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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I understand the author's issues with the spots -- and agree with them -- but he seems to demonstrate a poor understanding of what the goal of an advertisement for a free Android overlay targeted mainly towards 18-35 yr olds should be.

The goals of such an advertisement are to be loud and to promote immediate curiosity, in my opinion.

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The author, Josh Elman, has worked at Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and is now a principal at Greylock Partners with an investment focus on advertising and social (among other things). I'd say he definitely understands the advertising goals of a social media company.

I'm not trying to be glib, but he really doesn't demonstrate it in the article. His thesis is:

Facebook is celebrating all the wrong things. It advocates tuning out the people around you to see what else is happening that must be more interesting elsewhere. It foments FOMO.

Which sounds incredibly effective with the aforementioned target audience.

You could make the argument that he's talking less about the ads being ineffective and talking more about the ads being deplorable, which is fair -- but why does that matter? I can't remember Apple deployed a marketing strategy without the world 'magic', but I still think they're a great company.

Accomplishing the short-term goal while creating or reinforcing long-term positioning and/or framing issues (e.g. Facebook as a tool for tuning out) isn't actually a win.

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