As you read this, thousands of 18-34 year old men are watching Tampax commercials. Not because they want to, but because television is an imprecise medium that makes it hard to get the right ads to the right people. As a result, we’ve been conditioned over decades to expect irrelevance at the commercial break.

But wasn’t the Internet, and in particular, social media, supposed to turn that tide? Take Facebook—they know more about my day-to-day life than my parents do, and surely enough to serve me ads that I’d find remotely useful. But they’re dropping the ball. Big time.

Check out this little gem, currently smack dab in the middle of my news feed: an ad for MarineCFO. From their website: (Yeah, I clicked) “MarineCFO is the leading provider of on-vessel, marine operations, personnel, fleet maintenance and financial management solutions to the marine transportation industry.”

Will someone out there besides Google please get their shit together?

Update: Robert over at GrokDotCom picked this up, and some of the comments over there got me thinking. The bottom line is this: While a poorly-targeted TV ad reflects badly on the advertiser (and not the network), a poorly-targeted Facebook ad reflects badly on the network (and not the advertiser). The reason is that Facebook integrates advertising WITHIN their programming (my news feed) while the TV network traditionally keeps it separate (product placement aside).

In this sense, Facebook has a much greater responsibility than TV networks to make their ads relevant. When they don’t (as in the above example) they compromise their product experience, and damage their brand, all in exchange for a few pennies per CPM.