Honestly the ads on Instagram are kind of nice. They’re definitely the best ads I see by a wide margin - mostly likely to actually be stuff I’m interested in.
It really shows where Meta spend their money. This is probably an excellent ad for someone in a position where they want to make money by creating and selling Instagram accounts. This is also a very easy genre of ad to spot for a company on the bleeding edge of NLP. The advertisers don’t even use euphemisms, their feed is just pictures of dozens of passports and visas. It’s still up weeks later.
I’m obviously used to online platforms being careless about who they run ads for, but official ads brazenly selling identity documents was certainly a new one!
My complaint with Facebook, though, has more to do with the live feed algorithm recommendations, where I have to sift through memes and other viral posts I'm not interested in as well as viral political posts that often post misinformation. I miss the old days of Facebook where my feed was strictly limited to posts from my friends, plus the occasional ad.
"Going out of business" sales for fast fashion websites only a month old. Crowdfunding projects which obviously are just clones other products. Items with a slick video which if you buy them from any other place, they cost half to a third the price.
*last I used Facebook for any significant amount of time, which has been a while.
This could be why you see less targeted ads. Scams, high-ctr and broad appeal ads thrive in places where targeting doesn't exist because their margins can support it. Watch a show on cable or broadcast these days for an example of this.