Work at McDonald's Via Facebook - The New Gen-Y Job Hunt

Facebook has been making some big headway in how they help companies promote jobs to Gen-Y. Recently they teamed up with Career Builder (hat tip Cheezhead) to bring in non Beacon style ads to showcase Career Builder positions. Now with some success behind Facebook Targeted Advertising, I am seeing more and more companies pop up in my NewsFeed offering job opportunities. The one I saw today was from McDonald's. The ad was showcasing a McDonald's super marketer and that's what I claim to be. I think this is how they targeted me. That's just my initial guess as that is how the ads are distributed and targeted. (McDonald's or your advertising company, please talk to me about this!!!)

Barring my curiosity, I clicked on the ad to see what McDonald's had to say and how they thought it was more important to show me an ad for a job opportunity vs. a BigMac. Here is the ad:


Cool ad campaign. Play on the fact that I wish to take over the world and market products for a super huge company. Next comes the Facebook landing page.

Pretty sweet corporate Facebook group. The group also boasts over 1,000 members and shows me the info I need if I happened to be interested in a position with Mickey D's. So, let's play along and assume I'm interested. There is a link right below this screenshot that takes you here:

This is probably one of the most Gen-Y friendly job site landing pages I have ever seen for a company. Very sleek and clean. I see the job I want and I click it.

Overall, I give McDonald's an A for effort and execution. It was easy to navigate and within 3 clicks I was applying to my dream job. Well, not exactly, but you get my point.

As Facebook really gets into their targeted marketing approach, I think we are going to be able to see more and more companies get their message across to the people that are genuinely interested (or more prone to interest) than with programs like Adwords.

I can see bands having Digital Download ads that target country fans who list Taylor Swift as their music preference.

My hope is that application data can also be used to target advertising demographics. Especially in the case of musicians. If we can gather Pandora and iLike and Last.FM data from applications on user pages we can really get in and target the people that will convert higher and show a greater return on our marketing investment.

So McDonald's (er, Facebook's advertising platform) read the marketing text somewhere on my Facebook page, that's great. I have no problem seeing their ad. Even though I am not applying for their position, they are getting some linkbait and blog world mentions for the campaign inadvertently. Even if they never thought of it that way, I hope they get Google Alerts and see the possibilities.

Talk to you kids soon.

-Greg Rollett