Ello Ello Ello…What can we learn from The FaceBucket?
The FaceBucket phenomenon raises important issues around the modern tech world’s consumption of mobile video, writes Greg Grimmer, Global COO, Fetch.
Many people – mainly my friends at Google and Microsoft – accuse me of being an acolyte to Facebook.
A lot of this came down to the infamous Zed/Facebook ski trips of the late noughties that I used to run with the now stateside duo of Blake and Hainsey, aka Euro employees 1+2.
However, my fascination of The Book isn’t down to personal friendships or even liking people and events – it goes deeper than that.
I’ve used my MediaTel column to discuss the social network on numerous occasions, not least after my visit to Palo Alto back in 2011.
On this trip I was accompanied by Nicola Mendelsohn – then IPA President, now EMEA President of Facebook – and also Steve Hatch – then CEO of MEC, now MD of Facebook UK. These defections, along with others from the agency world to the world of The Book, have continued to give Facebook a slightly different corporate hue to those of its Silicon Valley neighbours.
Indeed, rumours that the 2011 trip was just a very expensive recruitment drive have never been denied by those in power. I am, however, still waiting for my call up…
But back to that trip – I was speaking with Steve last Friday at the excellent MediaTel breakfast event at the Haymarket Hotel and we were both reminded of the (now ex) head of mobile who stood up and told us that there were no plans to have ads on the mobile newsfeed of Facebook as “We can’t see the consumer benefit.” Fast forward four years and about a billion dollars in ad revenue later and Facebook, its shareholders, many clients and even consumers, have reaped the benefit.
Another ex-agency-now-Facebook employee, the ever ebullient Claire Valoti, also touched on the melding of our video and mobile habits by urging people to think about changing their spending habits now – not next week, not next month, but now.
The trouble with all of this, of course, is the age old problem of vested interest – the status quo is where everyone’s bonus bar is set. Beat last year and all is hunky dory. It’s why the hungriest sales people always end up in the fastest growing media – whether it was radio circa 1990, digital outdoor in 2000 or mobile in 2015. If you have to kick and scream to find the right person in an agency to sell to, you make sure you get a sale once you’ve found them.
But back to Facebook and buckets; Sheryl Sandberg at Advertising Week in New York said if the ALS ice bucket challenge had achieved only one thing, it was that it had taught her mom (sic) how to upload a video to the web.
Whilst the reach and sheer number of Facebuckets have been documented elsewhere at length, the questions it raised for me were more around the modern tech world’s consumption of mobile video. I have tried and failed to find accurate and up-to-date statistics on the viewing of mobile video on either YouTube or Facebook by source of creation.
Almost everyone reading this article will be more likely to want views of professional content – i.e. an ad or branded content or even, perish the thought, programming – rather than the efforts of talented amateurs. And despite Google’s admirable use of digital outdoor trying to make stars of their YouTubers, the feeling I get is they are more like big brother contestants rather than lasting talent – or indeed ‘proper’ UGC such as the ice bucket phenomenon.
The personalised short-form video of the McDonald’s World Cup campaign, the charming French vignettes for Nescafé and even the sociable coke – America is beautiful work – all prove that when you “bake social into the start of the campaign” (Ms. Sandberg’s phrase, not mine) the results can be enormous. But nearly four years after my evangelical trip to Palo Alto it is still the rarity not the norm. So how do we accelerate this?
As my interviewee, Steve Hatch, told me on Friday, if he was running an agency today he’d be investing in talented video motion people. You can keep your programmatic wizards and your uber smart data scientists, we want great storytellers and film makers.
Now the truth is of course that Facebook has more than its fair share of brilliantly talented computer scientists (or engineers as they insist on calling them) but somehow this comment about creative people is what I think makes Facebook stand out from the Silicon Valley crowd. There is still – seven years on from when Blake Chandlee left a good career job at Yahoo to start up Facebook in Europe from a serviced office in Soho Square – a personable streak that runs through Facebook.
‘People over pixels’ is the clarion call for the new Facebook Atlas product and you know what? I sort of believe them.
Now my social team at Fetch, led by the indefatigable Jody Shilliday, may scorn at such a belief as they fight their way through the latest power editor changes or PMD protocols, but they, like the majority of the audience at the conference last week, were left with the feeling that we will use Facebook more and better going forward.
Finally, my return to half-life theories of social networks still looks as defunct as ever when used with Facebook in the room but of course others will continue to try and prise them off their perch.
Amongst the social media elite in Manhattan I was asked at least a dozen times if I was on Ello, the new pretender to the crown.
It has launched amongst much hullaballoo and has a no advertising manifesto no less (an excerpt is below):
Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
In the meantime Facebook launched new video ad formats and brand ads on Instagram at the IAB digital upfronts on Monday.
I know where my money is going.
In fact, as I only half joked on a panel in NYC, the only question with Ello is whether we will be saying goodbye to them before or after Facebook buy them to shut them down.
So you read it here first; Ello to kick the bucket – just make sure it’s not full of ice