the ads (and shirts) as they were all outside of the US (ie: Vietnam). That and thankfully FB didn't want their wall to be all ads for t-shirts, lol.
> Signal countered on Twitter that it “absolutely did” try to run the ads. “The ads were rejected, and Facebook disabled our ad account. These are real screenshots, as Facebook should know.”
I'm not saying Signal's side is necessarily true, but you're making an affirmative claim that Signal is performing a "misleading publicity stunt", by taking faith on Facebook's narrative as true.
It isn't misleading though. It is exposing what really happens under the covers.
They didn't have to run the ads or even be truthful about being blocked. Fact is, they would have been blocked and the ads are indeed targeted. All of the details in those ads, are true.
Even if FB doesn't collect the data itself, any time you shop online, you get added to buckets and those buckets get shared when the seller uploads the target data back to FB and then the process starts all over again.
If you’ve ever seen tee shirts and similar products in ads that say things like “This Kansas City redhead likes their coffee with whiskey” or some other uncanny specific junk, thats how this works.
There is a whole new category of products based around these ads. I don’t know what they’re actually called actually, but it was on HN sometime in the last year. They’re usually tee-shirts and other “made on demand” products, and they use the magic of software to generate images for the ads, and products that produce to a ton of permutations, and target ad demographics that fit all of description. The products aren’t real until someone clicks the link, and then software knows which ad you clicked and generates it for that permutation.
The whole idea that the un-canny match will be enough to attract buyers for the novelty, and they eschew the inventory risk by just printing on demand.