What’s With Memory Lane’s Facebook Ad Strategy?

My old high school (and junior high) yearbooks are sitting in a bin in my storage shed, underneath several other bins of junk. So when I saw this ad for Yearbookarchives.com on Facebook, I figured I’d check it out.

The link pointed to Yearbookarchives.com all right. But it had the look and feel of being on Classmates.com. And of course, one click ay yearbookArchives.com brought me directly to a Classmates.com registration page.

And with that, I lost faith in Facebook ads. And I also thought, maybe this was Classmates.com’s revenge on Facebook for stealing away all its business.

Classmates (recently rebranded as Memory Lane, though it still owns Classmates.com) was huge even as MySpace.com grew in popularity. But Classmates also allegedly deceived consumers into becoming paid members by telling them high school buddies and the like were trying to get in touch with them. And once consumers gave Classmates a credit card number, it was very difficult to cancel, according to this 2006 PCWorld study.

And at about that same time, consumers found out they could get back in touch with their classmates free – both hassle and monetary – by signing up for Facebook.

So it’s kind of ironic that Classmates – which relaunched this spring as MemoryLane.com and does have some of these Yearbookarchives.com ads pointing to its new URL – is being deceitful with its Facebook ad campaign.

As brand interest in Facebook ads is building, and Facebook is proving its worth as a targeted ads vehicle, Classmates/Memory Lane has thrown a wrench of distrust in the engine. We’re in an age where phishing scams are targeting even the most innocuous sites (I found one last week while doing a Google image search), and consumers getting a bait-and-switch are going to lose their faith in Facebook ads.