Facebook’s Carolyn Everson, its vice president of global marketing solutions, put on an impressive display before the admen at the Cannes Lions festival on Wednesday, addressing many of the issues about which marketers have been concerned.
As well as announcing a new “client council” to guide Facebook’s monetisation strategy, ahead of its expected initial public offering next year, Ms Everson talked about new ad formats, acknowledged some of the company’s shortcomings in providing metrics and accessibility to its “small” staff, and argued that Facebook – despite its modest, unintrusive ad formats – was a great platform for creativity.
“Facebook is one of the most incredible platforms for creativity out there – I don’t want you to think about it as just a display ad,” she told the Don Drapers in the audience. Facebook won’t do homepage takeovers (in spite of being asked repeatedly to do so) but it is a medium for “telling stories”, she said.
“Brands have asked us a lot: ‘Is this really about display advertising? Do I just buy ads on Facebook?’ When they ask that question I realise we have so much education to do.”
Ms Everson made one of the most impressive pitches I’ve seen at Cannes in four years of covering the Lions.
She showed off case studies from the likes of JetBlue, Samsung and Nike, whose “Write the Future” campaign saw 2.5bn “ad views”. In a canned video, one of Nike’s digital marketing folk called Facebook’s Like button “the most valuable thing on the internet”.
But in a humble moment (Facebook has in the past been accused of arrogance by agencies) Ms Everson admitted that putting harder figures than these around the returns from Facebook campaigns is something the company needs to improve.
“The measurement has to go beyond the click. That is a very 10-year-old display-ad-oriented model. It is much more than that. We need to be measuring brand affinity, awareness, intent to purchase.”
But if not the click, is it the fan that’s important? Surprisingly not:
“The basic level [of marketing on Facebook] is getting your page and getting fans. I think some brands are probably over-obsessed with fans and just focus on numbers of fans. As an industry we need to move away from that. Fans are totally important, of course they are – you want to know people who love your brand. But there’s more – people expect more from a brand, they want to have a conversation.”
As Facebook works with its client council and other ad agencies to figure all this out, Ms Everson reassured Cannes delegates that it would not go into competition with them, a criticism sometimes levelled at arch-rival Google:
“We are not going to be building an in-house agency. We are not going to compete with you. One of our mantras is to stay small. We want to empower you.”
If Facebook can live up to the expectations set by Ms Everson, it could be very empowering for both the company and its clients.
