Facebook gets temporary leadership after sudden departure of MD Stephen Scheeler
Facebook Australia is under temporary local leadership following the abrupt departure of Stephen Scheeler, who was elevated to the role in 2015.
Facebook seeking a new Australian MD after the departure of Stephen Scheeler
It is understood Facebook’s group industry director, Paul McCrory, will fill the role while the social media giant conducts an internal and external search for a replacement.
Asked about Scheeler’s sudden departure, a spokesperson for Facebook said: “We confirm that Stephen Scheeler is no longer with the company”.
Scheeler was promoted to the role of MD in August 2015 after joining the Australian arm of the business in 2013.
He previously held a wide range of roles with a diverse group of companies including Deloitte, Subaru, Westfield and Lion.
His sudden departure came the same week Mumbrella revealed a major decline in Facebook’s video stream numbers after a reporting error by Nielsen was uncovered.
Nielsen had identified the error early in 2016 and provided guidance notes to media buyers in its Digital Media Landscape Reports until it introduced a fix in October.
After introducing the fix reported streams on Facebook dropped 94%.
The adjustment to the Nielsen numbers also came after Facebook’s unrelated admission that it had overestimated video views in the US.
Last week, Mumbrella also revealed that data from Standard Media Index (SMI) showed spending targeted specifically at video on Facebook dropped 32.4% in the past three months of 2016 compared with the same period in 2015, while spending on YouTube grew 11.9% during the same period.
By comparison, video spending for the previous three months period had risen by 30% for Facebook.
The errors both on Facebook’s side and Nielsen’s continue to raise major questions about the transparency of digital measurement and the ability of third party auditing to deliver meaningful measurement to marketers.
While Facebook conducts a search for new Australian leadership, in the US it has confirmed it will open itself to third party auditing by the Media Rating Council.
In a note released on its blog Facebook pledged “accountability and new choices for marketers”.
“We want to provide transparency, choice and accountability,” the company said.
“Our verification partners will receive more detailed information about ad impressions on Facebook and Instagram to help provide marketers with better insights. We will start providing specific in-view and duration data for display ads.”
Among measures Facebook will share with verification partners will be the milliseconds an ad was on screen, the milliseconds 50% of an ad was on screen and the milliseconds 100% of an ad was onscreen.
In the wake of questions over its video ads, Facebook has also created new choices for video buying.
These include:
- Completed-view buying: advertisers will pay only for video ads that have been viewed in its entirety, for any duration up to 10 seconds.
- Two-second buying: compliant with the MRC video standard, where at least 50% of an ad’s pixels are in-view for two continuous seconds or longer.
- Sound-on buying: advertisers will have the ability to buy sound-on video ads.
“We’ve been working closely with marketers to understand their measurement needs on key topics such as reach, attribution, audience demographics, brand lift, offline sales and mobile app measurement,” Facebook said.
“Independent verification continues to expand and we now have 24 global third-party measurement partners so marketers can work with their preferred vendor.”
There is no link to this departure and the measurement issues. It is a global platform so it would make no sense to make a move on a regional MD.
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I don’t think this departure has anything to do with the numbers…I think you might find (if you dig a little deeper) there has been a few ‘sudden’ departures lately. Might have something to do with internal culture…possibly even the big B word #justsaying.
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