Jon Loomer, principal at Jon Loomer Digital, is a Meta advertising expert whose site, jonloomer.com, should be on your visiting list if you’re doing any kind of advertising on Facebook or Instagram. While Jon does offer paid training programs on his site for “power users,” he’s been very generous with his extensive platform knowledge by making much of it available without charge to the public.
I wanted to get Jon’s take on how Meta is doing as an ad platform these days and also get his view of what seems to be the biggest topic in marketing (and perhaps the world) these days: AI. As Jon notes, usable AI (as exemplified by ChatGTP) is so new that its applications to marketing, advertising, search, SEO, and social media advertising are both exciting and largely unknowable at this moment in time. We discuss some of the possible impacts of AI in these areas and also probe potential legal and ethical issues arising when AI systems scrape information in order to feed or train themselves without attributing
sources or providing traffic in return (as Google does).
Then our discussion turns to Meta and Facebook. Jon is a power advertiser on Facebook and he’s lately been pointing out on his blog that Meta has lately begun to remove important features from its advertising back end. We discuss why this is so frustrating and suggest some possible reasons that this may be happening right now.
We then turn to ad formats on Facebook. As Jon reports, while he’s never been much of a fan of video ads, he’s found them more effective than ads that force users to leave Facebook, especially short-form videos, published daily, that give audiences a chance to learn about who he is and become familiar with what he does and how he can help them. We then discuss whether it’s prudent to spend effort precisely targeting user segments or to leave those decisions to Facebook’s targeting algorithm, and touch on whether it’s worthwhile to create unique ad creative for each Facebook audience segment.
Jon is candid about his frustration when dealing with Facebook support — especially when dealing with accounts that are shut down because of a (real or imagined) ad policy violation, and we chat about that. We both agree that Meta would do a far better job for its advertisers — and its investors — if its support teams worked in a more effective way.
We close with Jon’s view of what 2023 will bring to the digital marketing community and why he’s excited by these developments.
