You might be surprised to find out that what are Meta ads and the platforms these advertisements appear on, are a relatively old concept when compared with some of the relative newcomers such as TikTok.

Believe it or not, what are Meta Ads can actually be traced all the way back to 2004, when in a bid to bolster much-needed funds to get the social media platform off the ground, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg offered companies ad space in the form of what were essentially digital “flyers”, in exchange for payment. Talk about humble beginnings.

Fast forward a few short years to 2007, and the official “Facebook Ads” platform was born. What are Meta ads looked like back then? They consisted mostly of individual profiles for companies to promote products or services. These digital ads were also some of the first to cleverly combine what were known back then as “social actions” from friends lists such as positive reviews or recent purchases, as a kind of endorsement of the companies or products advertised. Pretty clever huh?

In typical Zuckerburg fashion, what are Meta Ads became in their present, revenue-generating, data-driven incarnation over a period of several years and included some notable innovations and acquisitions.

But how Do Meta Ads Work Exactly?

In a nutshell, what are Meta ads function based on data relating to online behavior gathered from billions of user profiles and the information those users interact with on a daily basis.

To the casual observer, that may sound like Meta advertising is little more than basic demographics working to serve up relevant products or services to interested users at the right moment, much in the same way that targeted television advertising does.

However, under the hood what are Meta ads and the ways in which those ads work, tell a much different story of a data-collection machine almost unparalleled in human history.

How Meta Ads Collect and Use Data

When it comes to marketing my products or services, what are Meta ads doing differently than traditional marketing solutions like newspapers, radio or even television?

Remember all that personal information you input when you created your Facebook profile what feels like a lifetime ago? Everything from the city you were born, relationship status, favorite movies, even places you’ve worked at or traveled to all neatly organized into a profile just begging to be targeted with…well, targeted advertising.

But it’s not merely personal details harvested from Facebook (and later, Instagram) profiles that made the platform and the advertising opportunities so lucrative. In the beginning at least, one of the most useful pieces of tech at Zuckerburg’s disposal was a tiny snippet of code called a ‘cookie’. You know all those pop-up windows telling you to click “Agree” on various websites asking you to accept cookies on your browser? Well those are a little different now from what Meta was using back in 2004.

Back in the good old days (or should we say the “wild west” of the early internet) there existed a now defunct method for advertisers to exploit called a “third party cookie” which meant whenever a user clicked on a website that had agreed to allow these so-called cookies to gather information from web browser activity, those tiny bits of code would log literally every website visit, every click, and more alarmingly any credit card information or personal data that got input onto website forms.

It wasn’t long before companies began realizing how much money there was to be made by shamelessly exploiting users through the unethical (and often illegal) use of cookies and the personal data they collected.