First, you ask if he wants your honest opinion. No one likes unsolicited critism.
Second, what makes you qualified to say his idea sucks? Many people in history were told their idea sucked.
Next...sometimes it's good to let people fail. It builds character. We learn by making mistakes.
But if you feel like you must give criticism...don't simply say it sucks. That's just as useless as saying it's wonderful. If you don't like his idea, say what you don't like about it AND give a suggestion about how to make it better.
The bottom line: your opinion is just one of many and a suggestion is always better than a criticism. Especially when he's your friend.
Thank you for being one of the few logical people in this thread. People love to bring out their pitchforks, and report / downvote (or whatever it is they do here) when someone disrupts the "flow" of things.
The guy ran a poor ad. It's his fault, not Facebooks.
I'm a fan of what works. And right now Facebook is what is working. I don't know if it's the same for you, but not a day goes by where I don't overhear someone talking about Facebook in public.
About the video, the guy ran a poor campaign for a pointless page. He was expecting advertising to work like a magic button where you click it and you get engagement. The guy had no product and no target market. He advertised nothing to everyone. Of course he's going to get poor results.
About the click farms. Yeah, they do exist. But it's not Facebook's fault. Just like it's not Google's fault if people use the internet to send spam. You have to think about the scale that Facebook operates. They're the number two website in the world. And the number one social network. Let that settle in for a second. Fraudulent activity is, unfortunately, inevitable when you have a site like that.
The bottom line: become smarter with your ads. Have an actual product and a real audience. Ironically, I know of a copywriter / marketer that made a website for the dog niche. He gets 800,000 engagements a week on it. Every one of his posts gets 500-26,000 likes and tons of comments. The site is basically a news site for dogs. He just does content right. And he knows how to advertise. He doesn't spend time making fancy videos like this guy did. He gets things done. He gets results. He partners with dog related products and services and makes a killing entirely from a Facebook page.
This video is an insult to marketers. It's like me trying to insert a floppy disk into a cdrom drive, then complaining that computer makers are all frauds.
I'm not a fan of this video. One is that it's told in a very convincing way. He sure spent some time on his charts and making his opinion sound factual. The problem is that he is wrong. Facebook ads are the most effective way to advertise, if you do them correctly. It's not Facebook that's fraudulent here. Facebook did what they said they'll do. It's the way this guy ran the ad that's the problem.
This IS a Facebook problem. Whether they are not doing their job properly or customers have problems understanding their platform. But whatever it is, it still affects FB directly, so of course it's their problem.
No, it's not. This is as much of a Facebook problem as it is Google's problem that people send SPAM to people on the internet. This guy doesn't know how to market. People think that advertising is a magic button that you push and you get results. Hilarious.
And let me guess... you get great results with your Facebook campaigns? My marketing teams have spent a lot of time with a variety of advertising campaigns. The Facebook has always been by far the worst, an order of magnitude worse than everything else we tried even though it's supposed to have greater targeting ability. Snarky comments on HN aren't going to make me believe that Facebook advertising is anything but overpriced and overhyped. Please present your evidence instead of assuming everyone is an idiot.
Yeah, a facebook employee complaining that he didn't use enough money to promote the fake pages. Also complaining that he is using facebook wrong and should know better. I was expecting facebook to know better than to leave old tools that does not work lying around just because they make good money out of them? No wait, I wasn't.
I'm not here to make you believe anything. Do what's working for you. If Facebook ads are not working for you, stop using them, or seek the help of someone more qualified than you and your team.
But SPAM is Google's problem and they are devoting a lot of resources to stopping it. Not to say it is exclusively Google's problem or Google's only/biggest problem.
I'm so glad this video came out. People like me can continue to dominate Facebook ads. This video will scare people away that do not know how Facebook ads work. Ask any internet marketer, Facebook ads are dominating unlike anything in history.
A part of me thinks this video was made to drive people away from FB advertising on purpose.
Turn the photo around so she looks at the opt in.