PARIS—The chief operating officer of the world’s dominant social network did not show up in person at the Viva Technology conference here Friday. Of course not—Sheryl Sandberg appeared via video chat.
After brief uncertainty over whether her feed could get patched through to the screen behind the stage (see, even tech leaders can’t count on video chats working on the first try!), the Facebook (FB) COO appeared above her interviewer, Maurice Lévy.
Sandberg, speaking from Facebook’s offices while sipping a cup of coffee, fielded questions from Lévy, until recently the CEO of Viva Tech co-host Publicis Groupe (PUB.PA), with amazing aplomb. She never wandered off message and rarely let an “uh” slip. (Should she ever run for office, woe betide anybody who faces her in a debate.) And attendees watching with an interest in advertising on Facebook—spoiler alert: Sandberg wants you to do just that—would have come away with useful advice.
Ad advocate
It made sense that when speaking via video to a marketing executive, Sandberg spent so much time discussing video ads. They benefit from Facebook’s massive scale—she called its rapid growth “the fastest adoption of a communications technology the world has ever known”—and its near-ubiquity on mobile devices.
But you can still screw them up. Sandberg offered two tips that too many advertisers don’t seem to grasp.
One is to assume a distracted audience.
“You need to put your key point up front, in the first two to three seconds,” she said. “They need to work with the sound on or off.”
The other is not to recycle—don’t throw an ad cut for TV on Facebook. “You want to create natively,” Sandberg advised.
Do those things right, she emphasized, and you can reach an audience of unparalleled scale: “There has never been a better time to be a marketer.”
There’s probably never been a better time to be a Facebook ad executive, either. The company has been doing so well that some media observers worry about how much Facebook, along with Alphabet, Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL), dominates online advertising. One analyst estimated that Facebook alone racked up 77% of online advertising’s growth in 2016, leaving little for competitors—including Yahoo Finance’s parent company Verizon (VZ).
And as Google moves to incorporate a limited ad blocker to its Chrome browser while Apple (AAPL) starts to jam some common ad-tracking techniques in its Safari browser, the appeal of Facebook ads that will appear in its apps all the time should only increase.
Privacy: it’s complicated
Sandberg was cagier when Lévy asked about Facebook’s commitment to privacy. That’s a tricky topic for the company, since people won’t share their info on the service unless they think only their friends will see it—while advertisers won’t buy ads unless they think Facebook will show them to people with genuine interest in the topic.