Former Facebook exec Alex Stamos and I have several of the same advertisers on our lists despite living on opposite coasts: a realtor in New Jersey, a Maserati dealership in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Spectrum Pain Management.
Here’s where things get spicy — companies that you’ve had no interaction with before but that have access to your data., like Acxiom and Oracle, as partners in its advertising platform to power its Partner Categories feature for advertisers. Basically, anonymized personal data from these data companies was baked into the Facebook Ad platform, accessible to advertisers from big digital marketing agencies to one-person businesses selling hand-knitted beer koozies.
Of course, this didn’t mean third-party data was impossible to use in Facebook advertising . It just meant that now advertisers and their agencies had to work with an Oracle or Acxiom directly to use the custom audiences that the data brokers controlled. If your Advertisers list seems surprising and confusing to you, you’re not alone. Even people I spoke with who work in automotive digital marketing were perplexed by what they saw. “I can’t figure out why, it’s just such random car dealers,” said Steve White, CEO of Clarivoy, a car marketing agency, as he looked over his own list of advertisers on his personal Facebook account.
Holy shit a helpful buzzfeed article wtf is this the TwilightZone
Wow people still use FB?!
Lol I'd rather delete Facebook!