Facebook Drops Ad-Targeting Specific Groups Of People

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This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.

Meta Platforms Inc.  FB, announced it will no longer accept detailed targeting for advertisements on its Facebook platform — the world’s largest social networking site with more than 2.9 billion users.

Meta also owns the picture sharing site Instagram and the instant messaging app WhatsApp.

Facebook Vice president of Marketing Ads Graham Mudd said via a blog post that the decision was made to prevent advertisers from targeting ads on specific subjects perceived as sensitive.

What Is Detailed Targeting? 

Detailed targeting is when an advertiser chooses to show its ads to a particular group of people. The detailed targeting options may be based on the ads a user clicks, pages they engage with and the activities people engage in on social media platforms such as their travel preferences and hobbies.

What Is Facebook Dropping?

Starting January 19, Facebook removed the option for advertisers to target their ads to specific groups of people based on their interaction with content related to political affiliation, race or ethnicity and their health. Examples include ads on health such as lung cancer awareness or world diabetes day, or religious practices like Jewish holidays or Catholic church.

Facebook says the targeting options it has removed are not based on people’s physical characteristics or personal features but how they interact with content on its platform. The company says the decision came after it received concerns from experts that such ad targeting options can be used in a way that can cause harm to people in underrepresented groups.

However, the decision to drop these targeting options is being criticized by some businesses. Some of the company’s advertising partners have expressed concerns that dropping ad targeting options will negatively affect their businesses because it limits their ability to create positive societal change.

Could This Be A Better Solution?

Mobiquity Technologies Inc. MOBQ, a digital advertising and data intelligence company says it can offer a better solution to this. Through its two platforms, Advangelists and Mobiquity Networks, campaign managers can create and manage targeted ads. Unlike Facebook ads, which are only displayed on Meta’s platforms, Mobiquity digital ads can be built and deployed across multiple platforms via different formats.

Mobiquity’s intelligent HomeGraph platform can not only create targeted user lists based on user interaction, location profiles, context based targeting, voter profiles and demographic data across programmatic media channels, it also provides the flexibility to its advertisers to extend the reach to these audiences on platforms like Facebook.

While the issue of user privacy has landed big tech companies like Meta and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL in trouble, Mobiquity says it is concerned with user privacy. Each ad created by Mobiquity comes with a small icon that allows a user to click and learn why and how the ad was displayed on the device or web browser. The data that was used to target that ad is also displayed to the end user, and there is an option to remove the ad and reset or completely opt-out of targeting configurations.

This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.