It ain't me babe: Kurt Bills social media team hits broad side of a really big barn with Facebook ads

Lollygagging around lazily on Facebook for the past few days, Bluestem has been seeing an ad for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Bills.

The Facebook tells me that:

Michele Bachmann stands with Kurt Bills for the U.S. Senate. You can too by clicking like.

I've saved a screenshot here, with Facebook friends' names redacted, except for Thug In Pastel's Javier Morillo-Alicea, who left a helpful suggestion in the comments.

There's little reason for a conservative candidate to target me. I don't "like" Facebook pages for conservative candidates and I do "like" Amy Klobuchar and will probably even vote for her. So depending upon the arrangement the Bills campaign has with Facebook, it's being charged every time someone like me clicks.

But perhaps the Bills campaign has stumbled on to a totally rad new approach to web ads, the analogue of "Staring At the Future" and copying a Paul Wellstone ad frame-for-frame, despite believing in the antithesis of the late senator's values.

In July, Mashable reported in Americans Don’t Want Political Facebook Ad Targeting:

Several political tech and data firms on the right, left and in between are introducing new ways to target digital ads to voters this election season. And while there are no signs of campaigns slowing their use of your social media profile data, a lot of users simply don’t want them.

A new study from the Annenberg School for Communications found that 85% of Americans surveyed would be “angry” if they discovered Facebook was serving ads for political candidates based on their profile information. But political advertisers commonly do just that, targeting Facebook ads to people who like certain political organizations or candidates or express other interests that might align with a candidate’s stance on an issue. Corporate brands do this, too.

Rather than offend his affinity groups, the Bills campaign might be directing ads to folks like me. On the other hand, the ad is a "sponsored story" which means that while Bills may ditched all that awful data I've handed over, for fear of outraging me, his social media gurus are looking for common friends, and finding me through Mr. Redacted.

Not that Americans like this strategy either:

Facebook Sponsored Stories ads for political candidates elicit an even higher level of disdain. Seventy percent of people surveyed said they would be less likely to support a candidate if they found out a campaign targeted ads to friends of people who like a candidate. But Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad format allows for this exact scenario.

Thus, I get to see Michele Bachmann and Kurt Bills together on Facebook. As polite Minnesotans say in the hinterland, that's different.

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