Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

As Prasad and I think about different ways to promote the Startable blog a fun idea came up: Facebook ads. I love the idea that we can publish highly targeted advertisements right at the people who I imagine would like the blog (too bad advertisers with more than a $20 ad spend budget don’t seem to care that much.). As I went through the ad buying process I was a bit surprised by the “Common Ad Mistakes” in the Facebook Advertising Guideline section. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of my 7th grade English teacher (a great teacher, by the way). For some reason she couldn’t get it into her mind that I really didn’t care that much about spelling and grammar… Facebook seems to have hired her, since the vast majority of the rules have to do with punctuation and spelling. Of the 12 common ad mistakes, 7 of them seem to be about grammar, while only 5 deal with actual deceptive advertising or inappropriate offers/targeting/images. I really would have imagined it would have been the opposite. Perhaps this lack of targeting enforcement is why I keep getting ads for a male balding solution – if they looked at my photos they’d see that I clearly have most of my hair still (I do, don’t I? It’s not noticeable yet, is it???)

Here are the 12 rules listed on the Common Ad Mistakes page:

1.  Capitalization of Every Word
2.  Capitalization of Entire Words
3.  Incorrect Grammar, Spelling, and Slang
4.  Inaccurate Ad Text
5.  Deceptive Discounts and Offers
6.  Irrelevant or Inappropriate Images
7.  Inappropriate Targeting
8.  Destination
9.  Sentence Structure
10. Unacceptable Language Choice
11. Incorrect Punctuation
12. Symbols and Numbers in Place of WordsCommon Ad Mistakes

Are you telling me the 3 most important rules on posting a Facebook ad are grammar rules, before inaccurate advertisements?? Check out rule 2; heaven forbid it should look like an advertisement is screaming at a user:

Or Rule 3, which deals with Spelling (Thanks Mrs Hicks!)

As if most people on FB don’t get texting slang…

However, my favoriate is the punctuation rule. This truly feels like it was created by an English teacher trying to get those darn kids to start using correct grammar! Or maybe the founders have stock in the publisher of Strunk & White.

 Anyway, I’m sure the good folks at Facebook are just trying to maintain the look and feel of their site, but still, it does feel a bit authoritarian for some reason. But, who knows, maybe one of the founders’ moms was an elementary school teacher, and this was one of her requirements when she let him drop out of college to start a company… “fine son, you can leave Harvard, but if you decide to go with an advertising supported business model for your destination site you HAVE to make sure you force your advertisers to use correct grammar… and I don’t care if you say it will slow your revenue generation!” (Obviously I added that all caps word in there for emphasis, because otherwise it would be “excessive capitalization.”