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.
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.
Bredemarket 