When Brian Swichkow, a digital marketer in Burlington, Vermont, was pranked by his roommate, he came up with a creative idea to get even. Swichkow flipped to his Facebook Ads dashboard, created a custom audience with his roommate’s email address, and started serving banner ads that poked fun at his hapless friend’s personal life.
For three weeks, Swichkow targeted his one person audience with increasingly comical and invasive ads, reaching the point where his roommate confessed he thought a Facebook advertiser had wire-tapped his phone. With just $1.70, Swichkow executed one of the most uniquely targeted Facebook ad campaigns in recent memory, one that’s been re-shared on social over 30,000 times since he revealed the punchline.
Although Swichkow’s joke is an extreme and amusing edge case in social advertising, it also highlights a very real truth: we have squarely arrived in the era of person-level marketing. It’s not sci-fi, it’s a power available in your current marketing technology stack.
