Tag Archives: Facebook

When Companies Can’t Target Prospects Under Age 16

If you’re on a platform such as Facebook, you sometimes receive advertisements that are VERY specific. Such as, “This is the perfect drink holder for California white males over the age of 50!” It’s almost as if they know everything about you…because they do.

Unless you implement privacy restrictions and don’t allow platform advertisers to reference your personal information.

Of course, if the advertiser isn’t able to narrowcast directly to you, the advertiser will broadcast to everybody.

And Facebook will start showing you advertisements in Chinese.

Qiaobi.

And if you complain to Facebook and ask why you’re seeing Chinese ads, Facebook will simply reply, “We are prohibited from using your personal information. Since there are a billion Chinese, we take a guess that you’re Chinese and show you those ads.”

Which brings us to age and social media.

The Under 16s Are Blocklisted

Back when Marky Mark created The Facebook, he initially targeted college-age users. But as time went on, Facebook and its competitors started aiming for younger ages.

This makes sense. Advertisers want to target consumers who are suspectible to changing their minds and are not set in their ways. So while a super kewl soft drink manufacturer isn’t going to target me, it is going to target 18 year olds…and 16 year olds…and 14 year olds…and 12 year olds.

A recent DKC report stated that 42% of all household spending is influenced by 8- to 14-year-olds, and that this age group is DIRECTLY spending over $100 billion per year.

So you can bet that advertisers are clamoring to purchase ad time on Facebook, TikTok, and the other social media services to get a pipeline to the brains of these 8 to 14 year olds…whoops, 12 to 14 year olds, since most social media services require you to be at least 12 years old to have an account.

But what if access to that entire age group is cut off entirely?

We’re seeing all over the world that jurisdictions are enacting or trying to enact bans on the use of social media for people under 16 years of age. The latest country to propose such a move is Indonesia:

“Authorities in the country, which is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, said Friday they expect social media platforms to deactivate the accounts of under-16s from March 28, starting with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox.”

In other words, all the popular sites that teens love.

And in certain jurisdictions, the companies will implement age verification and age estimation technology to ensure that kids don’t like about their ages to get in.

Assuming these prohibitions stand, this causes a huge problem for B2C marketers that target teens: how do you market to them when the direct pipelines to this age group are cut off?

I’m just thankful that Bredemarket and its clients sell to adults. You don’t really see 13 year olds buying biometric technology.

What is the Difference Between “Bredemarket Identity Firm Services” and “Bredemarket”?

I’m putting myself in the shoes of someone reading stuff on LinkedIn or Facebook.

  • At one point, the reader may encounter a reference to “Bredemarket.”
  • At another point, the reader may encounter a reference to “Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.”

Are “Bredemarket” and “Bredemarket Identity Firm Services” two separate entities?

No.

They overlap.

So if your specific interest is biometrics, or secure documents, or other identity factors, visit Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

If your interests are more general (such as product marketing), visit Bredemarket.

I Warned of a Scam Substack Post…and Facebook Didn’t Like It

So I wrote my Bredemarket blog post about the scam Substack post I saw last night.

The original post.

Then I shared it to my socials, including Facebook.

But Facebook removed the shares.

Post removed.

And put me on a one month restriction.

Your account has restrictions.

I’m appealing.

Conceptualization of the Planet Bredemarket and Its Rings

Inspired by the Constant Contact session I attended at the Small Business Expo, I wanted to conceptualize the Bredemarket online presence, and decided to adopt a “planet with rings” model.

Think of Bredemarket as a planet. Like Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter, the planet Bredemarket is surrounded by rings.

Google Gemini.

The closest ring to the planet is the Bredemarket mailing list (MailChimp).

The next closest ring is the Bredemarket website (WordPress).

Moving outward, we find the following rings:

  • Search engines and generative AI tools, including Bing, ChatGPT, Google, Grok, Perplexity, and others.
  • The Bredemarket Facebook page and associated groups.
  • The Bredemarket LinkedIn page and associated showcase pages.
  • A variety of social platforms, including Bluesky, Instagram, Substack, and Threads.
  • Additional social platforms, including TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube.

While this conceptualization is really only useful to me, I thought a few of you may be interested in some of the “inner rings.”

And if you’re wondering why your favorite way cool platform is banished to the outer edges…well, that’s because it doesn’t make Bredemarket any money. I’ve got a business to run here, and TikTok doesn’t help me pay the bills…

Messing Up “Meta Data” via the Meta Challenge

I confess that Meta AI’s cluelessness often amuses me. I need to start collecting examples, but it is often off the, um, mark.

But if you REALLY want to confuse Meta AI, participate in Bredemarket’s “Meta Challenge”:

Meta Challenge: at least once per day in October and November, go to Facebook and/or Instagram and ask Meta AI the most inane questions you can think of.

And feel free to ask these inane questions of Bredemarket’s own two Instagram bots.

Because we all want to know who is the best Osmond brother.

And Mark Zuckerberg’s shoe size.

Conversation with one of my Instagram bots.

Why?

Now since Bredemarket’s readers are of above average intelligence (and also have extremely magnetic personalities), you are probably asking why I am promoting this activity.

Simple reason: the data we feed to Meta AI in October and November will be used in December, according to PYMNTS.

Meta will begin using people’s conversations with its artificial intelligence to create personalized ads and content.

The change is set to go into effect Dec. 16, the tech giant announced Wednesday (Oct. 1), 

If you are concerned about the Really Big Bunch knowing too much about you, feed them false information just to confuse them.

And maybe you’ll get some wild entertaining ads in return.

And if they complain that you’re intentionally messing up their algorithms, tell the Really Big Bunch that you’d be more than happy to provide the REAL data.

For a price.

Go See Cal

In a private Facebook share, Rahsheen Porter quoted from Cal Newport:

“We know these platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.

“But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.”

The algorithms only show you what they think will cause you to maximally engage. Even in the days of FriendFeed, I never saw content from the extremely active Turkish and Italian communities. Why should I? I saw what FriendFeed wanted me to see.

But I’m thankful that Facebook shows me Rahsheen’s content.

And I am also thankful for those who understood the “Go See Cal” post title.

And finally, I am thankful to the residents and former residents of south Arlington, Virginia who detected the inside joke in the picture above. (Hint: the hoodie was originally gray.)

This is Only a Test

Just trying to figure out what I would do if Meta lowered the handle on Bredemarket and I couldn’t post audio-enhanced conte n via its platforms.

“For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation.” Details here.

Thankfully it’s not auto playing. I don’t want to go back to the 1990s again.

And this also covers me if my Spotify-hosted podcasting empire is reduced to rubble.

Behind the Scenes: Working on Mesmerizing Storytelling

(Imagen 4)

This was never supposed to go on the Bredemarket blog, but here it is. Because when a product marketing consultant wants to improve his storytelling skills, he practices with…toilet paper.

A Facebook challenge

I’ve been working on improving my AI art generation skills, and even created a special Facebook group, Bredemarket Picture Clubhouse, as my practice area. One of my inspirations has been Danie Wylie, whom I first encountered during the HiveLLM thingie.

Wylie likes to share art challenges, and she recently shared this one. The text below, including the emojis, is straight from the challenge.

📣 New Weekly Wednesday Challenge 📣

🌟 Glitch N’ Sass  and AI Anonymous  Present:

🎭✨ MESMERIZE THE MUNDANE ✨🎭

Where glitter drips from code and imagination struts in stilettos. @everyone  💥

Take the forgotten, the overlooked, the tragically basic —

and unleash the glam-core magic of AI.

Allow creativity to glitch the system, let sass polish the mundane, all while reshaping reality.

⸻

Flip the script on the everyday:

🥄 A spoon stirs time’s secrets

👟 A shoelace coils into cosmic scales

📎 A paperclip snaps open hidden realms

✨ Rewire purpose.

✨ Reframe presence.

✨ Reveal what the world forgets to see.

📌 Tag it: #AIAnonymous #GlitchNSass #MesmerizeTheMundane

⸻

💬 This isn’t an art drop — it’s an everyday clutch, transformed into a chasm of creativity .

A call to those who see depth in the digital, beauty in glitches, and freedom behind the mask.

We are not escaping the world — we are a reminder, to view it. For all the purposes they told us it never possessed. 🔥

✨ So go on… Mesmerize us, With glitter in one hand and encrypted vision in the other. ✨

Preparing my response

Now on the surface such an exercise has nothing to do with “know your business” or “biometric product marketing expert” or “content – proposal – analysis”…

…but it does.

In essence, written business communications are opportunities for storytelling. As I noted, case studies are inspiring stories about how a challenged company realized amazing success, all thanks to the wonderful Green Widget Gizmo.

Now that’s a riveting story.

Tell us about the Green Widget Gizmo again PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE! Imagen 4.

And of course I’ve performed AI image storytelling before: for example, with my three “Biometric product marketing expert” reels. Here’s the second:

Biometric product marketing expert, the content for tech marketers version.

But back to the “Mesmerize the Mundane” challenge. So to participate in the challenge I had to find something mundane. Now some of you think a single finger sensor is mundane…but I don’t. (There’s actually a connection between fingerprint sensors and art, but I’m under NDA.)

My response

So I picked a mundane topic: toilet paper.

What’s even better is that toilet paper is filled with emotion. Particularly relative to the ongoing debate about whether…

I’m not going to say it. I hope this reel—my entry into the “Mesmerize the Mundane” challenge—speaks for itself.

The over/under.

When I shared this reel on Facebook and elsewhere, I did so with the following text.

A storytelling exercise…and a challenge.

You can’t get more mundane than toilet paper, or spawn fiercer battles over orientation. But love conquers battles.

#AIAnonymous #GlitchNSass #MesmerizeTheMundane #BredemarketPictureClubhouse 

But before I close this post I will get a little technical.

Time to show how the sausage is made


By Rklawton – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=735848.

One of the challenges in multi-image storytelling is the need for consistency between the images. You can’t have the hero wildebeest wearing a blue cap in the first picture and a red one in the second.

So to enforce consistency, I’ve been bundling all my picture prompts into a single request to Google Gemini, and including instructions to enforce similarity between the pictures in the series.

AI art creation. This is the picture I use for the Bredemarket Picture Clubhouse Facebook group.

So here is the specific request used to create the four pictures in the reel above.

Draw realistic pictures based upon the following four prompts:

Prompt 1: Draw a realistic picture of a toilet paper holder on a blue tiled bathroom wall, next to the toilet. The toilet paper is white. The toilet paper end is hanging in front of the roll.

Prompt 2: Draw a realistic picture similar to the image in the previous prompt, a toilet paper holder on a blue tiled bathroom wall, next to the toilet. The toilet paper is still white. This time, however, the toilet paper end is hanging behind the roll.

Prompt 3: Draw a realistic picture similar to the image in the previous prompts, a toilet paper holder on a blue tiled bathroom wall, next to the toilet. Now the toilet paper is glowing in a neon red. Due to mesmerizing magic, there is a toilet paper end hanging in front of the roll, and there is also a duplicate toilet paper end hanging behind the roll. The presence of both toilet paper ends removes the conflict of whether to hang toilet paper in front of our behind the roll; now, both are simultaneously true.

Prompt 4: Draw a realistic picture similar to the image in the previous prompts, a toilet paper holder next to the toilet. But now the tiles on the bathroom wall are colored gold, vibrating, and throbbing. The toilet itself is glowing with a bright light. Now the toilet paper is glowing in red, green, and blue, and sparkles are shooting away from the toilet paper roll like fireworks. Again, due to mesmerizing magic, there is a toilet paper end hanging in front of the roll, and there is also a duplicate toilet paper end hanging behind the roll. The bathroom floor is covered in hundred dollar bills and shiny gold coins.

And here are the full square pictures, which do not completely display in the reel.

Now I just have to tell the riveting story of a single finger sensor.