How many of you weep into your downy pillows because Facebook limits you to 5,000 friends?
After all, you know that pretty much everyone you come into contact with loves you with truth, madness, and untold depth. Even the lovers you mistreat want to hang on your every happening.
You will feel giddy, then, that Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wants to help you and your unparalleled loveliness. In an interview with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, Ms. Sandberg promised an era of extended familiarity.
Speaking of the 5,000-friend limit and the need to expand it, she said: "I'm not going to give you a specific date, but I will reinforce the message that this is coming, and more importantly tell you why we think this is important. Because you have these friend requests, because people genuinely want to hear from you and genuinely want to connect with you...We look forward to you having 80,000 friends...100,000 friends."
Perhaps I could unblur the lines a little? Ms. Sandberg genuinely needs the social network to make money and genuinely thinks that you could make it happen.
The people Facebook needs to convince--clients and their ad agencies--have always succumbed to the lure of numbers. The bigger the number, the more attractive it seems to be. So please hold my hand--don't squeeze, now--and enter Facebook Futureworld just for an instant.
Facebook finds a way for people to surround themselves with their most beloved 100,000. Then it wanders along to ad agencies and offers parcels of, oh, let's call it psychographic engagement media. (It's my job to make things up.)
The Facebook sales chappie or chapess says to the agency: "Now look, here we have 100,000 folks who all stem from your perfect target. And we mean perfect: 28 years old, male. With income more disposable than paper bags and an education more essential than cloth napkins at a dinner party."
Now perhaps the Facebook sales folks have identified another 10, 20, perhaps 100 immensely connected people in the same target. Before your lo can beget a behold, we're talking millions. Yes, nice, big numbers.
You'll be thinking that there must be a twist. Well, I have one here. (Again, it's my job to make things up.) Those who have amassed 100,000 human beings on their online fireside rug can, genuinely, be offered significant incentives to push products to their 100,000 nearest and dearest.
It's that numbers thing again. There's safety in them. And, you know, there's some sense of bigness. You think that Facebookers wouldn't do it? Oh, I suspect that when we start operating with a little scale, their venal tendencies might burst through like a conference attendee espying a free buffet.
I only make all of this up because there hasn't been too much synergy yet between Facebook and ad agencies. It isn't just the absurd defriending of Burger King's brilliant Whopper sacrifice promotion. Someone at a very important ad agency recently told me of a meeting with a Facebook sales chappie.
The agency was interested in finding new and creative ways to use the site on behalf of its very big clients. The sales chappie, according to the agency folks (who, in this instance, I trust, respect, know and, strangely, like), had his mind set on selling a specific space on a specific page. Almost as if he was selling magazine space to Prada. And he'd flown in specially for the meeting from another city, another temperature altogether, far, far away.
The impression left was that Facebook wants to sell a little like old-fashioned media has always tended to sell: mechanically, by numbers.
Facebook's achievements are already immense. But it is extremely difficult for all concerned to get their crania around selling ads on a site where those who use it don't actually want or need to see ads. A site where they go, in many ways, to actively get away from the commercial world in order to focus on their own vast personal wants and needs. (Disclosure: I often include ideas for using Facebook as part of my client presentations. It is not a simple thing.)
But Ms. Sandberg made an even more important statement in her interview with TechCrunch: "We really believe in enabling people to be their authentic selves on the Web."
So just imagine if she can persuade you to sell to 100,000 people while being your authentic self. Powerful, no? Genuinely.
At a conference of fortunate brainstormers today, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg said something interesting:
"More than 90 percent (of marketing dollars) spent in the world are not in direct, but in brand, and that's (about) generating awareness."
Perhaps I've sat in one meeting too many (there are those who would say it's around one thousand too many), but this description of a separation of powers between direct and brand I have heard once too often, thank you.
This world view is of 90 percent of all advertising money being spent on saying "Hello, here I am" and 10 percent on securing a sale.
It's a world view of real people out there pointing their noses at advertising, staring in rapt awareness at a brand ad and muttering:
"Hmm. Thank you for making me aware about that product with your interesting and expensive brand ad. I can't wait for the direct response ad to come along so that I can feel sufficiently moved to actually buy the product."
100 percent of all advertising is direct.
Any piece of advertising you see or hear is attempting to create a direct effect.
It's just that some advertisers have found success with directly rational appeals and others with more directly emotional insidiousness. (What is the rational appeal of Dr. Pepper? Please discuss.)
This ad was stuck to a banana. Is it brand or is it direct?
(Credit: sh1mmer)We do a lot of purchasing (and other decision making, for that matter) at the instigation of our weird and irritating inner selves.
It's quite surprising (at least to those in the discipline that used to be called direct response) how many supposedly emotional ads make people buy the product the next day. And again the day after that.
Is a so-called brand ad that has a URL at the end still a brand ad? Or has it seeped into the uncreative, ugly nether regions of direct salesmanship?
The supposed chasm between direct rational selling and direct emotional selling (which always has more than a sprinkle of rationality) probably stems from a time before the telephone.
Or from a culture, such as the British, which dominated advertising creativity by looking down upon commerce and genuine human feeling (the latter was deemed "schmaltz" and left entirely to the US), but looked reverently up at wit and humor.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to do funny ads. By everyone, I mean creatives who thought funny was a passport to sex and riches. (they tended to be more successful with the former)
What Sheryl Sandberg was admitting today is that in order to make money out of Facebook she can't run anything that resembles funny (or not) TV advertising.
But equally, social networks, which have a strong emotional character, are outraged to apoplexy when they see something that looks remarkably like one of those revolutionary cleaning liquid ads on QVC.
A friend told me the other day that she saw an ad for a revolutionary green tea on her Facebook page that identified her by her sex and age and said something like: "36 and feeling chubby?"
Please imagine what kind of direct, um, brand emotions that ad might have released.
Facebook is torn between interrupting its members in a way they will tolerate or even applaud and a medium, the Web, that doesn't rely on advertising for its existence.
The Web is personal. Even when it's social. It's a medium for the masses, but not a mass-medium.
Real people make Web-based decisions daily about how they want to be seen, what they want to do, what they want to buy and how.
For any advertiser, this is a particularly pungent purgatory.
In essence, Facebook should be the place where advertisers cast aside terms such as 'brand' and 'direct' and re-invent what constitutes an ad. An ad that sells.
In a medium based on the personal and on relationships, you just can't talk AT people any more.
But brands still want to be deeply involved in any place they can find more than one person at any given time. It's something to do with money.
Of course, by setting her strategy for growth rather than for monetization, Ms. Sandberg is acknowledging that Facebook is buying time to find some way to work this out.
As directly and in as brand-appropriate a way as possible.
- prev
- 1
- next
