I have seen the future and I like it…

Fresh from Facebook HQ, Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, is impressed by the vision, ambition and pace of the Facebook juggernaut, and by its slogan ‘Fail Harder’ – a statement of belief that is perhaps missing from current UK advertising culture in 2011…

Two weeks ago, I was in Palo Alto – Facebook HQ, deep in the Silicon Valley of North California.

I was among a dozen or so lucky UK agency types (we were grandly called “influencers” – which led to lots of English ‘under the influencers’ joshing) who were invited out to Facebook to give them a better understanding of what UK agencies and their clients wanted from the social network.

Well that was how it was pitched. It was supposed to be a dialogue between UK agency heads and senior management at the world’s most fashionable and talked about brand.

However, for the first time in my agency life, the boisterous, self assured, impetuous bunch who traditionally make up the upper echelons of UK advertising agencies were dumbstruck by the intelligence, drive and ambition of the mainly twenty-something Facebookers put in front of us.

The ubiquitous Hainsey, head of Facebook UK, had bravely selected both media and creative agency heads and thrown them together into a lions den of big brained billionaires… and the gamble paid off. There were no holding company politics, no media/creative divide, just a group of people who quickly became determined to make sure the agency world can deliver ‘Social’ to their clients.

I, as many of you my dear readers will testify, have been a fan of The Book since its early inception and indeed have used my MediaTel column to talk about the many pros, some misunderstood cons and the general soar away success story of Mark Zuckerbergs $76 billion valued baby (as of today).

Others have been more sceptical indeed – it was only in January this year that BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas and I had a spat at the MediaTel Year Ahead event about the Facebook business model and his perceived lack of knowledge of their $2 billion of revenues in 2010, which still show no sign of slowing.

However, most of this naïve optimism (on my behalf at least) has not been centered around brand usage and ad revenues but around three aspects of consumer usage and Facebook’s seemingly uncontrollable march across;

• Demographics (three generations of one family as users is now commonplace in the USA)
• Country boundaries (Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook, talked to us with power and emotion about Facebook’s role in the recent overthrow of the Egyptian dictatorship)
• Functionality (the seamless inclusion of photos, chat, messages and other previously stand alone applications with equal take up)

Our three days in California (it rained every day btw) were spent underlining the consumer success story. Reminders from the preposterously bright engineers we met accentuated the fact that Facebook would ALWAYS be designed with consumer usability in mind.

But moreover we were there to talk not about how brands could use Facebook, but how communication should and will change because of the effect that Facebook and other web 2.0 platforms are having on not just media consumption but life itself.

Sheryl had a neat phrase for this brand behaviour, which all of us UK types leapt upon and no doubt will begin to infiltrate into agency presentations over here pretty quickly… It was ‘social by design’.

She gave this further depth by explaining that a lot of marketing campaigns in the US and elsewhere were simply using social as ‘the salt on the fries’. Being only too happy to use agricultural language myself, my trans-Atlantic translation: We need to make social the potatoes and also start in the garden and not the kitchen.

A great example of this thinking would be the Doritos crowd sourced ad campaign, or from our own shores and back to our tuberosum analogy – the Walkers ‘Do us a Flavour’ campaign.

Now there are issues with this approach and as agency types we of course pointed out that we all have clients who approach social at different speeds and for some it may be salt only for the time being. But notwithstanding client reluctance it is only the lazy planner or Ostrich headed CEO who will wait for their clients to ask the question.

If a decade of digital planning has taught us anything it is that it gives clients the opportunity to learn faster and with more information than their agencies.

As I once had to explain to a luddite boss, ‘internet stats are more real time than TV and the clients have access to the BARB tape’.

With Facebook, we must all get the client, creative agency, media agency and ideally PR and other agency partners together at the outset, otherwise the process is doomed from the start and the potential power of social will be diluted.

Anyway back to Palo Alto – what else did we learn? Well Chris Cox, the engineer behind the ‘News Feed’ talked to us in a whiteboard fury about ‘the Social graph’. How we shouldn’t just worry about building a Fanbase as ‘Friends of Fans’ could be even more valuable. How Starbucks with 19 million fans has over 500 million ‘friends of fans’.

Facebook’s marketing director, known universally as The Hoff, was a different breed to the bright-faced engineers but probably came the closest to talking our current language and through his joined up approach of media (advertising),brand (PR) and business (c/f the Chevrolet Superbowl ad for example) bought us back to Cheryl’s ‘Social by Design’ – brands using social to enhance business, not just as another medium.

Elsewhere, as you would expect, there is lots of other clever stuff  going on, which will increase the 50% of the internet time we spend on Facebook – but overall I was just impressed by the vision, ambition and pace of the Facebook juggernaut.

The bright twenty-something’s all cavorted stickers proclaiming that “This journey is only 1% finished”, which is their latest provocative slogan. I was more taken by a previous one still stuck on every desk, door and wall – “Fail Harder”.

It is a statement of belief that all of us could take with us everyday and one that is perhaps missing from current UK advertising culture in 2011.

Nicola Mendelssohn, IPA president, was one of the attendees at the summit (she was most definitely a convert) and I hope she takes her enthusiasm to the rest of the advertising village over the course of her presidency.

For media owners, as with Google before them, Facebook is going to be a tough competitor but as the Doritos, Walkers and Chevrolet case studies prove, there is room for other media to prosper – even in the most social marketing campaigns.