Adland needs to adjust its time lines, extract itself from the campaign spike mindset and think longer term. Brands need to stop marketing at people and instead give it to the people. Scale will follow because the network effect is so powerful. Importantly, the things people say won't work can become the biggest successes. And they need neither bells, whistles nor perfection. Just the utility.
That was Facebook's message to Cannes on Tuesday.
Director of global engineering Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the engineer behind Facebook's News Feed, said that “people in bars offered to fight me over it” at launch. People hated News Feed because they don't like change. “Which was great, because we listened to what they said, refined it and now it is the most popular feature on the site.”
Ad agencies and brands could learn from that – and also the iterative processes that are at the core of technology companies – rather than the campaign calendar mindset that still exists across much of creative world.
“The creative cycle is still very linear process”, said Facebook's director of global creative solutions Mark D'Arcy. “We are still working on news feed. Iteration is at the core, not perfection at launch.”
Whereas technology moves fast, the mindset at Silicon Valley is long term. Advertising firms and brands could think about adjusting their time lines too, Bosworth suggested.
“Often with clients there is a short time to deliver. If you are measuring impact, it is one thing to measure it on these aggressive short time lines, but as much as we think technology moves fast, a lot of our very pure technology companies in the Valley have a very long horizon for what they are trying to optimise for.”
That way, value is built for the long term, said Bosworth.
“We try and build things five or ten years out that we think will be amazing. We try and think what the world will be like and then just take that next step.”
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