Facebook, Which Knows Everything About You, Really Wants to Be Friends With Automakers

Facebook isn’t just a hotbed of meaningless virtue signaling, thinly veiled racism, political rants, and overly serious arguments with people you haven’t seen in several years. It’s also a great place for advertisers to spend their money — at least, that’s what the platform wants automobile manufacturers to believe. The social media site is trying to establish closer ties with the industry, and went so far as to send COO Sheryl Sandberg to Detroit to host the first Facebook Automotive Summit in five years.

However, if you’re anything like me, your feed is probably already clogged up with car ads. This morning’s limited browsing yielded placements for Jaguar and Genesis before asking me when I last drove a Hyundai. Facebook thinks it can do more, targeting the subset of its 2 billion users which could benefit automakers the most. While the website has stepped up its game, future ad investments will still suffer from runoff to zero-engagement click farms in countries like India, Egypt, and Brazil.

A large company might deem those losses acceptable, but does it really matter when so few people buy new cars online?

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  • Steve Biro There are 24 races on this year’s F1 schedule. And I guarantee you no more than two will be reasonably exciting, Meanwhile, F1’s reception for Andretti reveals the dark underbelly of the sport. I have followed F1 since the 1960s and, frankly, I am running out of interest. I’ll catch a race if it’s convenient but won’t bother DVRing them.
  • YellowDuck Been watching since the 80s, seriously since the 90s once we had reliable TV coverage. I'm in Canada though. Hey, and don't forget that the Interlagos race is also in a convenient time zone, as is Mexico. So that's 5 races in the Americas. Absolutely love it, but it takes a bit more interest in the technical / strategic side of things to really appreciate it. It's not just going fast in circles until someone crashes into someone else, while drunk people watch. The US can be proud of what it has contributed - Austin is one of the best tracks on the calendar, Vegas turned out to be much better than anyone could have hoped, and even Miami - a real Indy car-style track - produced a good race this year.
  • JMII I watch every F1 race, same with Indycar which is 100X better in terms of actual racing.
  • Dale Quelle surprise.
  • 3SpeedAutomatic Nice looking, but IIRC, there was an issue with these engines where a knock would develop. That may account for the very low milage. 🚗🚗🚗