Not long ago, Facebook seemed disinterested in helping agencies, but times have changed. It’s as if they want more ad revenue or something
As recently as 2010, Facebook and ad agencies weren’t very good friends.
Acquaintances, sure. They knew the same people and had the same interests. The marketing set was eager to use the popular social platform to get branding in front of consumers, and Facebook was certainly happy to cash cheques from brands. But this wasn’t happening as often as you’d think because, ironically, the communications industry and the world’s most popular communication platform weren’t actually communicating all that well.
Burger King’s 2009 Whopper Sacrifice, for example, is seen as one of the first great Facebook campaigns. More than 80,000 people used the Sacrifice app to unfriend more than 230,000 people in exchange for free Whoppers. It was news-worthy, controversial and very popular right up until Facebook killed it one week after launch. The app notified people when they were unfriended in favour of fast food—a violation of privacy expectations, according to the company.
That a Facebook “success story” lasted but a week—and was killed by a policy issue that could have been avoided with a pre-launch meeting—shows how weak the lines of communications were between medium and messengers.
“Facebook was very difficult to deal with, not only on the communication end, but the development end,” says Dario Meli, co-CEO of Invoke, a digital agency with offices in Vancouver and New York. “We’d be working on a project and suddenly something would stop working. We’d do all this code review to figure out what we did wrong, but actually Facebook had modified how [their system] worked. We only found out because a thousand other developers had the exact same problem at the same time.
“We referred to [Facebook] as a walled garden laced with land mines. It was pretty to look at, but navigating it was dangerous.”
Meli’s experience was not unique. Jamie Garratt’s agency Idea Rebel worked on numerous Facebook campaigns for big digital spenders (EA, Aritzia, WestJet), but prior to 2011, talking to Facebook was “a nightmare.”
“We’d be constantly barking to get their attention,” Garratt says. A campaign to get video-game fans to vote on the cover of a football game was killed because the program was so popular, Facebook assumed the high volume of sharing meant it was all spam.
But starting last year, the social platform suddenly started returning agency phone calls. It’s investing significantly in hiring outreach staff, enhancing metrics and developing platforms for the communications sector. If past experience has prevented you from exploring your options on the world’s largest online social platform, it may be time to take another look.
Something’s changed. Though Facebook would no doubt deny it, this could have something to do with its IPO. “The thing to take away isn’t that we don’t care [about business],” founder Mark Zuckerberg told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. “People for years were asking me why aren’t we trying to make more money. I would say I’m trying to build a business for the long term.”
But with public investors looking for quarterly returns, it follows that Facebook is going to be a lot more interested in making money and selling more ads. While its filings indicate its revenue growth is slowing, Wedbush Securities analyst Lou Kerner says revenues could exceed $5 billion if the company makes a concerted effort to win more share of display advertising. It has chosen agencies as the advocates of this business push.
“Around the world, we had [marketers] coming forward, saying ‘help us.’ But then we’d sit down with their agencies, and they’d tell us ‘we don’t know how to do that,’” said Blake Chandlee, Facebook’s vice-president, global agencies and clients. Talking to Marketing last year, he said, “We [had] to shift our approach to the market and focus on the agencies.”
This has meant significant change. At the top-most levels of the industry, Facebook invited multinational holding companies to sit with major brands on an exclusive council. Currently steered by Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice-president of global ad sales, membership will rotate annually. Only global creative directors and CEOs are welcome here, so conversations about better collaboration remain high-level. But the social platform has also hired executives such as Sarah Personette, director of global agency relationships, to specifically reach out to those who had complained for so long.
“We went through a very transformative period,” Personette says. “We understood that in order for us to be a very lean, mean company, it is very critical that agencies become the advocates, curators and designers for brands on the platform.”
Personette, a former media agency executive with Starcom, and her team have the difficult task of getting agencies buying media (display ads, sponsored stories) on a platform many regard as free media first and a paid platform second, if at all.
Not surprisingly, she’s making the pitch to agencies with numbers. For example: “When you put a post on your page, you only get 10% to 20% of your fan base to see that post. If you want to scale what you’re communicating to your fan base, it’s critical you’re leveraging ads.” She says socially backed paid ads, on the other hand, score 68% in ad recall, and consumers who see them are four times more likely to purchase.
The result of this new push is still a work in progress as Facebook builds its outreach team (mostly in the U.S.). But agencies are noticing an improvement.
“In the past year, [Facebook] has done a much better job at managing agencies and clients directly,” says Trevor Carr, president at Vancouver’s Noise Digital, which often develops client Facebook projects. “They’re much more willing to service agencies and help them succeed.”
Before the agency epiphany, Carr’s calls to Facebook would end up with a seemingly generic pool of staffers (“one step above a call centre,” says Carr). He now works with a “client partner,” Alison Twiner, who is based locally in Vancouver. “She’s been fantastic, a great support for us and a facilitator.”
Idea Rebel’s Garratt says the improved communication has made Facebook a far more stable platform for campaigns, and Invoke’s Meli has likewise seen a vast improvement. While developing a project for NBC Universal, Facebook representatives were present at Meli’s client meetings to facilitate a smooth build.
Garratt says Canadian client partners seem to need more time getting approvals than American ones, a pattern he’s noticed serving clients from offices in both countries. But despite this, the Canadian industry generally sees the step towards a more one-on-one relationship as a positive one. After all, Canuck agencies are used to waiting for U.S. approvals already with so many brands managed stateside.
However, while Noise, Invoke and agencies of their weight (read: serving clients with big digital budgets) may get an assigned client partner, smaller or less-proven agencies are still left with less personal interactions. For this broader market, Facebook launched its Studio platform, a Facebook-within-Facebook just for agencies to share case studies and creative work. Posted work can be “liked,” with the most popular finding their way to a featured “gallery” section.
Studio was first pitched as a share-and-learn proposition in March 2011. By letting the industry post Facebook campaigns and results, it would illustrate how its various marketing tools could be used, says Personette.
Several Canadian agencies now using it say there is a benefit to seeing what the shop across the street is doing, but there’s reason to try it beyond industry altruism.
“Once campaigns run their course, they often vanish,” Meli says. “Studio allows you to house this information in a single space. It adds validation that it’s on Facebook’s URL… Facebook is so ubiquitous. Everybody’s on it.”
Also, Studio is running its first award program, with entries set to be judged by top-tier agency talent such as JWT’s Jeff Benjamin, Leo Burnett’s Susan Credle and Y&R’s David Sable. It was smart of the company to lure in the creative set with the promise of trophies, giving more focus to what had been a somewhat passive site for posting and reading.
Michael Milardo, Noise’s creative director, says that without the award, the agency wouldn’t have bothered posting work. But while most award shows are getting better at identifying quality social media work, the Facebook award is “the pure-play, social media-specific award given by the people who basically built that into the empire it is. There is a certain prestige given to the award because of that.”
Overall, Facebook’s overtures have been a success by the most important metric: sales. All of our agency sources agreed that clients had spent more money since the agency epiphany, and that campaigns have been much more successful.
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