Machines are not going to do the work for you

Machines Are Not Going To Do The Work For You

This morning a friend of mine calls me.

He said he sponsored a post on Facebook.

He was pushing one of his messages, trying to broadcast using Facebook.

He took some ads and all that.

And then he got the responses

Mostly from Indonesia. People he never heard of before.

So I told him that maybe he should complain to Facebook.

Not that Facebook will reply to you immediately because Facebook is not exactly decentralized. So you will talk to the machine and you have to wait for the machine to come back to you.

Sometime those days, they are in a different time zone.

Anyway, I love Facebook for whatever reason.

But my friend couldn’t figure out why he was getting all these Indonesian people coming in who were not his audience.

With due respect to Indonesians.

I have a lot of wonderful Indonesian friends.

And people he didn’t know….. names he couldn’t figure it out.

It was like hybrid names, made up names of people responding and increasing his numbers to show that there was more reach and all that.

So, I told him that if he complains about it too much there will be a lot of experts out there who will come and tell him that he targeting it wrong, he’s got the wrong metrics.

So I suppose he has to do a trial and error to get his targeting right.

And pay a lot more money to experiment…. he may not get it right.

On the other hand, if you advertise in The Star.

You don’t have to do that.
You know who is reading your paper.
You don’t have to test this metric or that metric.
You can choose your metric.
You can choose your sections.
You can choose your tone of editorial.

It’s there…

Television, same thing.

It’s there.

But still, people pay a lot of money to go to Facebook and all these wonderful online platforms

To try and target this, try and target that.

Hey, the machines are not gonna do your work for you.

Face it.

So if you want to try an experiment that is fine.

No issue.

But if you really want to target your audience and know who you talking to.

Immediately… there are a lot of media options out there for you.

No wonder some marketers are winning… because they love to see how the other marketers are being confused

Something to think about.

Video captions by GilaTerJemah

More video from this series:

Year of the Ham
How well do you know Millennials?
We are slaves to the machines