Screw Online Dating! Target Your Potential Mate with Internet Ads
I will never “see it all,” I’ve decided. A man, living in AZ, creates a Facebook ad targeting single women. First off, how effing simple and brilliant is this? Um, pretty effing brilliant. Matt Simpson used Facebook to create an ad for himself, which he then used to filter out the “white noise” and get his ad served to the people he was most interested in. So clever!
The idea for this personals-ad campaign was born out of, from what I can tell, genuine geek-factor and also a desire to work smarter and not harder. Simpson states on his blog: “To be effective, Match simply requires too much active attention. Facebook ads are set-and-forget.” Nice and so very true!
This leads me back to that discussion I had with Ross Felix about why more movers and shakers are not leveraging Facebook into their dating service strategies. Facebook already carries a freakish amount of data about who we are, what we like and the company we keep.
What Simpson effectively did was prove my point with his campaign. He proved you don’t need to give up your hard-earned cash to an online dating site that can’t guarantee visits or interactions with your dating profile. While this sort of campaign doesn’t put the dating service providers on “notice” per se, it should make us all do a double take and wonder why the various dating giants such as eHarm, True and Match don’t do a better job of connecting people. Is it that these sites are afraid to lose members? I imagine there’s a lot to do with that theory. However, strategies born of fear seldom win anything but a slow death of a suddenly stale brand.
The market is wide-open right now for someone with a damn good idea on how to leverage Facebook and a singles network… I just don’t see that dating sites, of most varieties hope to remain viable in the near future.
Who knows, maybe Facebook decides to do it themselves and run their own dating network. We’ll have to wait and see what’s in store for the “original social network.”
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This reminds me the guy I read about who bought Google ads tied to the names of the CEOs of five companies he wanted to work for. So, when these CEOs invariably Googled themselves (who wouldn't?), the first thing they would see was, "Please hire me, so-and-so!"
The guy basically had to pay for five ads, each had to be displayed only once, and yet he targeted the exact people he needed.
Now THAT's brilliant.
Well, yeah, that's pretty smart, I suppose. =)
I just wonder how ethical all this is, though… It doesn't give me the warm fuzzies, I must say.
My recent post How to Publish Your Content Everywhere
Yeah, I guess it's a pretty fine line.
I think it brings up some interesting questions related to everything from job-searching to website SEO, ya know. When is it a clever way to publicize yourself? And when are you just gaming the system?
Or maybe it's just because all this is still so new, so we're kinda like in the Wild West period of the internet, until we can some sort of rulebook figured out….
I really hope Facebook doesn't leverage it's reach into online dating&I would never want a complete stranger to download my activities and photos before meeting me. It's bad enough that people google each other before meeting&
I really hope Facebook doesn't leverage it's reach into online dating. I would never want a complete stranger to download my activities and photos before meeting me. It's bad enough that people google each other before meeting.
I agree online dating has it's challenges…cost, time and return. I recently reviewed how much I've spent on online dating and my return. I know when I joined each site and how much I spent (I'm a bit of geek yes) over a 10 year period. You can read about it in my blog, "My ROI on Online Dating." http://singletease.com/blog/2011/05/the-cost-of-d…