Viewpoints facebook for marketers - March 2012

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What Facebook’s New Product Offerings Mean for Marketers March 2012

Neo@Ogilvy Viewpoints | What Facebook’s New Product Offerings Mean for Marketers

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What Facebook’s New Product Offerings Mean for Marketers

Daniel Jeydel

Deepa Iyengar

Mitch Bernstein

Sacha Xavier

Sean McCarthy


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Contents 3 Introduction 4 Details on New Features 8 What This Means 9 Conclusion 9 Resources


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"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services." — Mark Zuckerberg, February 2012 The purpose of Facebook’s Marketing Conference (fMC) was to introduce new products for both desktop and mobile channels.

• Pages relaunched for brands: Mission control for your business on Facebook • Premium Ads: New ad opportunities including Offers and Log-Out • Reach Generator: Ensuring that fans see your stories • Real-time Analytics: New measurement opportunities

In this Neo@Ogilvy Viewpoint, we offer insight on what to expect regarding these specific updates and more importantly, how to think about marketing on Facebook.

Introduction Facebook has a commanding share of the display advertising market, serving more than 32% of display media in 2011 (eMarketer). With an eye to its forthcoming IPO, it makes sense that Facebook would seek to capture the minds and marketing budgets of the advertisers driving its revenue growth. These new products will not replace, but will complement Facebook’s existing advertising portfolio. Looking across our client base, we see a significant portion of our clients actively engaged in social channels, including Facebook. There has been a clear trend towards an increased use of paid, owned and earned vehicles to connect with customers, with clients testing multiple strategies and tactics, and increasing budgets against successful campaigns. This growth has largely been driven by superior targeting abilities and the ability to gather insights that inform, enhance, and supplement other media channels. This last point is crucial, as “Social” has evolved into a cross-channel medium, acting as a link between TV, radio, OOH and all digital channels. Brands are including Facebook page URLs or Twitter hashtags into their overall marketing strategy because they want to build a presence in the places where customers discuss the things that matter in their lives. These latest announcements mark Facebook’s most ambitious attempt yet to help marketers get beyond the framework of a traditional paid advertising unit. Facebook is betting that by encouraging brands to shift from “ads” to quality content and branded storytelling, they will be able to generate more consumer/marketer interactions. This, in turn, will create more value for all involved in the Facebook ecosystem, improving the user experience, stimulating more valuable conversations and, of course, generating increasing revenue streams against one of the largest user bases ever assembled.


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Details on the New Features Pages: The new brand Pages are described as “mission control for your business on Facebook.” Here, a marketer can:

• Announce a new product or news • Begin two-way communication with consumers • Host CRM • Manage and optimize postings and advertising content • View page analytics in real-time

In an effort to streamline the cross-platform user experience and bring brands closer to their fans, Pages are now set up similarly to users’ Facebook Timelines. This change will minimize the commercial aesthetic of brand pages and instead showcase brand stories. Anatomy of a new brand Page incorporating a Timeline:


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Premium Ads: New ad opportunities These ad units are considered by Facebook to be its most impactful ad opportunities. These include placements in:

• News Feed on the homepage and mobile • Right-hand side on the homepage • Log-Out screen


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• News Feed ads – placed within a user’s News Feed o Additional advertising placements on a user’s News Feed complement the existing

right hand column unit and are impactful because the News Feed is the user’s primary touch point. These units are designed to assist brands to better integrate their content within the user’s organic experience.

o According to Facebook internal studies conducted in August 2011, the current premium ads and featured stories on the right-hand side are typically 40% more engaging and 80% more likely to be remembered than all previous offerings.

• Log-Out ads – message users as they log out of their Facebook account o The log-out page is a large impression generator that will create a new revenue

stream for Facebook. Reaching an estimated 37 million users daily, Facebook will now utilize the log-out page to showcase ads to its user base. As proven by Yahoo Mail, the log-off screen provides another option to a user who is open to “surfing.”

• Offer ads – message users with exclusive offers and deals o Much like Google Offers, Living Social and Groupon, Facebook now provides

branded offers of discounts or specials. These offers can be presented as content on the page, as well as promoted through a variety of standard and premium ad campaigns. The social context of these units will make it more likely than completive offers to be shared.


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• Mobile ads – For years, Facebook has developed rich apps for the major operating systems, and recently released a long awaited iPad app, but mobile advertising was not introduced until fMC. Facebook’s new paid mobile offerings include News Feed and Offer placements. Facebook’s mobile ad serving piggybacks on the News Feed advertising rolled out into the display environment as well as the log-out page. Mobile advertising efforts show Facebook’s increasing desire to integrate advertising in the network with user content while keeping the user’s experience top of mind, much like what Apple did for mobile operating systems.

Reach Generator: Ensuring that fans see your stories • Facebook’s Reach generator guarantees to reach 75% of a brand’s fans each month and an

estimated 50% of fans via exposure to the sponsored story on the homepage across desktop and mobile.

• Reach Generator, however, does not take into account frequency of visits by user, brand spend, share of voice, eye cognition research or several other factors included in media analytics. This feature is not available at all levels of spend and the minimum has not been highlighted.

Sample Reach Generator tactic:

Real-Time Analytics: New measurement opportunities Many marketers, including Neo, have been lobbying Facebook to improve its analytics offering. Platform measurement will now include real-time statistics on impressions, feedback and reach, while user demographics will be updated every fifteen minutes, allowing marketers to move with more agility and precision. We’ll have to wait and see whether this data is portable beyond the Facebook environment, but there will be plenty of new ways to analyze and optimize the impact of ongoing activity. For the curious, Facebook has already launched a tutorial including ways that you can use this new tool. This link points to http://www.learnpageinsights.com/


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What this means: As we consider the implications of these changes, the principle takeaway is the blurring of paid, owned and earned media. Several presenters repeated the mantra that “ads are good, stories are better.” This makes content more important than ever, with Featured Stories designed to personify brands and Timelines created to curate the content. Marketers will need to start with engaging content, rather than the traditional headline/image/copy ads that dominate existing Marketplace offerings. Just as consumers can “like” brands, marketers will be able to respond with more customized messaging. This means drawing a connection to existing CRM programs, so that increased Facebook activity contributes to a more complete customer understanding. For many of our clients, this will accelerate the need for multiple functions or departments to work closely together. In many cases the person responsible for creating a story is different from the person responsible for maximizing distribution. Similarly, the different agencies and partners (whether that’s creative, media, PR, search or ad operations) will need to be on the same page to get the most out of granular content. One of the ways that Neo is already addressing these changes is through active participation in the recently launched social@Ogilvy practice, which brings social experts from a variety of disciplines into cross functional teams. For more information on this approach, visit https://social.ogilvy.com/expertise/what-is-socialogilvy.


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The changes that were announced at fMC will have implications far beyond the specific products that were mentioned above. Companies with products based on the Facebook API are already repositioning existing offerings and placing bets on new ways to reach consumers. Buddy Media just announced the acquisition of Brighter Option to help manage owned and paid campaigns. Social marketing software company GraphEffect is already promoting a page ranking tool called StoryBoost to optimize “owned” posts for Featured Stories. According to GraphEffect Marketing Director Alex Press, “Facebook’s new features further allow marketers to leverage earned and owned amplification from their paid efforts. We expect that higher levels of transparency will draw the curtain back on arbitrage models. This will certainly favor marketers and agencies that are comfortable managing self service, versus managed service campaigns.” Conclusion At the end of the day, Facebook is trying to encourage advertisers to connect with customers in similar ways that users connect with one another. By centering new ad products around storytelling and giving marketers more powerful tools to curate and distribute compelling content, these new products will blur the lines between paid, earned and owned media. We encourage our clients to actively test these new products, just as they would test any new publisher or technology. Experiment ways to embed compelling calls to action within content that isn’t single-mindedly sales-oriented. Develop multiple creative iterations that can generate learnings. Measure which types of stories generate first and second generation shares. And don’t spam your fans!

Resources Facebook Marketing Conference, www.facebook.com/business/fmc, February 2012 eMarketer, “Revenue Gains Push Facebook to Top of US Display Ad Market” February 2012


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_________________________________________________________ What Facebook’s New Product Offerings Mean for Marketers Written by Daniel Jeydel, Deepa Iyengar, Mitch Bernstein, Sacha Xavier, Sean McCarthy Published by Neo@Ogilvy For the latest industry news, trends and happenings, follow us on Twitter at @neo_Ogilvy. For more information, please contact: Rachel Serton [email protected] 212-259-5289

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Viewpoints facebook for marketers - March 2012