Seen from the jaundiced eye of the outside advertising world, Facebook had for years been completely unconnected to any outside data source, with no real tracking or attribution to figure out which Facebook ads were working (and where). Now we were proposing rendering a quarter of the Internet targetable via all the online data in existence. Every product you’d looked at or bought, everything known about your online reading or browsing habits—it was all going to be inside your Facebook experience now. There were two ways to do this. The first would end up being called Custom Audiences (CA),
Seen from the jaundiced eye of the outside advertising world, Facebook had for years been completely unconnected to any outside data source, with no real tracking or attribution to figure out which Facebook ads were working (and where). Now we were proposing rendering a quarter of the Internet targetable via all the online data in existence. Every product you’d looked at or bought, everything known about your online reading or browsing habits—it was all going to be inside your Facebook experience now. There were two ways to do this. The first would end up being called Custom Audiences (CA), and was an extension of the existing ads system. Like the data “on-boarding” we talked about earlier, it would be a way to join offline data like names, addresses, and emails to Facebook users. That was its original and sole intent, though it soon grew into much more. The second, more interesting approach, Facebook Exchange, or FBX, would form the final chapter in the programmatic takeover of digital media: a real-time exchange connecting the world’s advertising data, user by user, and ad impression by ad impression, to the Facebook experience.* How did it all work? In the CA case, advertisers had to upload lists of email addresses, phone numbers, names, or other personally identifiable information (PII), and manually craft some targeting cluster (“people who bought something last month”). The Facebook technology, drafting as it was off recycled targeting technology, was creaky and slow...
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“Custom Audiences” and “FBX” - Another Facebook monetization tools
