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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

I find this to be a bit strange from a marketing perspective and the cost to run this campaign has to be non-trivial. If someone searches for Signal, what is the likelihood they don't already know what Facebook Messenger is? What is this ad supposed to convince someone of? Like you see the ad after searching for Signal and go "oh I have Facebook Messenger"?

I guess maybe there might be some who don't know about Facebook Messenger and so they heard about this new Signal app and now they see a new chat app that works with Facebook.

I'm sure there's analytics and testing behind the decision to support it.

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FWIW, I can tell you my father goes with whatever's in the ad 99% of the time. It's led to some... interesting... situations to fix.

But there are absolutely people like this, and FB makes money off of them in droves.

Users who click on ads are probably the best users to have.

Thats why Facebook are targeting them.

Cynically I'm guessing it's for potential new users who have heard of Signal vaguely and inducing brand confusion. "Oh, Signal is part of Facebook Messenger, cool, already have that."

New-old word: brand confusion

I was curious about this from a trademark angle (it seems against the spirit of the law if not the letter) and apparently it's generally permitted to show ads based on a brand keyword as long as the ad itself does not contain any trademarked terms or images. I don't personally agree with that but it supposedly been tested in a few courts.

It's common practice in Google Adwords to book your competitors' keywords.

It's also common to book political ads in newspapers that will be placed next to articles discussing that topic.

Whoever pays most, gets that screen/paper space.

Yes, Facebook is likely violating trademarks. Its quite disgusting to see a $500 billion dollar company fighting a non profit with such ugly tactics.

It does make Signal's own ads more expensive.

I miss the old Google layout where it was crystal clear what is an ad. Nowadays, you can't even blame normal people that they don't notice the tiny "Ad"

Do Signal buy ads against their own name in the App Store though? Despite adding Google-like search ads, Apple haven’t broken search and they’re always the first organic result for their name, so I don’t see why they would want to.

What’s really annoying is searching for an app and it shows up in the search suggestions but doesn’t exist. For example, search “Red Robin” in the App Store and there’s a suggestion for it. But what shows up... Robinhood (with a DoorDash ad above it). Turns out Red Robin doesn’t have an app. But then why is it a search suggestion?

Apple is probably autocompleting based on the data from what people search for.

Or even the keywords attached to the ads (which would by why DoorDash shows up as an ad). It’s still frustrating sometimes.

I wonder if there's automated ad purchasing going on here, bidding against the keywords of the top app names in relevant categories?

It seems that Facebook bidding on Signal keywords is unlikely to gain them much, as those searching for signal right now are very likely going there expressly to escape from Facebook, and are searching for a specific brand name already.

Facebook has the cash to burn, even if it's a less-than-stellar marketing decision. My guess is this is a short-lived advertising campaign to protect the moat during this heated moment.

Deep down, I hope this has nothing to do with a "marketing decision", and is just a hail-mark "Fuck, look at all the people fleeing WhatsApp since we announced the privacy changes? We have to do _something!_ What're we gonna tell Zuck?".

(Sadly, in spite of the noise in my personal social bubble, I suspect the number of users departing WhatsApp over that is so small it's completely indiscernible from regular churn...)

Judging from what I'm seeing personally, it would be hard to explain the sudden increase in the number of my contacts that installed Signal as regular churn. Though I acknowledge that the choice of my contacts is probably not representative of the whole population.

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