The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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What Facebook and Publicis gain from their intriguing new partnership

By Ramzi Yakob

May 23, 2014 | 4 min read

Earlier this week Facebook and Publicis announced a vague but intriguing multi-year partnership said to be worth "hundreds of millions of dollars". Ramzi Yakob, strategist at digital agency TH_NK, looks at what it might mean for the industry.

Without getting into the details of the partnership, it instinctively feels like progress. Progress toward digital taking centre stage in our connected world. Progress toward agencies trying to make sense of increasingly complex datasets. And progress toward collaborative working at a grand scale to provide better value for client businesses and more engaging communications for people.

Despite being spearheaded by Starcom MediaVest Group, I can see all Publicis Groupe agencies benefitting in our competitive agency environment. Having access to a Facebook partnership with proprietary tools and opportunities could easily be a deciding factor during tendering processes. Imagine walking into a pitch not just with a giant toolbox, but with creative media ideas that you know competing agencies won’t be able to propose, because those creative media opportunities don’t exist to them. Seems unfair doesn’t it? No. Not really. Because that’s the market we work in. Information asymmetry is as much a competitive advantage as talent.

This is as true for Facebook as it is for Publicis Groupe and could hint at why the details behind the partnership are so frustratingly vague. Facebook still needs to do business with other advertisers and agencies that spend an incredible amount of money with them. There’s a fine line between incentivising up-front commitments and reassuring other customers that they aren’t receiving a second class service.

Looking at the statement, made by Carolyn Everson, VP of global marketing solutions at Facebook, this tension is evident throughout, but I’m particularly fond of the following:

This is the first time we have all of the different elements that will allow clients to reach a significant scale of 100 million people a day in the U.S. and [specific] audiences within the 100 million the client wants to reach.”

Seems a bit strange to say that you’re doing for ‘the first time’, something that you’ve been selling to anyone with a credit card for many years. But of course this is a massive overstatement, as it needed to be.

Meanwhile Facebook is taking advantage of the committed spend by creating itself a low-risk environment for R&D. It needs to constantly innovate its product to improve it for end users and advertisers. Commitments like this pay for the resourcing of those efforts, and help them to get paid even if experimental features end up failing.

Clients want media firsts and award winning campaigns and Facebook wants to live-trial new features on someone else’s dime. Sure there’s a risk of some of those media firsts not working, but Facebook can always negate that risk to their clients by compensating them with media impressions if they really need to. I assume Facebook aren’t regularly running out of inventory, so it’s likely that this form of compensation won’t be a financial burden.

I’m a fan of experimental efforts to make things better. It feels relevant to today’s landscape. It feels digital. It feels like networks actually doing the type of thing that their agencies regularly advise their clients to do.

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