Why did Facebook reject our ad? Jealousy?

UPDATE 10/17: We tried to revert the ad’s landing page to the original URL (our Facebook page) and got the same rejection notice.

Wow, a funny thing happened today. Facebook rejected this ad promoting Blogads.com’s Facebook page:

We’d already been running the ad on Facebook for over a year, and 694 people had clicked through. Facebook only rejected our ad when we tried to update the landing page URL. Nothing too crazy.

Here’s what Facebook told us about our ad on their site:

The content of your ad or Sponsored Story does not adequately reflect the product or service advertised.

Doesn’t it, Facebook? Here’s what some Facebook users think of the ad:

What’s the ad’s point, beyond being an obscurely high-brow play on René Magritte‘s much referenced painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe?

Well, for our freedom-fry loving friends, the ad translates as “This is not a blogad… here’s the real thing.” And if you click, you arrive on Blogads’ Facebook page.

Which is our way-meta way of pointing out that Blogads originated — way back in 2002 — the very format of image + text that Facebook relies on today. We created the ad type hoping that the combination of image and text would inspire advertisers to create ads with more meaning, content and humor than the horizontal image-only ads that then dominated the market. Too bad there’s no room for playful content now in Facebook’s ad system.

For you history majors, this blogad (bought by campaign manager Mark Nickolas on TalkingPointsMemo) is from the same month that Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook:

Oh well. Today blogads continue to do great things, like allowing multiple text links and easy video integration. Someday maybe we can buy an ad poking fun at Facebook’s adoption of those features too.

Has Facebook rejected your text plus image ad? Try buying the original social media ad.