Facebook's Weird New 'Home' Ad Triggers Wave Of Negative Reaction

Facebook's new ad for Facebook Home is very, very strange, and just like a previous TV commercial ("Chairs") it's attracting a lot of attention.

But perhaps not the attention Facebook hoped for.

The ad, titled "Airplane," shows a man boarding a plane, and as he looks at the photos on his Facebook Home phone screen, they are acted out in real life around him. Two guys sunbathe in the overhead compartments; a drag queen bursts out of the drinks cart; and a couple of cats walk across the heads of neighboring passengers. A flight attendant asks the man to shut his phone down for takeoff, and he momentarily disobeys the request before hitting the "off" button.

On the Facebook page the company created for the ad, the comments are almost uniformly negative. Here are some sample comments:

64,000 people have liked the ad, or the comments underneath it.

The ad's intent seems to be to show that having Facebook Home means that no matter where you are, you'll get all the wonderful, unadulterated weirdness of Facebook.

But it also gives the odd impression that Facebook Home will turn your life into a visual clown car, with an endless stream of trivia spewing randomly from your phone.

The ad was created by agency Wieden + Kennedy, which also did "Chairs." Facebook spends very little money on TV advertising — why should it, it's owns its own audience of 1 billion people after all — and thus needs its ads to go viral in free online video media.

Ads generally don't go viral unless they're very unusual. So what's happening here is that Facebook is being deliberately weird in order to get your attention.

Here's the ad: