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The media is filled with examples of the poor business practices of facebook there blatant disregard for user privacy comes to mind as one example.  Today I ran across a great example of why they may struggle to get the advertising revenue they could have.  Here’s what happened.

I decided to run an ad on their site.  It’s fairly easy to set up and I liked that I could narrow down the demographics quite easily.   I was looking forward to seeing how things would go until I got notice that my ad had been disabled.  Now Zuckerberg may be all smiles in his photo, but this apparent friendly attitude has not transfered to his ad team.  Here’s the message I was hit with.

“This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances.”  Wow! That stings.  And what was my transgression?  No I had not slapped up a picture of a pretty scantily clad person as some do or lied in my ad about a service or product, no I had  are you ready for this… left off a period from the end of the ad.

Now if my dad the English teacher is reading my blog these days he’s probably cheering for Matt’s ad team for keeping me in line.  However, in my defense imagine you spend most of your ad writing time creating Adwords where characters are precious you tend to neglect the periods.  Sorry dad.

Here’s what really bugs me though.  Zuckerberg’s folks apparently think their time is more precious than mine and yours.  Rather than give advertisers like me an easy way to edit the ad, they slap me with the above.  Tell me never to run such a horribly depraved ad on their site, then tell me “If you choose to submit this ad again, please make the necessary changes so that it adheres to all of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines.”  And make me redo the whole thing.  Wouldn’t it have been better and easier for all involved to provide an easy editor and let me stick the stinking “.” in then resubmit it?