The scariest thing this Halloween wasn't a ghost or a goblin. It was the interface holding my ad budget.
Meta Business Suite this year is a haunted house where nothing works quite right: glitchy screens, buttons that play tricks, and a payment flow so strange my own bank flagged it as fraud. For a platform whose entire business is taking money from businesses, you'd think verifying users and getting paid would be the two rooms with the lights on. They're calling this their year of efficiency. From inside the maze, it reads as the year of frustration.
Which raises the horror-movie question every small advertiser eventually faces: keep trudging deeper, or turn back? Google, blessedly, is working exactly as it should — at least someone left the lights on — and there's a real case for redirecting budget toward partnerships that feel human: people who actually connect with the audiences I'm trying to reach.
But the glitches also got me imagining what comes after all of this. Picture typing: "Find a gift for Joe, who my daughter's bringing home for Christmas. I know almost nothing about him except he owns a Golden Retriever and probably drinks coffee." And the right product — maybe mine — simply appears, curated for Joe and his Golden. No haunted dashboards, no fraud flags. Commerce that works like a good question getting a good answer. Whoever builds that will deserve every business that flees the maze for it.
Until then: experimenting continues, budget follows whatever's least haunted, and here's hoping business tools stop feeling like Halloween every day.
Comments