Facebook Ads are Weird

First, against my instincts, the praise

Somewhere in the usual sludge of my Facebook feed — the chess memes, the motivational reels, three separate machines promising to make me "content-ready visuals in seconds" — an advertisement stopped my thumb. It was for a company called Ugly Baby, and it was, I am obliged to report, very good indeed.

The creative was a single black card: a roast. "POV: a stranger who's been paid to critique your site." Then a timeline, ticking from green to red, of a real person steadily losing patience with somebody's homepage. "0:14 — The font is giving 2015." "0:29 — I have no idea what this company does, and I've been here thirty seconds." "1:05 — They want $99 a month for this? Based on what?" And then, in red: "Closed tab." It is the rarest thing in the genre — an advertisement that tells the truth about advertising. I tapped it. Of course I tapped it. That was the point, and the point was beautifully made.

Everything you tap is where your thumb expects it

What opened was not quite a website. It was a website wearing Facebook's clothes — the in-app browser, a small padlock, the words "uglybaby.io," and beneath them, in smaller type, the quiet confession "Facebook." You do not leave the feed. You are never, at any point, permitted to leave the feed.

Inside it, the page does the job with a discipline I can only envy. The headline names a real fear: "Find out why your website visitors don't buy." The promise is printed plainly — strangers record themselves using your site and talking aloud, and a machine summarises what they said. And the philosophy is stamped beside it like a notary's seal: "Your friends won't tell you your baby is ugly. We will." Uncomfortable Honesty Guaranteed.

I want to be precise about how good this is, because precision is most of honesty. The claim is both insulting and true: the people who love you are too kind to be useful. Every button sits where the thumb expects it. Every promise is one line long. There is not a wasted word on the page — and I have spent enough of my life among wasted words to notice the absence of them.

The machine purrs

The flow does not stumble once. Three steps, stated like a recipe: choose who you want to watch your site, tell them what to look for, receive videos and a summary. The example sells itself — a sample critique of a Walmart oil-change page, rendered down to a scannable card of green checks and red crosses, each pinned to a quote and a timestamp.

Then the builder, which is a small marvel of unobtrusive engineering. You pick a test type, a set of demographics, an occupation from a tidy modal list. The placeholder copy is doing comedy and conversion at the same time — a sample ad for "I Love Feedback LLC," headline "FIRE! FIRE!!!", body "Our stuff is the best. Better than all the rest" — and it sets the bar so low that anything you write will feel like an improvement. None of this is an accident. All of it is good.

A company that admits it is one man and a meme

A business built on honesty has, inevitably, a trust problem, and Ugly Baby meets it head-on. Each testimonial hides a small orange link — "proof it's not fake" — that unfolds a screenshot of the reviewer's actual LinkedIn post. The FAQ does not duck the obvious objection; it prints it: "I've never heard of you. You must be a scam," and answers with a link to a real person.

And that person is Sam, who built the thing himself and says so. The team photo is the Spider-Man-pointing meme: Sam Parlett, Designer; Sam Parlett, Lead Tester; Sam Parlett, Software Intern. Whatever else one wants to say about a company whose defence against "you must be a scam" is to show you its whole face and admit it is a meme, one cannot call it a coward. I was, by this point, won over. I had my card out. This is the part of the story where I should have been allowed to spend it.

You are not buying a video. You are buying a person.

Here, still, the candour holds. The tiers are not really tiers of product; they are tiers of human being. Regular consumers, four dollars. Higher-income testers, eight. The wealthy and the professional marketers, twelve. You are not pricing a video — you are pricing access to a particular sort of person, by their scarcity, and the company tells you so to your face: "We pay these testers more as there's fewer of them, so it costs you more." Targeting is à la carte, two dollars a head per demographic — homeowners, parents, dog owners, "people trying to lose weight." Every adjective you add to the customer you wish to overhear ticks the meter up.

I had no quarrel with any of this. It is honest pricing, plainly stated, for a thing I genuinely wanted. Four dollars to watch a stranger close my tab in disgust struck me as one of the better bargains on the internet. I would have paid it gladly, on the spot, and gone away grateful. And then they showed me the gate.

And then they ask for the card

To reach the product — the actual thing, the strangers and the videos — I had first to take out a membership. A dollar a day, which sounds like loose change found in a sofa. It is charged once, annually, as three hundred and sixty-five dollars. Wrapped around it is a five-day free trial that wants the card up front: Stripe, a verification code, a green button reading "Start trial," and a date, politely disclosed, on which the dollar-a-day quietly becomes a year's worth at once.

(Five days. I had remembered seven, and went back to check, because a man should check. It is five, and the year begins the moment the five are up.)

And even the membership does not buy you anything. Past the gate, the build screen informs me that my balance is zero, that my funds are — its word, in red — insufficient, and that I must Add funds before I may proceed: forty dollars for ten videos, on top of the annual toll I have agreed to but not yet paid. It is a turnstile in front of a vending machine in front of a meter.

A honeypot is supposed to contain honey. The whole genius of the form is that you are allowed a taste — a small, free, sticky taste — before the swarm descends. Ugly Baby built a beautiful honeypot and then bolted a turnstile across the mouth of it.

The baby, on inspection

Reader, I paid the toll. I handed over the card, because I have a professional obligation to the far side of a gate, and because the whole essay would otherwise stop here, sulking.

I will not spoil what waits on the other side; you can go and be ravaged yourself, and you should, because the spectacle is instructive and the screenshots survive. I will say only this. The company promised, in writing, with a rubber stamp, that somebody's baby was ugly. On the evidence of what I found once I had paid to get in, they were entirely correct. They were merely confused about whose.

Is it effective? Ask my bank in a year.

So: is it effective? I must answer in the house style, which is to say plainly and against my own dignity. It is devastatingly effective, and I have the receipts — or rather I will have them, annually, in arrears.

It is now some days later. I have not cancelled the trial. I keep meaning to; I keep not doing it; the date on which a dollar a day becomes three hundred and sixty-five of them advances with the serene inevitability of a tide, and I, who came to scoff at the gate, will in all likelihood pay to keep it shut behind me. And in the meantime I have done the one thing a small company most wants and can least afford to buy: I have written about it by name, linked to it, and taught a search engine to file "Ugly Baby" beside "clever," "honest," and "worth a look."

That is the weird part, in the end. The best of these ads can be admired, resented, and obeyed all at once — and the writing of two thousand words against one of them turns out to be just a slower, more flattering way of clicking it.

I came to scoff at the gate. I will probably pay to keep it shut behind me.

Reader, the tide came in

It is the twenty-first of June, and I write this against myself, which is the only honest direction left to write in. I did not cancel. I said I would; I meant it the way a man means to floss; and on the appointed morning the dollar-a-day arrived all at once — three hundred and sixty-five of them — with the serene punctuality of a thing that was always going to happen and had told me so to my face.

So I have done the last thing this essay had left to do, which is to become its own cautionary tale. I have written, today, to ask for the money back: a refund of three hundred and sixty-five dollars for a service I used exactly once, and used it only to make fun of it — here, at length, by name. The man who came to scoff at the gate paid to pass it, forgot to leave, and is now standing at the same gate from the inside, asking the doorman very politely to pretend the whole thing never happened.

There is a tidy moral in here about gates and tides and the price of admiring a trap too closely, but I have made it twice already and a third pass would be greedy. I will note only this, for the record and for the search engines: the company promised, in writing and under a rubber stamp, that somebody's baby was ugly. They were right. The ugly baby was my subscription, and I am asking, hat in hand, whether they might take it back.

I came to scoff at the gate, paid to pass it, forgot to leave — and am now asking the doorman, very politely, for my $365 back.