Facebook Sponsored Stories Turn Your Life into a Commodity

This post originally appeared in our February  issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Facebook’s Stories project has, for all intents and purposes, fulfilled its end goal. Now a fully-fledged, first-of-its-kind ad network named Sponsored Stories, not unrelated to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets/Trends/Accounts, it allows brands to affix their name (and corresponding Facebook page) to an organic, consumer-generated activity in the hopes of populating the well-intentioned promoter’s friend network with a more compelling push to purchase. This approach is infinitely more engaging, and invasive, than any brand-spun messaging could hope to be—and that could be what makes it pure (or evil, depending on your perspective) genius. It raises the inevitable question: Is your privacy even more at stake these days? Let’s look behind the stories.