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Dmexco: 'Brands aren't something we put on Facebook to make money, they are part of the experience,' states Facebook's director of engineering

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By Stephen Lepitak | -

September 19, 2013 | 6 min read

Facebook's director of engineering, Andrew Bosworth, has predicted that brands will help people "navigate" a world with too much information while calling on marketers to see people as individuals and to invest more in content when developing campaigns for the platform.

Speaking at Dmexco, Bosworth opened by explaining his view that brands were able to help people navigate the world by being familiar in a foreign environment. He described this as 'brand technology' and claimed it had been true since people began to travel, and was becoming all the more vital as the world becomes mired and more cluttered.

"Brands are more important now than they ever have been before," he explained. "When I get off that train and I pull my phone out, I am no longer just choosing the bars on a city block, I am choosing bars from all over the city. These devices process so much information that it is a real challenge to navigate. So if in the past brands existed to help navigate a world with too little information, then in the future brands will exist to help us navigate a world with far too much."

He added that this was a problem that he was trying to solve when he originally joined Facebook eight years ago, working immediately on its Newsfeed infrastructure.

"We did that precisely for this reason, there was too much information for people to consume and they didn't have time to consume it all. We had to provide them with a better tool for sorting through all of that information."

Having revealed that 1.15 billion people are now on Facebook, with 470 million using it on mobile every day, he went on to describe Newsfeed as "a marketplace for attention" and warned marketers that they would need to invest in compelling content as they were now competing with content created by family and friends.

"This is something different when it comes to numbers of this size," he said of the figures. "Unlike a number of other media channels, these big numbers...they break all the way down to individuals. One person with their own media channels, their own public figures that they care about, their own interests and things that they care about, and unlike other media, we can target them directly."

Bosworth discussed the generalisation that other media was forced to use in previously targeting an audience, claiming that they were forced to judge by proxy the audience's likes and interests.

"People. Not proxies. We do not have to suffer these intermediaries anymore. We can be more precise, even at this tremendous scale... we can target each one of them with tremendous precision, based on their actual interests, and what they actually care about."

He continued to highlight some examples of campaigns that had run through Facebook from Unilever, Nestlé and PepsiCo.

"Focus on relevance," he advised. "Think about the opportunity that you have. Marketers often want to stand out from the crowd. Think of that paradoxically - how can you belong to the crowd? How can you be a part of it?" he asked, pointing out that on Facebook users were talking to their friends and were connected to large organisations and the media as never before.

"What you do has got to be a part of the context of their lives... I really want people to stop thinking about monthly active users to to think about daily active users. What is the opportunity with a user every single day?"

He advised that relevancy was also of core importance for marketing messages before turning to quality content, and he revealed that whenever someone logged into Facebook the system was choosing from 15,000 stories to show them, a number that is growing.

"Newsfeed is getting more competitive every day, which means it's harder to ensure that your content will appear every day." He added, however, that marketers could compete: "You are content creators. It is one of the greatest things that you can is is produce phenomenal content... I want to make sure that you guys are investing in content. When you are spending on TV and print, you have to ask yourself 'What is the opportunity you are missing?' Because every post you are not engaging with on Facebook doesn't just affect that post, it affects the likelihood of engaging on the next post."

He continued: "Newsfeed is getting more and more competitive every day and you need to invest in quality content that makes a difference."

He closed by returning to the idea of environment, claiming that users open Facebook willing to engage with the content that is available but without knowledge of what to expect, which included marketing.

"If you don't invest in content, if the content doesn't feel native, if it doesn't feel like it belongs, then with one swipe it is gone... I am a big believer that brands are a positive force in the world to help us navigate a really complex ecosystem... brands aren't something we put on Facebook to make money, they are a core part of the experience that we want to deliver to our users."

He asked the room to inform Facebook if it wasn't delivering the value they expected from their investment as the company "believes that our ads work, and they work well".

"If you guys aren't investing, if you aren't thinking mobile-first or relevance and context. If you guys aren't thinking about the quality of experience you are creating with content that is much deeper than it was with traditional media, well then that is on you and for you not to be taking on these opportunities."

Bosworth's call for further spend on content follows a similar call by Google's Jason Bigler for more spend on creative, data-led online campaigns made on the same stage yesterday.

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