Facebook global marketing boss: Look back campaign ‘nearly broke the internet’
Facebook’s global marketing boss has given an insight into the success of its recent 10 year look back campaign describing it as the “best piece of marketing we’ve ever done”, and signalled that the social platform would soon move to introduce autoplay on video into the Australian market.
Speaking to Mumbrella after an event hosted by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), Carolyn Everson Facebook’s vice-president of global marketing said the global campaign which celebrated the first decade of Facebook by invitin users to make a create a “movie” of their time on the site had driven record traffic.
“Facebook 10 year look back campaign is the best piece of marketing we’ve ever done because it was in service of the people who use Facebook and reminded them of why they use Facebook,” Everson told Mumbrella. “It nearly broke the internet,” she quipped.
Everson’s remarks came at the end of an address on the future of Facebook in which the marketing supremo told some of Australia’s largest marketers how the company’s future will be built on autoplay videos and multiple apps.“Autovideo play is much anticipated,” said Everson. “We will first launch it (in Australia) for consumers because our belief is that it has to delight. If you are using Facebook then you have to get there and say wow this is an amazing experience.”
In Australia, autoplay on video has been a controversial areas with with some media buying agencies, such as UM, refusing to place preroll ads on publishers who use them arguing that they irritate consumers.
Everson however said the social platform would soon follow the likes of Fairfax Media and News Corp by introducing the automatically played video function into the Australian market.
“What we want is that you have the ability to scroll through and the images burst out and videos play”, said Everson. “It will be around a consumer play and then the opportunity for marketers to have that same experience and that is coming soon as well.”
The Facebook marketing boss also spoke about the importance to the business of apps beyond the platform’s core Facebook app, such as Instagram and Messenger.
“Instagram is one of the things we will hopefully be rolling out in the near future internationally from a monetisation standpoint,” she said.
While on the growth of Facebook’s Messenger function she said: “People just want to be able to communicate one to one, one to few, one to many.”
“We launched Facebook messenger to ensure that when someone wants to communicate with someone they can do it immediately,” she said.
When questioned about a recent drop in usage among teenage users Everson said that the company’s ownership of apps like photo sharing platform Instagram would be importance in maintaining their appeal among teens.
“We’re not worried about it and I’m not saying that as an arrogant answer,” she said. “The reality is the decline is statistically insignificant.”
“We reported it in the interest of transparency… teens are using multiple services and it is very commons for them to have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter on their phone and that’s ok,” she said.
Everson instead pointed to Instagram as a driver of future growth.
“As long as we are capturing a good amount of their time. We also feel good about that because we have Instagram which is one of the fastest growing apps in any market.”
“Would I say that if we didn’t have Instagram? No I’d be like ‘hey, look at that thing over there’ but because it is part of the family and teens are responding incredibly well to it we feel pretty good about it.”
Nic Christensen
Facebook is becoming less used as a social media platform. Grannies use it for petes sake.
“The reality is the decline is statistically insignificant.” MySpace anyone?
”It nearly broke the internet,” she quipped. Please…..
User ID not verified.
Facebook stalk you through dodgy privacy terms for ten years and then show you a video to prove how much they have you by the balls.
User ID not verified.
I’m not sure how “grannies use it” illustrates why Facebook is “less used as a social media platform”. Surely that shows how far reaching the platform now is?
User ID not verified.
no one under 25 uses fb. bahahahaha good-bye fb, you will not be missed
User ID not verified.
Autoplay videos are beyond annoying, especially on news websites. When you browse the homepage and open articles you’re interested in in multiple tabs to read, and each tab starts it’s auto play video, you end up with a nightmare of noise, frantic clicking to each tab to shut off video that you had no intention of watching anyway.
This is particularly bad on a mobile device as you’re using your data to buffer video that you’re not interested in.
User ID not verified.
‘…the social platform would soon move to introduce autoplay on video into the Australian market….’
I’d recommend training Adblockplus to take out Facebook’s autoplay video servers…
But who the fuck uses Facebook? I suspect really old people lacking the technical acumen to train Adblockplus.
User ID not verified.