Part
01
of eight
Part
01
Holiday Marketing Strategies - Facebook
Facebook launched its first billboard ads promoting the Messenger app in Chicago and Los Angeles in 2014. In 2015, the company had bought mass media ads in Australia and Canada.
Company Snapshot
- With $55.84 billion, Facebook reported an increase of around 37% in its revenue by the end of 2018 as compared to 2017.
- The company's ad revenue increased by 38% in 2018 as compared to 2017 to $55.01 billion.
- According to a 2017 Fortune article, Facebook had reported that 98% of its quarterly revenue came from advertising, up from 97% a year earlier and 84% in 2012.
- The average number of its daily active users (DAUs) were 1.52 billion for December 2018, an increase of 9% as compared to December 2017.
- With 241 million users, India is currently the largest market for Facebook.
- The average ad revenue Facebook derives from each user of its services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, each quarter is as follows: In the Q42017, these numbers were $26.26 in the US and Canada, $8.71 in Europe, and $2.52 in Asia-Pacific.
Ad campaigns by Facebook to promote itself
- Facebook had launched an ad campaign in the US that was developed by the company’s in-house creative team and tested in Chicago in March 2018.
- The outdoor ads on bus stops featured slogans such as "Spam is not your friends", "False news is not your friends", "Clickbait is not your friends".
- Facebook had advertised on TV to promote its Facebook Live video feature in 2016 and a 2014 TV spot called Chairs are like Facebook.
- Facebook partnered with WPP for launching an ad campaign called "Live what you love" in India. The objective of the campaign was to drive adoption of Facebook Groups, Pages and Events in India
Partnerships with media agencies
- According to Drum, Facebook has restructured its agency model.
- The company would continue to work with Wieden + Kennedy, but has newly partnered with Publicis’ Leo Burnett, and has hired Omnicom's BBDO, WPP's Ogilvy, and Accenture's Droga5.
- Creative X, Facebook’s in-house team will focus on the events, experiences, websites and social posts on the platform.
- Droga5, part of Accenture Interactive, will focus on the company’s "corporate narrative".
- Wieden + Kennedy, the agency behind Facebook's 'More Together' campaign will continue developing global creative for the social network.
- Publicis’ Leo Burnett is expected to take lead on the separate app Messenger.
Research strategy
We referred to marketing magazines such as Adage and Adweek for the requested information on Facebook's holiday marketing strategies, but in vain. Both these articles dated back to 2014 and 2016, respectively. Besides, both these sources provided information on ad campaigns, in general and not specific to holidays (i.e. Christmas and New Year).
As an alternative research strategy, we scoured the website of Ads of the World, which is the largest advertising archive globally, to check if they have listed any holiday ad campaign on Facebook that would depict the company's holiday marketing strategies. However, this research strategy also proved futile because the website did not list any such advertisement that promote/market Facebook rather it provided information on ads of other products that were featured on the social networking platform.
We also checked for the requested information on the press releases of media agencies such as WPP with the hopes of finding any partnership between Facebook and the media agency. This is how we came across an article on Your Story that said Facebook partnered with WPP for launching an ad campaign called "Live what you love" in India. Although the objective of the campaign was to drive adoption of Facebook Groups, Pages and Events in India, we have captured the screenshots of the creatives of the campaign in the provided document.
In addition to the above research strategies, we also referred to the latest annual report with the hopes of finding preexisting information on the holiday marketing strategies of the company but in vain. As a last resort we scoured Facebook's official page on the platform itself with the hopes of finding posts on holiday ad campaigns by the social networking giant. This is how we came across the ad of Portal from Facebook that was posted in October 2018. We further corroborated the findings of this research strategy by referring to iSpot.TV. However, this research strategy was fruitful only in terms of providing information on the number of national airings, ad spend of the TV commercial. Consequently, we have entered NA in each of the rows starting 3 to 8 of column C of the attached spreadsheet because the information was neither publicly available nor could it be triangulated with the help of the above-mentioned strategies.