A little bit arrogant?

I saw my first real Facebook ‘Social Ad’ today in the wild on my news feed. For those of you that don’t know what it is, Facebook takes your friends’ actions on other sites (Blockbuster, Yelp, etc.) and connects them with advertising in your news feed. Here’s a picture of the ad I saw:

A friend added a movie to her queue on Blockbuster and they married it with an ad for the Blockbuster service. It’s a somewhat interesting idea, though I feel like this one ad really fails on the fact that the movie advertised isn’t even the movie my friend added (is it?).

I do give Facebook credit for trying something different - clearly there’s a play to be made around commercial implicit endorsements by friends. Honestly though, this isn’t it. Maybe if it said my friend added the movie to her queue, watched it, and loved it, (and, oh by the way, would you like to sign up for Blockbuster by Mail to watch it?).

In any case, I clicked on the little question mark, interested to see how Facebook would be explaining this, and was greeted by a little bit of an affront:

For those of you that can’t read the text, the one line I was alarmed by was:

Social Ads mean advertisements become more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends.

I have a couple of problems with this:

1. The sentence is more of a statement than a suggestion, but unfortunately Facebook isn’t the one who gets to say whether something is more interesting to me. It’s a bit of arrogance that’s slightly nauseating. The implication is clearly: “Don’t be alarmed, we know what’s good for you. We will tell you what is more interesting.”
2. The ad is NOT more interesting to me or, really, more tailored to me. It’s just not. *Shrug*.

It’s a small little thing, but I think there’s a certain humility that is lacking here. It’s a similar humility that is lacking from most of the choices that Facebook seems to make. When they announced the news feed, people were freaked out (probably unjustifiably so), but the official Facebook response was “Everyone calm down. You’ll get over it.” When people were freaked out by the opt-out nature of Beacon, the response was similar (and didn’t change until advertisers started getting worried).

I have a feeling it’s embedded in the culture of the company, because it seems to pop up continuously: “Don’t worry, we know what’s best for you, and we’ll let you know when we’ve decided what that is.”