'The Most Personal Ad Campaign in History' Highlights the Frightening Targeting Abilities of Facebook

Creative and innovation shop, Technology, Humans and Taste [THAT] partnered with Accountable Tech – a non-profit that’s played a leading role in the campaign to ban surveillance advertising – to create a targeted ad generator: a way for everyone to look through the data Facebook uses to profile you and serve you hyper-personalised ads. 

The ad generator tool called 'Make Me a Target' is found at targetmyself.com - a website that introduces anyone to the many scary, but real life targeting abilities of Facebook by letting them collaborate with AI to create an ad for themselves or another target. Visitors are asked to select from hundreds of the over 52,000 data points that Facebook knows about every user– name, location, job,  income, highly specific interests– and the tool generates a custom video ad just for them: hilarious, but eerily similar to the specificity of ads fighting for your clicks and dollars on Instagram feeds today. Also, every ad is trying to sell the same pair of pants.

The goal is that people will make ads again and again to share– engaging with the data points because of how funny and weird they are, while all reinforcing the understanding that every time they use the tool is just another example of how Big Tech companies like Facebook track, profile, and manipulate you to pad their bottom line.