Social media companies face an increasingly uncertain landscape of increased scrutiny from governments across the world threatening new legislation to reign in the way they use the data of their users. Yet, many companies like Facebook don’t actually “sell” their customer data, they use it primarily to better target advertisements to them. Could Facebook’s pivot to fostering community through Groups actually help it reinvent its advertising business for this new regulatory climate?
Once upon a time, in the pre-digital era, newspapers and magazines sold advertisements based on their primary demographics. A small-town newspaper was likely consumed primarily by citizens of that town, a financial broadsheet was a fixture of the business community, a car magazine meant someone interested in cars and so on. The same held true for the era of radio and television once they moved beyond sponsored shows towards open advertising.
While imperfect, this model of using a broadcast show or print venue as a proxy for a certain combination of behavioral and interest selectors worked reasonably well.
The digital era upended this model, promising the ability to target an ad to a single person using almost unimaginably rich targeting selectors in infinitely complex combinations.
However, the need to provide extraordinarily rich behavioral and interest profiles for each user to enable such precise targeting necessitated the rise of our modern online surveillance society. Facebook needs to track our every activity to be able to generate the full range of selectors advertisers today demand.
In fact, previously, Facebook even went beyond what it itself could observe to purchase a vast array of datapoints from data brokers to enable even richer targeting, though it since discontinued this practice.
The problem is that supporting these hyper-targeted advertisements requires vast oceans of our most intimate and sensitive interests and actions.
As governments have become ever more concerned about the safety and ethics of these archives, social companies are likely to come under increasing pressure to curtail the sheer volume of data they collect about us.
What’s a social media company to do when its need to precisely target our interests for ads collides with governments increasingly looking to curtail that profiling and targeting?
Today’s advertising machine is built upon the idea that social media companies will silently surveil their users from afar, assigning advertising selectors to them based on the actions they take and content they consume.
What if this model was reversed?
What if social media platforms instead provided their users a list of advertising selectors and users self-organized themselves into the selectors of greatest relevance to them?
Today Facebook tracks a user’s every move to determine that they tend to frequently click on posts depicting golden retrievers and thus place them into an ad category for goldens. What if instead, Facebook gave that user a list of ad categories and had them select the ones they were most interested in, self-selecting into the golden retriever category?
At first glance this might seem absurd, that no user is going to spend the time to browse a massive list of millions upon millions of ad categories, including every possible permutation of them, such as “Married first time golden retriever owners in Washington, DC with one child.”
However, if one steps back for a moment, this sounds an awful lot like Facebook Groups.
By encouraging its users to self-organize themselves into Groups based on their interests and activities, Facebook is essentially getting its users to self-select themselves into all of the advertising categories of greatest interest to them.
Most importantly, Facebook could in the future sell advertisements for Groups instead of users. Rather than an advertiser running an ad targeting users that meet certain criteria, they would return to their roots of running ads in a demographically homogeneous venue.
Whereas an advertiser might once have run an ad in a golden retriever club newsletter, then in the digital era moved to running ads targeting individual owners, under the Groups model they could return to running ads in the digital equivalent of a newsletter.
Selling ads for Groups rather than individuals would allow Facebook to sidestep much of the new privacy legislation enacted and proposed around the world. In fact, it could even eventually abandon entirely all data collection on its users, reaching them exclusively through Group-based ad selectors.
One could imagine users being automatically enrolled in Groups based on combinations of their age, education history, location and interests, creating a base set of interest categories that would help draw them further into those communities, thus spending more time on the platform and viewing more ads.
Putting this all together, this return to roots for advertisers would allow us to move past today’s digital surveillance state while still maintaining the ad-supported web that enables the web to be free.
In the end, perhaps the web’s pivot to community will not only bring us closer together, but help restore a bit of our digital privacy.
