K atie c ouric

Fun Fact: Hypertargeting Can Trick Rocket
Scientists
If you get really smart about targeting, you can reach just about anyone on
Facebook. FabFitFun’s David Oh once told me a story about a trick he
played on people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a federally funded
research and development center and NASA field center in La Cañada
Flintridge and Pasadena, California. Oh went there to give a lecture about
using Facebook’s digital marketing and hypertargeting—the act of sending

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highly targeted messages to very specific groups of people. If it sounds
familiar, it’s the type of targeting discussed earlier in the chapter, that zeroes
in on demographics like age, sex, location, language, education, interests,
and workplace.
Before going to the lecture, Oh did a little experiment. He made some
fake ads on Facebook and used them to target anyone who worked at JPL
within a twenty-mile radius. One ad was for something called “Life on
Mars?” The ad had a rover with a question mark on it. Another ad said,
“Funding for Next Rover Project Canceled?” He made ten different
variations of fake ads with various headlines and images. He had also heard
from a friend that there was an inside joke at JPL that people were called
“peanuts,” so he made a landing page, which people were redirected to
when they clicked on the ad, that said “Peanut Community News” with a
little countdown timer set to when he was giving his speech.
Oh spent about two dollars on that effort, and he had about ten clicks.
Four scientists even put their personal emails into the email waiting list he
created. During the lecture, he explained what he did (blurring out names so
he wouldn’t embarrass anyone), but two of the IT people at JPL stood up
and said, “It better not be any of you.”
The point is, the hypertargeted ability of Facebook’s ad platform makes
it possible to trick rocket scientists. So if you know your audience, it allows
you to do very well on Facebook or any other place that offers this kind of
granularity.