Rafael Guida of Facebook speaks with Shinmin Bali about being the bridge between agencies and clients on the one end and Facebook as an advertising platform on the other, the merits of a layered idea, and more. Edited excerpts:
You were a part of the digital jury at Kyoorius Creative Awards last month. What was your impression of the work that you saw?
A majority of the work had a social component. It was interesting to see the direction that the industry is growing in. Digital work, especially in the recent past, wouldn’t necessarily have had a social peg to it but that seems to have changed now as the social theme comes across as an integral part of the creative work.
Is the social peg always relevant?
It is but probably, is not being used to the fullest. It looks like work in progress. The Indian market has adopted digital in a big way but it is taking baby steps in leveraging the full potential of social messaging on digital.
You have a background in advertising and you are now with a tech giant. Do you see creativity differently?
The first six months at Facebook were about changing my own mindset before attempting to change that of clients and agencies. It is not that easy to do. Coming back to the work we are seeing right now, it still depends on engagement and trying to show how many likes and comments it has got and not about tangible results. Both clients and agencies need to learn how they create and measure their work.
Within the overall digital budget, Facebook advertising may still not account for a major chunk. How do you view this?
The budget is not as important as return on investment (RoI). Facebook is probably the cheapest medium a client can invest in. As Creative Shop, we want to bring back the highest possible RoI for our clients by delivering value to them, which goes beyond likes and shares.
In Southeast Asia, there is a clear relation between good quality creatives and good results. We have lots of pilots, learnings and new formats all the time. It becomes difficult for the industry to keep up with the pace with which we change or develop new formats; and we are just one such player. There are Google and Twitter or say, even a Tinder, as platforms where new models could be tested. My main job is to get new formats to do things for our clients first, compile these learnings, tell them what works and what doesn’t, and then facilitate the adoption of these formats.
So Creative Shop’s role is to acclimatise clients and agencies towards advertising on Facebook?
The advertising agency would still have big ideas. If those ideas are strong enough, they should be adapted to other platforms. That is where we come in — to extend that thought beyond the TV commercial, to tell clients how the idea can work on Instagram or Messenger or how the idea can work as Facebook Live.
We are not here to replace agencies; we work with them in a collaborative manner. We can sometimes even be approached by agencies themselves, for example, during instances when they have an idea for a Facebook Live whose duration can possibly run into hours. In other cases, we are also approached by clients who have a campaign but aren’t sure how they can extend the core idea to Facebook. Our effort is to encourage agencies and clients to formulate core ideas in early stages which can then be optimised across various platforms rather than trying to force-fit ideas as per platforms at a later stage.
Creative Shop is not a revenue generating department for Facebook. It is actually a department that costs money from Facebook to run. Facebook’s revenue generation happens by selling media. The moment both clients and agencies fully understand how to use the platform to come up with ideas that can work well, they won’t need us anymore; then the focus can go back to selling media. But Facebook as a platform changes very fast. It always has new formats to learn and work with. For example, Facebook recently launched the dating platform. We should be the first ones to test new tools and then introduce them to agencies. For the long term, it is about helping clients. It is less and less about just truncating a message to fit the online platform, taking the message ahead and telling a secondary story on Facebook. This can add an extra layer to the communication.
If you take a 30 second ad that ran on TV and on Facebook as is, and compare it to an ad that has been optimised for Facebook, you can see about 30 times better results with the optimised version on Facebook. We want agencies and clients to know that they need to go one step ahead when they come up with an idea or shoot the ad, and think about how it will look on a mobile screen or on digital platforms, or whether or not the message works with or without audio.
