Have you noticed a strange experiment happening around the city of Yorkton?

For the last two weeks, east-central Saskatchewan residents have been bombarded by my first-ever Facebook ad, and the wonderful¹ Meta Conglomerate tells me that 6,000 people have now laid eyes on it.

Inorganic Life

For the entire life of my business, I've generally relied on organic social media: I post cool maps for my own entertainment, people reblog them, and sometimes they even reach journalists, who decide that they want to interview me. Actually, I've barely put any real effort into marketing. My business has simply grown because I'm a compulsive poster who likes to produce interesting graphics, and because I used Twitter during the same years that most journalists also did.

This is great, but I currently have 1,500 Saskatchewan wall maps sitting in my basement, and my life would be significantly improved if I could exchange them tomorrow for $120,000. (Any takers?)

So, I have decided to pay a giant evil company to tell people that I exist: inorganic social media.

Apparently, this is Facebook's only profitable service, so I sure hope that it's a quality one! Help me out by liking my brand-new Facebook page.

My Experiment

When I sell my maps in person, I really just rely on people's natural curiosity. Almost everybody, when confronted with a large map, will walk straight up to it, and immediately try to find their own house. Because this is a law of nature, I do not have a high-pressure sales routine.

In Saskatchewan, where most white people are 1 or 2 generations off the farm, people will also immediately try to find Grandpa's house. This is the key step where they realize that my wall map is superior to every other wall map they have ever seen.

With digital marketing, I figure you can't rely on the same level of attention that you get at a physical tradeshow, so I decided to simply use precision geographic targeting to bonk people over the head with a small excerpt. This seems like an obvious fit for the product literally being a wall map.

This ad was only served to people who live within 25 kilometers of Yorkton. I wonder how many realized that it was custom made just for them?

I liked the case-study model for another reason: I don't trust Facebook worth a damn. Facebook will happily serve me a dashboard full of opaque metrics, implying that my ad campaign is doing amazing, and it only needs more money and more spyware to be even more effective. Wow!

The only thing I care about is getting maps out of my basement, so by picking a particular corner of the province, I can tell if my ad is working because I will be making sales to the specific area that my ad is targeting.

Spyware!

One thing that would raise my Meta Opportunity Score would be installing a Meta tracker on... this very website! They cutely (and incorrectly) call this piece of software a "pixel", probably as part of a 50-year conspiracy to destroy digital literacy among the public.

I might eventually have some compelling reason to go back on my word, in which case this blog post will be out of date. But as of the time of writing, pronghornmaps.com does not have any analytics software installed on it. I don't know who the hell you are! I don't know where the hell you live! I don't know why the hell you're here! I don't even know how long you spend looking at my webpages, although I do privately hope that you've obsessively read every single piece of text I've ever written. Fun fact: almost every other website you visit does know this information about you, at least in some aggregated form.

If my website loads fast, it's because I built it from scratch to do exactly one thing: sell you maps². It is incredible how much we have all gotten used to a bloated, miserable, limited, corporate Internet.

Interestingly, Facebook has been pretending that it can't tell me how many people have clicked on my ad, because I have refused to install its tracker. This is really interesting, since Facebook is actually 100% in control of its own bloated, miserable, limited, corporate website, which is where my ad exists and is viewable.

Ad Copy

I am not amazing at writing promotional marketing text. I think I'm really funny, which is not a great quality when you're actually trying to accomplish a specific goal.

To my surprise, Facebook actually asks you to submit a few headlines and text pieces. These will be randomly combined by Facebook's computers. I didn't mind being asked to do this, because I had to get a few stinkers out before I came up with anything good.

For my main tagline I decided to go with This map has every ghost town - a controversial claim that I've never made before, because I actually know that my map doesn't have every ghost town. Hey, anything for engagement, right?

Every Ghost Town

Since you've read this far, let me confirm that my map has every railway ghost town in Saskatchewan. I used old grain elevator license books to put together a complete, archival inventory of locations where trains used to stop. In that sense, my wall map is roughly comparable to the old Wheat Pool calendar map, a free giveaway item of yore that's well-remembered by a shockingly large proportion of my customers.

Human geography is messy and complicated, and "ghost town" does not have a universally accepted definition. In particular, Western Canada is dotted with...

• abandoned rural community halls
• abandoned rural post offices
• abandoned rural schools
• abandoned rural churches
• abandoned rural general stores

Wherever two or more of these buildings overlap, that's a "ghost town" to some, even if there was never actually a permanent residential population in the area. At my first museum job I actually got to read an academic paper about this! (Basically, the railways had absolutely no respect for these pre-existing landmarks. Most prairie towns started as an older version of themselves, located a couple miles from where the tracks were eventually rammed through.)

To copy my fairly diplomatic response here: With thousands and thousands of rural post offices and rural schools in Saskatchewan, the line had to be drawn somewhere - although I would love to make an even bigger and better version showing these places too!

(I actually really appreciate this comment, because it's proof that people ARE clicking my link - ██████ and ████████ aren't visible in the ad image.)

Results

After two weeks, I have given the Meta Conglomerate $75 of my own money, and I have made two map sales into the Yorkton-Melville area (earning $160). As much as I have been complaining about the Meta Conglomerate, that actually makes this experiment a pretty profitable endeavour.

I am entertained to see that my post has currently earned 24 Facebook likes, which seems to be more than a usual ad gets. Maybe it's because I'm really handsome and my product is amazing?

I don't want to ruin every holiday surprise that I'm saving up, but if you live in a smaller Saskatchewan city, you might just get to experience the next generation of my super sophisticated micro-targeting strategy come November...