Hasta La Creative!

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital-related news. What people are talking about today: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged a big failing at the company, the fact that it was possible to target ads at people with anti-Semitic or racist interests. “The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options was totally inappropriate and a fail on our part,” Sandberg wrote in a blog post. (Read a thorough take on this topic by Ad Age’s Garett Sloane.) To fix things, Sandberg said, Facebook is “adding more human review and oversight to our automated processes.” She didn’t give details on how that human review would work, or how many staff members would be on the team. The whole humans vs. algorithms debate is at the heart of so many of Facebook’s problems right now, including the whole uproar over fake news. The company needs to get the balance right.

Trump’s wall

There’s more news about Facebook ads. President Trump is reportedly using targeted Facebook ads to reassure supporters that he really will get a wall built on the Mexican border. One such ad from his campaign, as Buzzfeed reports, asks for donations after proclaiming: “WE WILL BUILD A WALL (NOT A FENCE) ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES…” What’s interesting is that the president’s exact stance on the border wall has been confusing lately, and the targeted digital ads send a different, much clearer message to his base than his public proclamations do. You can’t look the ads up, so they’re not out in the open. “When the president sends one subset of the population a message that the rest of the population can’t seeespecially one that’s at odds with realityit feels like a fundamental failure of government transparency,” Wired writes. The word “transparency” is popping up a lot lately. The internet was supposed to put everything out in the open. Things didn’t go quite as planned.

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