"Leaving Yahoo?" ad placed at facebook by First Round Capital made a news: facebook social engine mistakenly mashed up a profile photo of a Yahoo employee to the ad. Read the fact.
The advertiser First Round Capital cannot see the actual ad at Yahoo network on facebook. What happened is that the Yahoo employee also belongs to FRC group:
Anyhow, I've now been informed (loudly) that my ad which said "Leaving Yahoo?" was accompanied by a picture of a current Yahoo employee. Most of those employees joined the FRC group before the ad campaign -- and (obviously and justifiably) were not too pleased by any implications that they were leaving their employer. And while I've apologized in person to those that contacted me, here's a very public apology to those who haven't.
This interesting social ad experiment generated totally unexpected results for the advertiser. The missing link is the semantics processed by facebook social engine. Even human can make mistakes during social engagement with misaligned social context, as of the machine, why not?
The simple machine model doesn't work for human. If the ad is going thru viral channel, human social ability would mostly place it in appropriate social context. However, this natural human model seems not working for facebook's eager revenue objective.
Anyway, it's funny to see actual people being placed by ad engine in the way of AdSense which is often non-sense. This story could be a perfect sample of first generation social ads.
