Facebook’s data advantage enabled unprecedented advertiser nanotargeting

Evidence

On the positive side, it did know more about everyone in the world than anyone else (“big data” in the vernacular of the 2010s), allowing advertisers to nanotarget at an unprecedented level. Facebook ran side ads that allowed an advertiser to home in on his quarry with criteria like location, gender, age, schools attended, stated interests, and more. Thus, the advertiser of vintage 1970s speakers could target men between fifty and sixty-five living in suburban New Jersey who listed an interest in the Kinks and Led Zeppelin. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1006

Categorization

• SEED: A possible essay angle: the granular specificity of ad targeting (1970s speakers, Kinks-loving NJ suburban men) is the concrete realization of ‘data as revenue’ that prefigures surveillance capitalism debates.
• XREF: connects to: Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114; Advertising platforms sell analysed targeting promises, not raw data — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 55; Surveillance-based mobile advertising made Facebook among the largest companies worldwide — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 503 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297
• Facebook likes predict personality and life outcomes as accurately as human judges #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 858