Creepy or inevitable?

Posted on | August 12, 2010 | No Comments

Imagine my surprise some weeks ago when I found this photo on an ad on my Facebook page, plugging a freelance writing site. Here was a woman who looked eerily like a younger version of my South Asian mother, asking me if I was looking for work as a writer. I’m South Asian. I’m a woman. I’m a freelance journalist. I couldn’t not click on the ad.

A little while earlier, I’d covered an academic conference where a research team from Facebook presented a prize-winning paper exploring how Facebook could use U.S. Census data to predict its users’ ethnicity. It based its predictions on their first and last names, and related those predicted ethnicities with the way users interacted with friends online. Bottom line: people tended to have more friends and communicate more often with others of the same ethnicity.

Not exactly groundbreaking news, you may say. But when you think about what it could mean for marketing to Facebook users, that uncanny photo in an ad on my own Facebook profile begins to take on new meaning. How hard could it be to swap out advertising photos based on users’ assumed ethnicities? And wouldn’t users be more likely to click through ads with pictures of someone who looks like them? I certainly did.

I updated my Facebook status asking my other freelancer friends if they had seen the same ad on their profiles but with a different photo, but didn’t get much of a response. So I don’t have any proof besides a hunch that I’d been taken in by a very clever marketing ploy.

Of course, Facebook may not need Census data to mine information on ethnicity. Profile pictures can be a dead giveaway in many cases. And as readers of my related post on the SmartBlog on Social Media pointed out, predictions of ethnicity based on names are becoming quite meaningless in an increasingly multi-racial world. “What ethnic group would this program predict for Donovan McNabb?!” asked a reader identified as LilOle.

The Huffington Post linked to my original post on the Facebook paper as a lead story on its Tech page. Have you noticed anything different about the advertising on your Facebook lately?

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