Announced yesterday, Facebook will no longer allow adverts for housing, credit, and employment to be targeted to users based by age, gender and location.
Facebook has already been limiting targeting to protect classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. This expansion will encourage all of us to profile on psychographics rather than demographics.
Sheryl Sandberg commented “Housing, employment and credit ads are crucial to helping people buy new homes, start great careers, and gain access to credit. They should never be used to exclude or harm people.”
Whether or not this will be implemented in South Africa is yet to be seen. Should it come into effect, the challenge will be to understand each target market deeply enough to be able to identify them based on their thinking, their interests, and preferences. To get this right, observation is key, we need to understand our prospects better.
We are excited by the steps taken by Facebook to help build equality and look forward to creating new profiles. These changes challenge us to continue to strategise and adapt on behalf of our Purple Mookiting clients.
Read more on Facebook’s Newsroom blog here: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/protecting-against-discrimination-in-ads/