Facebook unveils Australian office
The worst kept secret in Australian digital media has been confirmed today, with Facebook announcing that it has opened an Australian operation.
The company said that Paul Borrud will be regional VP, Australia and New Zealand, with a brief to build a local sales team. Borrud was previously responsible for Facebook’s West Coast sales in the US. Prior to Facebook, he worked at Yahoo!, where he was the Director of National Sales for the Western Region. Facebook says it currently has around 5m users in Australia.
According to Mike Murphy, Facebook’s VP of Global Sales: “With its strong user growth and sophisticated digital marketing community, we expect Australia to play a significant role in our global sales strategy.”
“We see a lot of opportunity in the Australian market as advertisers look to online media to promote their brands in favour of the more traditional advertising models,” added Borrud.
Facebook’s Australian operation will only its third outside North America.
The brand’s local PR has been handled by Sydney agency n2n Communications since last year.
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in other news: water is wet, grass is green and youtube now comes in widescreen format.
nice to see the “official” word is out now, though.
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I wonder when the sales team will be unleashed and who will actually be hired? They have kept pushing the launch date forward…
Word is that every decent digital account manager across Sydney has been interviewed by these bunch of clowns only to find they (FB) have almost exhausted every potential Digital AM across the country. They have bastardised the role and its no longer the “elusive role”. Me thinks FB themselves don’t know what they want…and they are scraping the bottom of the barrell….
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This is good that the official word is out.
But to be fair, Facebook have been more visible with a few of the major agencies than some of the so-called ‘Big Five’ in the last six months, and will hit the ground running. It also helped that whilst based on CA they seemed to work 24 hours a day so that they were already competitive with the local publishers.
The Aussie online establishment should be on their toes given Facebook’s size and ambition.
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I don’t think Jouadi got a callback for some reason.
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I’ve requested an imposter profile be removed two weeks ago? does this mean I can expect a little more help from face book now?
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Don’t bother coming to Australia Facebook until you can listen to your users.
Facebook has just removed the most useful function. The Friend Status & Update tabs have been removed for some strange unexplained reason. Each time Facebook makes these backward changes another couple of million users become disillusioned. I predict Facebook will be replaced by a smarter social networking system who listens to their users.
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why aim at australia, the land of sheeps and jocks?
the market is in china and asia, man.
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Err the land of sheep is New Zealand… and WTF is a Jock?
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go back to America nobody will use you soon.
Once people start to realize social networking site are more drama for their life they will abandon that hell hole they call fakebook
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My Facebook keep me log out all the time
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Free speach and free thought is DEAD because [Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy]
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