An "Inside Look" at Consumer Trends According to Facebook

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing where we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. Back with me this week, you were absent last week and we missed you, Jeff.

Hi.

But it's my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everyone, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Cool. So where were you last week? We talked all about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and the blockchain and I'm all ready to go out and make millions on Bitcoin and retire from Free Webinar Wednesdays.

I'm in Nashville, Tennessee at the CSI Live customer conference.

Cool, and were you presenting down there? I can't remember.

I did, I did a session on operations reviews for community banks.

Cool, good deal. Well, I'm, I'm sure you got rave reviews and everybody loved it.

Thank you. Where are you this week?

Well, this week and last week, I think I alluded to it on the show last week, but I was handpicked— I'm doing air quotes with my fingers— but I was handpicked by an organization that puts on a bank CEO conference, and they pick different spots in the fall and the spring, and I'm down at Sanibel Island, and I've been speaking with bank CEOs for the past week and a half and trying to expouse upon the virtues and advantages and benefits of digital marketing and social media and all sorts of other wonderful ways to engage and attract consumers online. So it's been a really good couple weeks, but I have to admit, living at a conference for 2 weeks tends to make your voice a little sketchy and your pants a little tight, but I'm getting there.

Well, it sounds like fun. In addition to work, but it sounds like fun as well.

Exactly, exactly. We'll go ahead and get started. Actually, our guest is sitting right here next to me.

Very rarely do we get to have guests that we're actually physically present with.

You and I have done a couple of shows together when we've been at conferences, but usually it's webinars and somebody in a far-off land that joins us remotely through digital. But I've got Shane actually sitting right here next to me, and he's the very first official Facebook person that I've ever met. So I can now say I have a real Facebook friend, not just somebody that's a friend on Facebook.

I feel like friend might be a little generous.

You can see we're getting along just fine. Before we go ahead and I officially introduce this yahoo sitting next to me that just Just gave me a dig on my own webinar. Remind everybody that today's show and all shows are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if we say something that you want to go back and listen to again or share with a friend or a colleague or coworker, we certainly encourage you to do that. And then as Shane goes through his presentation, if you've got a question or you want to get clarification on something, feel free to use the chat box and I'll be monitoring that. And we'll go ahead and we'll ask that question. when there is a break in the action. So I'm going to go ahead and— let's see, I'm going to use the magic of GoToWebinar as it exists, and I'm going to send Shane the presentation. And while that happens, it is my pleasure to welcome Shane Coker from Facebook. Actually used to be with Kellogg's and a variety of other consumer goods companies. So little did we know it, but we actually were neighbors up in Michigan for a period of time, and he knows a lot of the cycling buddies that I know from our cycling team and the local bike shop there in Bala Creek, so that's been kind of cool.

Another example of a small world.

Yeah, very small world. So Shane's been down here, was here last Wednesday and again today, and he's doing a special VIP session for the bankers and giving them a little bit of insight on what's going on inside of Facebook and what's happening with the consumer, how brands are leveraging it, and of course we play in the digital space and a lot of consumers are spending a lot of time on Facebook. And at our global conference, one of the phrases that kept coming over and over again was people may not necessarily be going onto Facebook to search for you or your business, but that's where they're going to find you. And there's a lot of really new targeting and advertising and promotional tools available to marketers and businesses that Facebook has rolled out that he's been sharing, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for him to join us on the show. So I'm really excited to have you with us, Shane.

Great, good to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

Cool.

For the sake of everyone that is either dialed in or going to listen to this, let me frame up a little bit of the deck that I'm going to share because it perhaps is a little atypical, which is given what I've done with the conference. Sorry, one second.

The triangle. And then show my screen. Just— and then click here. There we go.

Okay, great.

All right.

Everyone see that now?

There we go. Screen— see, that's one of the other advantages of sitting right next to him. I can point out all the things that he's not doing right on his computer.

Beautiful. Well, hopefully if that's the greatest of my technological issues today, then we're going to be in good shape. I'm guessing it's not the last. Again, to frame up the deck that I'll walk everyone through, and then to Eric's point, please chime in with questions as we go along here. The community banking industry is not one that I'm intimately familiar with. My father-in-law has worked in the industry a significant amount of time, and so through proxy from him, I've learned a little bit. I'm enough just to be dangerous. But my background and experience has been in consumer marketing, and specifically in packaged goods and in retail. To Eric's point, I was a brand manager over at Kellogg's and ran a business over there, and then went over to Walmart, was a marketer there for a few years, and then had some technology experience with a company called Bazaarvoice on the marketing team, and then now work in a sales capacity And so I want to put that out, because the lens that you see for this presentation is going to be essentially lessons learned that I have come across from a short stint at Facebook. I've been on board for about 6 months at this point, but really applying what we see in consumer packaged goods and other industries and trying to build bridges over to the banking industry. So that's what I'll attempt to do. If there are questions that come along the way, please chime in. But all of it might not be an exact one-to-one parallel, if you will. So the agenda that I've talked everyone through here is that what I'll do is set up the landscape as we see it from a Facebook perspective right now. And the spoiler alert that I continue to give everyone is that this is going to be a very mobile-centric talk, and that's because that's obviously where we see consumer behavior going and the importance of banks, specifically community banks, to begin to think through consumer behavior with that mindset, recognizing that the way that they consume media has changed, their desire for services has changed as well, and a lot of that through that mobile lens. And then talking through some best practices, if you will, for what we see companies and businesses doing on the platform and ways that banks can begin to think through how that might be able to be applied to their own business. Then we'll talk a little bit about targeting and giving some just initial capabilities to create awareness there, as well as importantly measurement and some new ways to think through how effective you're being on the platform, and then ways that we continue to grow as a company in providing more tools and resources to help measure success. Then I have a couple just kind of rudimentary case studies we can talk through if we still have time. where a cross-section of everything from financial services organizations to small businesses, and then kind of one large brand in the beer industry, because everyone likes to talk about beer and some things that have been successful there. And so that's kind of the meat of the material that I have. Ultimately, the desired outcome you see, it was around trying to create awareness, a little bit of an education around Facebook specifically, the dynamic of the groups that have been assembled here in my sessions. Everyone From the baby boomer who is familiar with Facebook because the term is so well known at this point, but not an active user, not a user at all of Facebook, to the bank CEO who early on decided, yeah, I want to have a presence, not only as a personal presence, but a presence with his bank, and has tried to up his game as he has gone along. You'll see a varying degree of content here. You can just hide that. Okay.

Nope, the orange one.

Nope, that one. There we go. Alright, so quickly, this is me. And one of the things I always joke about with Facebook is that prior to joining Facebook, it was like, you know, you had 2 different networks. You had your professional network, call it LinkedIn or whatever, and then you had your Facebook presence with you, which was your personal articulation of self. What I've been surprised to see is that that's all stripped away whenever you join Facebook, and your personal articulation of self is your professional. And so this is the view all of my colleagues have of me, which is actually very, very, I guess, enabling, where you're able to kind of be your true self with all of your colleagues. They know about my family, good and bad probably. And so it's just a different philosophy with which You operate as a professional. And that's— I'll skip around a little bit, but that kind of pays off the mission of the company, if you will, in terms of making the world more open and connected. It is a desire to try and have a transparency with the way that you portray yourself to the world, and that people have a natural interest and curiosity for that. So a desire to stay connected to friends and acquaintances. And to discover what's going on in their world, and then to have an opportunity to share and express themselves as well. And so I guess I give that as a grounding for everyone because that's what my experience has been with Facebook so far, and then I think that's really what has created the opportunity for it to grow the way that it has so precipitously over a 10-year period. The other thing that I've talked to the bankers about over the last couple days whenever I've given these sessions is that they're not alone in understanding that, hey, there's this world out here they need to understand that has changed so rapidly, and it's been a difficult place to operate. And the personal story that I give on that front is going back to my time at Kellogg's, where in 2009 I was the brand manager on Frosted Flakes, and we had a massive advertising campaign at that time called Earn Your Stripes. And one of the things we were looking to do was to to grow awareness of Earn Your Stripes with Mom. We knew that that was going to increase purchase intent, and that was going to give them an affinity for the brand. We had all of these different levers we were going to pull, primarily rooted in television. It was grounded in the first Super Bowl spot Kellogg's was going to do in something like 20 years. And so massive campaign that we had pulled together, yet remarkably that campaign had Tiny amount of digital spend. That was primarily around doing banner ads and trying to have a presence on a couple websites we thought might be helpful, but had zero social articulation as part of that campaign or that entire marketing spend. And so I think through how that was, you know, 6 years ago, relatively short amount of time, and here I am at Facebook and preaching the merits of something that, as I did my job just a few years ago, I was totally— maybe not totally unaware, but I wasn't using it as a primary vehicle for gaining awareness and driving my brand. Moral of the story there being that as these bankers think, hey, you know, they potentially missed the boat and aren't able to capitalize, that's not the case. It's a space that is evolving quickly, and there's still an opportunity to learn. I think now there's a sense of urgency around acting quickly, because it is moving so quickly in that direction. All right, the other thing that we walked through were just some thought starters on issues that I know that some of the community bankers especially have. This concept of how you're going to give an opportunity for a lot of the ravers out there, or ranchers against your brand, to have a broader microphone to amplify that message. We see a lot of activity within the platform where people are coming to the defense of brands more often than what they are using that as a channel to rant against a particular organization. But that is something that there is a curve for folks to get over, and so trying to rest everyone's mind there. The concept of Facebook replacing existing spend and that being the new silver bullet and the only thing that has to be leveraged, not at all what we're— the way that we're going to market. Just important to be aware of it as a viable channel to layer onto some of the other spends. Another aspect that we introduced is this importance of management within the social plan. There is a barrier to entry as you get started. It's not a fire-and-forget kind of a tool to use. Something you really have to have a dedicated plan and resource against in order to be successful in the medium or to not do more harm than good. We also talked about the presence of small businesses on Facebook and how there are over 2 million advertisers on Facebook, and the vast majority of those are within the SMB side of our business. They are not alone in that space. And it's one that a lot of organizations, small organizations, see value. And then kind of hand in hand with that is that from a rural versus urban perspective, we don't see a degradation or a fall-off in terms of user activity and engagement on the platform. As a matter of fact, oftentimes the rural consumers that are more engaged with their local businesses, and so it is giving them an opportunity to kind of hit a sweet spot there. Fish where the fish are.

Right.

So with all of that as kind of a preamble, then what I wanted to do was just introduce to those that may not be aware what kind of the full suite of Facebook looks like outside of just the blue Facebook that everyone is probably most familiar with. These numbers are dated. I'll tell you that they've— and fortunately for us, they've gone up in the few months since this was published. I think it's about 1.5 billion active users on Facebook now. And then beyond Facebook, WhatsApp, which obviously has been an acquisition that has grown tremendously, groups within Facebook and the user base that exists there, 600 million people on Facebook Messenger, the presence of Instagram, that number looks more like 400 million now. And so what I was doing was just introducing that there are a suite of offerings, and we continue to innovate and continue to expand our offerings, recognizing, as I mentioned before, The space evolves quickly. We have to try and stay a step ahead of it. But it's also acknowledged that it's a difficult landscape to keep up with, and it's hard even as an internal person. Then we talked a little bit about what that active user base looks like. Again, numbers that are a bit dated, and they're likely north of these. But in terms of everyday usage, I think that number is around 160 million active users per day. on Facebook now. And then importantly though is that ratio continues to be very pronounced in terms of the number of those users that are using a mobile device. And that's not always just solely a mobile device, but clearly, you know, north of 120 million active daily users on Facebook on their mobile. Extrapolate that over to the month and we see those same numbers continue to hold and to even be more developed. And so, you know, fully 75% of all of the country active on Facebook in a month, which is significant. Continuing that conversation as it relates to mobile. Now this is one that I think, a chart that probably a lot of people have seen or are familiar with in some capacity. But this is just a— maybe it's us talking to ourselves in some regards, but it speaks to why we're leaning in so heavily on mobile and really becoming a mobile-first company. And that we have seen television usage begin to level off a little bit. But as a key channel for communication, digital and mobile are increasingly and ever-growing channels that advertisers just have to have a presence in. The stat that I think probably a lot of people are familiar with is if you look at consumption within a 24-hour period, there's an average of 25 hours of media consumed. Obviously, that speaks to the dual-screen viewing, and that only is made possible through using your mobile or tablet or some kind of digital communication while also watching television. And so at the very least, those eyeballs on TV are potentially even less valuable than what they once were. All speaks to the fact that mobile is where we have to be able to try and continue to lead. And just to beat the dead horse at this point, 80% of users are are tethered to their mobile device at every point throughout the day, with the exception of 2 waking hours. So, if an advertiser or a company that has a desire to connect with consumers is not present in the mobile world, then the reality is that they're just not present in the lives of their customer base. Taking that a step further for Facebook, and that's really where we see that we have a right and even a responsibility to continue to push for emerging presence within advertising, in that we know that all of these people that we just set up that are on their mobile device, we know that they are mostly on Facebook or Instagram. So it's important for us to be out there to help create awareness of where those eyeballs are, and then provide vehicles that allow advertisers to insert themselves throughout that day. And where the rubber meets the road from a spend perspective, and where I'm optimistic about where the growth of my business will continue to come, as well as where advertisers can be just more effective in the way that they go to market, is that we look at spend levels and compare those to what is the preference of consumers in terms of driving their consumption behavior. And you see a disconnect, and primarily on 2 fronts. One, being print and the other on mobile. And those obviously have an inverse relation where there's a lot of traditional spend that is just continuing to kind of be grandfathered in that space in print where that's not necessarily the most effective. As a matter of fact, it would appear that it is one of the least effective channels. And so there is an obvious opportunity to grow that with mobile where you see the inverse of consumption driving behavior compared to the spend on that front. So we'll continue to look for that and other areas to grow our footprint. The example that I've given then to some of the bankers that have been assembled is taking a look at direct mail and thinking through how that is an example of what can be done differently as they go to market. I know that's an advertising vehicle that a lot of banks continue to go to because it's comfortable, But I think that anyone being honest can say that it's less effective than it ever was, and it probably was never tremendously effective. And so just to really look like— let me just scroll ahead a couple slides. And thinking through Facebook as that new mailbox, a very targeted mailbox where banks have an opportunity to insert themselves, then what we would suggest is looking at it in kind of 3 different buckets. Taking the group of folks that they know to just not be responsive anymore to direct mail. Well, Facebook is a great way to target those users based on existing CRM knowledge that they have and making sure that they can message them only in a different medium. At the very least, that could potentially be a new way to go and reach people that they've lost contact with. In the event that There are users that are— then Facebook would be an opportunity to layer onto those existing activities to boost their effectiveness and take a layered approach to communications, which is kind of a marketing-wide best practice. And then the last scenario is really looking at the situation where they could be responsive to both Facebook and direct mail. And in this case, then maybe there's an opportunity to put more spending towards Facebook in order to generate a stronger ROI, or to lessen the production costs for some of the direct mail assets based on increase in shipping costs and printing and all of that sort of thing. So it's kind of a rudimentary study with people to kind of get an idea of how something simply can be done to change existing behavior. So then from there, as I gave a couple examples and talked about what Facebook looks like right now, provided that there are folks that have decided, you know, at this point we realize it's a platform that we should probably be taking advantage of, then there are some best practices around how to build your brand on Facebook that we would encourage. And what I've told the members that have attended, nothing here is earth-shattering or rocket science. As a matter of fact, I think there is comfort in the fact that a lot of times what we see work very well on Facebook is something that works in other channels and in other mediums, and we're just suggesting a nuanced approach to it, or to just be rigid about how you apply those lessons you already know. And so from a brand-building perspective, one of those is just this tenet of making sure that your branding is consistent on Facebook with what you have in other channels, and that you put your brand in the center of that message so that you really get credit for that advertising, And that it is accretive to what you're doing in other spaces. The other thing is we talk a lot about the ability to target communications, and we'll go a little deeper on that in a second. But that is only beneficial if then you are putting content in front of that targeted audience that resonates. If not, what you've done is essentially prove yourself to be off-putting and demonstrate a lack of of awareness or familiarity with your consumer base, which is certainly something that is not well received. And then the other part is trying to just think through beyond driving awareness— You need to do that, but In a situation— —to come about how that might be able to be done. The other thing that we offered up is just rethinking the way you evaluate success on the platform. And so as you look at, in the past we've talked a lot about social objectives, or a lot of companies have determined success based on the number of shares, the number of likes on a post, and things admittedly that Facebook kind of trains people to to identify as metrics of success because we didn't have other metrics to provide for them. Well, we have increased our— and now what we are really offering and suggesting people do is to evaluate the effectiveness of Facebook activity based on real business metrics. What are you doing to grow share? What is your sales lift? As you track your equity performance, is that growing based on the campaigns that you are doing? These are all tangible things that we have an ability to measure now, and it's certainly the way that we want to be— to be a test of success that we're trying to push people to. The other thing that I introduced to the bankers is the importance of planning what you do on Facebook, as with any other communication. But I think that a lot of A lot of people think that because there is such speed to it, and the cadence of Facebook posts is oftentimes on a daily basis, and that those are things that you don't necessarily have to have a broad plan for, that it can just be done on kind of the occasional basis. I encourage everyone, small or large, large calendar plan looks like for the channel, for Facebook specifically. And then make sure that that is mapped out and that you have resourced it appropriately as well, not only in terms of working ad dollars, but then making sure that your teams are aligned against those plans and that going into it that there are clear criteria and operating principles as well. That's where we've seen people stumble out of the blocks, is whenever they don't have the rigor on the front end, and then ultimately they're not successful or it feels more cumbersome than what they were thinking. Getting effective with that thinking. And I introduced the interface that is the ad buying tool, where you have a series of dropdown menus that allow you to decide who you want to talk to, how much you want to spend, what those campaign dates look like. Trying to demystify a little bit the platform that can feel like it is pretty hard to engage in until you spend a little bit of time with it and you realize it is actually a pretty simple interface. So provided all of that was resonating, then what I did was walk folks through some examples of creative storytelling that we've seen on the platform. And these are a cross-section of examples, everything from CPG which is my primary area of focus, 2 things that I just did are a quick kind of rudimentary search of samples and came across a few banking examples as well. So going back to what I had mentioned before, one of the things that we've seen be successful is where people insert their brand in ways that oftentimes are not heavy-handed or that they are being overly pushy with their brand communication. So I gave a couple examples here from Jergens and from Dior. The one on the left I really like, because this is an example where they are inserting themselves in their brand's conversation around skincare and maintaining your skin health. And so this is an example where their product is not featured at all in this particular ad, but it still resonates, and it still something that was an effective ad for them. Similarly, in the next ad, whenever they're prompting the fact not to be vanilla, and I think this was around a new product offering that they had that were different scents or something of the sort. But it's again, not heavy-handed in terms of inserting their brand, but being just engaging with both the imagery as well as the copy. That they chose to use. The last example with BRA, this is where they have inserted their product, but didn't do it in an overly stylized manner, where this wasn't a model that then they have done this beautiful art around the perfect placement of the BRA strips. This was a drawing, so probably saved them some money on production, but then also was an effective way to insert themselves in an engaging manner. on the platform. So, a lot of ways to go about doing that. Moving that example forward to— sorry, apparently I had some builds in there. Moving that example forward to the way that I have seen that come to life a little bit with Bank of America on some of the thematic approach that they took which has been successful for them. So one is this concept of speaking about new products that they're offering. And products don't have to be a new checking account or a new rewards offer. In this case, this was a new video that had been generated that they wanted to push in order to help with people's auto buying decisions. And so inserting themselves in a manner that was educating and being a partner in that process as opposed to being pushy about the auto loan. which is certainly ultimately what they would like to try and achieve there, but a good way to do it. Second, event-related messaging. This is where they took the opportunity to celebrate the Air Force's birthday. So certainly a nod to a desire at Bank of America to try and play a patriotic card there, which we see resonate, but not pushing anything specifically about the bank, but just being a part of that conversation. Then the next example, the occasion focus, and this is around birthdays and thinking through what your financial institution's role within birthday celebrations, which, you know, come at all times of the year. And so a good way for them to do that in a manner that was not heavy-handed. And then the last one is probably the most product-focused, and then just considering all of the decisions or reframing different decisions you're making during that time. timeframe, and they introduced their travel rewards card at that point, as you would potentially use it with the change of seasons. So I think you see a cross-section of things that work. And all of these, by the way, as well, have something that is eye-catching, it's engaging, and then the copy is very on brand. So good examples that we talked through. The other thing I talked about is that there are a variety of ad formats that are new and that can be effective in communicating. So what I just shared was kind of the 101. You've got engaging copy and a photo, and you let that do the heavy lifting for you. We still firmly believe that that works and that that is a very viable way to use the platform in advertising. But then with the onset of video and with carousel advertising and some different things, then there were a couple things we wanted to introduce there. Video is one of the ones that we've probably seen take on the most, or garner the most attention lately, and for a variety of reasons. One of those is that it is evaluated differently, in that it is not evaluated as a typical 30-second spot would be in a television situation. But looking at how Facebook video can flank what you are doing there, or can complement what you are doing in a way that you want to introduce video, and what is successful there. What I thought about is how Facebook video does not have audio, at least until you click on it. And so as we look at the efficacy of that kind of form of advertising, what we see is that it has proven to be quite effective. And you will learn as we go along, but that is That's been a major learning for us. And so a couple examples of video that has performed well, you see this one from Target which is kind of a tongue-in-cheek example of how everyone posts the photos of them at a beach or at a pool. And then speaking to— you don't have to overthink it. What is kind of catchy is oftentimes one of the things that people engage with and interact with the most. And so it's a good direction to go. We also see good examples of where people are using capabilities, and especially from a community banking perspective. The question was asked is, I don't have a huge production budget, so what can I do in order to put something out there that people will want to engage with? Well, the video that you just saw there was something that was shot on an iPhone, and so it's an example of using some existing capabilities that are at everyone's disposal in order to put something out there that will be more attention-grabbing.

Eye-catching.

Therefore, the next opportunity for this to be just a still ad, which was probably going to perform fine, but now adding just a little bit of movement gives it that much more of an opportunity to bring the image to life. And then the last example, one from a product that, hey, I don't know that people get tremendously emotionally stirred up through dishwashing detergent, but this is an example where they had fun with it. And it pays off to a nice way to then support the equity of the brand. And so it's a good kind of complement to what they were trying to message there. All of that being to say, you don't have to overthink what you are doing there with video, or really the spots as a whole. The next example is a version of advertising. And I will go ahead and let these build. And essentially the ability to tell a multi-part story. And so this is a great example of how that was done with engaging imagery. It certainly gives you more latitude creatively. But I think what is really interesting— I'm sorry. You can lock in a number of users. So if you want to have a certain number of engagements with one of the particular ads before someone moves on to the next, or whatever that might look like in the way that you surface, that's at your disposal, which I just think is a really for how you can be as effective as possible with the target audience. And then the other part is we encourage— how we've seen good use of repurposing and reusing creative, where you had Gillette in this example, the 30-second television, national television spot that they leveraged, and where they brought in some of the same video from that spot onto their Facebook ad so that their production is able to be minimized, and you are able to get again a layered approach to communication. We've seen that be successful. So we talked about, I touched on it a second ago, but targeting is really one of the key aspects of communication and messaging on Facebook, most effective. And it is just important to think through how that comes to life. The combination of your standard audiences. I'm going to let this play out as well as then the custom audiences that are at your disposal based on Facebook and third-party partners. A lot of times banks have a pre-established CRM database that they can glean from. There are email addresses. There's a loyalty program. There's credit card data. There are a number of sources that they can immediately leverage in order to begin to create the customer to speak to. Then beyond that, they can look at a number of other kind of partner categories that will make those databases that much more robust or those targeted audiences that much more robust. And then from there, Facebook is able to overlay our own data around demographics and location, interests, behaviors on the platform. That allow us to lay a blanket over a particular consumer target base in a manner that reaches very specifically who we want to talk to or who a bank would want to talk to. And we see that being quite effective. A good way to frame that up is then looking at how you've broken up all of those core audiences, and now you have an opportunity in a manner where you can be very targeted, but you didn't necessarily lose scale. And so I think that that's really the salient point for me was to understand that you have a message that needs to go to a wide variety of people, but it needs to be nuanced for any of those individual consumer targets. That's important to understand that principle, but then as you begin to develop creative around that, that's where the rubber really meets the road in order to ensure that you're doing something that you're not turning people off because of showing either a lack of awareness of their interests or that you didn't do the diligence around trying to tailor something to those audiences. Very much a blessing and a curse, but when done well, it gives an ability for effective advertising in a manner that really previously wasn't possible. And so let me show you a quick video. This is an example of what we have seen that performed very well. Let me explain this briefly. Hopefully everyone has seen this ad. This was the Super Bowl spot that Coke did a few years ago around using America the Beautiful. A number of different audiences speaking to, voicing over the lyrics. So I'll go ahead and stop that there, because hopefully a number of people are familiar with the spot, which garnered a large number of advertising awards. It was something that got a tremendous amount of PR benefit around the Super Bowl, so paid for their media investment in that regard. But what we saw Coke do that was especially effective on the Facebook platform is then to tailor what that message was to Through the same video introduced in all of those spots, but taking different screen grabs, and then using different copy as the lead-in to tease the video, they saw an ability to engage even more of the consumer base in a specific manner. And so it's just a good example of where you think through all of those dynamics, and it can be a powerful way to communicate. Yeah, I think that's a great example. Taking a quick look at some of the financial services kind of organizations that have done a good job with that as well, one of the examples I came across was Wells Fargo and some work that they've done with their Work Strong initiative. And, uh, Either had an affinity for the military, patriotism, a variety of behaviors that helped them know that this was an audience. And then it showed how in a, again, back to a non-heavy-handed way, a brand or an institution in this regard can have a meaningful impact and a meaningful place within communications with a number of examples from a storytelling and a creative perspective. One perspective that we've seen work and just kind of good food for thought is looking at in a manner to get a particular campaign or a post as effective. The reality, as you see here, is that 90% of people that go and see an ad will ultimately buy a product or take an action. They just saw it, it impacted them, elicited an action for them to do what ultimately the brand wanted them to do, but liking it is not part of that critical path, if you will. What we would offer though is that there are 3 key areas to think about as it relates to measuring success, and that being around reach. As we talked about before, there are great ways to be successful or to target and to try and do that within a number of different behaviors and demographics and groups. And so really evaluating, did I reach the people that I was trying to with all of the core audience creation that I was trying to Resonance— did the message and the creative that I tailored to those targeted audiences, did that resonate? Did it have an impact? What kind of impact? And then ultimately the reaction, which is important, right? You know, that's at the end of the day, did you move the needle in terms of purchase intent, did people buy? And then we work with a third-party provider called DLX that helps us understand whether or not there were in-store sales around a particular campaign that's being run. These are all important, and this slide just speaks a little bit to the methodology around how that's done. It puts in context the way that Nielsen and DLX are able to help us go do that. But it's incredibly important as it relates to being able to take more than just a like or a share approach to efficacy on the platform. So then all of that, and this is kind of the capstone slide around building your brand on the platform and ways to evaluate and things to consider as you go about doing that. And the first piece is, as I mentioned before, not rocket science, but the incorporation of sight, sound, and motion as a part of your storytelling and brand building is important. What's engaging to you as a user of Facebook is going to be something that you are going to want to to incorporate as the way that you go to market with your branding. Continuing that, the planning and delivery, as we talked about, really having a dedicated approach to how— what you want to accomplish, and then the plan for how you're going to get there, to include being resourced and able to— in order to see success is important. Targeting, there's a tremendous opportunity to do it and to tailor creative against those target audiences. And so all of the different ways that you can go about doing that. And then the last point is really just to galvanize, making sure that what you're doing, you're learning as you go along, that you're pushing us as an organization to continue to provide you more resources or more tools to help you evaluate success, and then we know that that's the only way that parties can be successful. So then the next few slides, and I'll go through these quickly, but there were just a couple examples that I wanted to share around what we've seen a couple folks that have done, have used the platform in a variety of spaces, and that they've been successful. The first is this organization called Personal Capital. And this was a situation where they had a new product that they were looking to try and market to high net worth worth individual product. What they found is they used some traditional sourcing methods, and those were successful, but they weren't able to scale as broadly as what they wanted it to be. So it was limiting their success. Then they partnered with Facebook using some of the core custom audiences that we talked about based on the large volume of people that you could still reach, and found that that was exactly the solution that they needed in order to grow their user base or the consideration base of the new product Saw that be incredibly successful from an ROI perspective, and I think 15 times over what they were— the existing channels that they were using, which is not an example that we— an unlikely example or a unique one. Another example on a smaller scale is— I'm based out of Texas, and so it's always easy to get the example that's just down the road from you. That is in the SMB space in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and they are primarily an oil change provider. They use that as an entry vehicle to try and then garner broader service on brake repair or on transmission repair, some of the higher-ticket items. What they have found though is that it's an incredibly crowded space. So trying to break through with their consumer base is a difficult thing to do. They used Facebook as a way to advertise using a promotion to get people in the door for their oil change. What they found is that they got a 7x return on that ad spend, brought in over 470 claims of that offer at a local level, and then turned that into 2 redemptions for a major service and repair. So it's a small example, but I think it speaks to the breadth of the platform and the ability to help everything from a large financial institution to the small mom-and-pop shop that is looking to kind of grow their business as well. The last example that I have, and I'll let this video play quickly and we can talk about it, is an example from Heineken. So certainly more of a national campaign that was done, but an example of where there's a breadth across enterprise business as well. I'll let this play, and then we can talk through that.

There are over 60 million people just in the U.S. that drink light beer. A lot of them are really kind of frustrated and disappointed that there isn't a good-tasting light beer out in the market. We really listened to our customers and beer consumers in the United States and found they wanted a light beer With a hoppier taste. So we remade the formula. As soon as we did that, we won our Best Tasting Light Award in the World Beer Championships.

So then the challenge was, how can we take this functional, uh, mass paling exciting and witty way?

So we brought on Neil Patrick Harris as our spokesperson.

I'm Neil Patrick Harris, and this is Heineken Light. We used kind of his humor and wit and created a storyline that There are certain regulations prohibiting me from taking a sip in a television commercial, but trust me, it's delicious.

We worked with Facebook where we got these videos and all this content out in front of consumers. Within only 3 days, we were able to reach 54% of our audience, which is tremendous for us. We were able to grow brand awareness for this brand, and we were able to grow recall by 7%.

Most TV networks don't get that number.

So we're looking at massive massive reach in a 3-day period. So what you're seeing is not just large numbers of people engaging with your content, but also they're actually remembering what they see. The month after we ran the campaign was probably the most successful Heineken Lite month in 4 or 5 years. So that's when you really know your efforts made a difference.

People are consuming video on mobile more than ever. This is one of those campaigns that's able to sit as a best-in-class example How do you— there are over—

All right, so good example there on a variety of levels. And so, you know, start with taking a very broadly aware brand like Heineken, and I think it's remarkable that there was a 54% increase in the awareness of Heineken. Now granted, it was Heineken Light, so that's probably the nuance that they were looking at there, within a short amount of 3 days after the campaign had begun. Facebook was one of those vehicles, but what was especially important there is that it goes back to the importance of targeting messages. And so Flint threw and decided who they were trying to talk to to drive awareness of that new product. Then it was specifically with an audience that they had identified as having an affinity and a desire that would be incremental to their existing user base. So great success on that front. The other thing I think that is not to be lost there is that it started with a product that it even says in the video, it was an award-winning product. So not surprisingly, start with a good product, have tailored messaging that is effective against that, then you are able to see success. And that's part of the reason why Ultimately, what I think is the salient point across this entire video is that they saw the best one product immediately following that campaign than that they had ever seen. And so, you know, again, not solely attributable to Facebook, but as they looked at specifically the return attributed to Facebook, they saw the positive ROI. That was significant for that particular part of that broader campaign, which is a success story there. So those were just a variety of different things that we've seen to be successful. I wanted to give a couple case studies as well. The last slide that I have here is the snapshot of, hey, I talked too fast, too long, and you didn't take away anything other than these 3 pieces. I think you'll be okay. But the first part is, as we talked about at the beginning, is that media is going mobile. And there's just an importance of all companies, all brands, all organizations to be aware of that. That's where they have to be increasingly in order to be a part of the conversation with consumers. And that's only going to continue to grow. Second part being that there is a wide variety of folks on Facebook, and so within that there's an ability to develop targeting and custom audiences and messages that will resonate with those audiences. And so being very planful, being very— is your differentiator and a great way to go to market. And then the last part there is this concept that we're dedicated to helping companies grow their businesses, but we know that that can only be done through solid measurement and ensuring that people are able to be informed about the success or lack thereof that they're seeing. And so the measurement as part of a learning agenda is a must in order to be successful on the platform. Okay, so that was all that I had. I'm more than happy to take questions if any of those can be chimed in. But again, pleasure to talk to the group. It's great to have the— A good little one-two punch down here at Cool, so you really do like me.

In the end, yes. Good deal. Well, as a reminder, I know we covered a lot of stuff, and if you've got questions, we do have somebody from Facebook, so feel free to chime in. I know everybody has questions about Facebook, and I've thrown a few at Shane that were kind of jovial in nature, some of the little scams and spoofs that are going around. But if you've got a question for anybody at Facebook, feel free to throw it in there. One of the things that I asked you about, we talked about last week, I've been seeing some things in the news about something called Facebook at Work. And we talked a little bit about that last week at dinner. Maybe you can share a little bit of insight on that, and is it positioned to be a LinkedIn killer? Is it more of an internal productivity tool or an intranet or a little bit of both? Maybe share some of what you know about that.

Yeah, you know, admittedly I don't know a tremendous amount, and so I guess I would say it's probably an information tool that is able to, to your point, to increase productivity. It's a resource that we use internally now. There is a significant amount of our communication that is done through groups, and you are able to filter your Facebook profile throughout the day in order to customize based on what you want that is work-related versus personal-related. So all of those are, I think, just important filters as we evaluate broadly what helps people be most productive, most successful in their roles and in their day-to-day. And this is an attempt to try and offer a new vehicle Cool.

I know there are a lot of organizations that are making an effort internally to kill email, online collaboration portals. Some of you may have heard of Slack. Maybe you are using Skype or Google Hangouts. But that seems to be from what you said, that is the way to communicate internally without having the email chain going around and waiting for a response. You can have a real-time conversation much more quickly involving many more people. Instead of a phone call which is one-to-one, or an email where everybody chimes in and you've got now 50 emails on one topic and 2 of them are relevant.

Well, I think that's spot on. But the other thing I would offer is that in your desire to make an organization or a workplace less email-centric and email dominant, just make sure you have a viable solution to replace it. Because what we have found oftentimes is that we've used other channels to replace email, and then there are times where the default to email might have been the most effective communication channel. I think there's still room for both.

Cool, good. Well, it looks like the question queue is clear, and we have reached the top of the hour, which I knew we would. Oh, wait a minute. Let me just see here. We do have one So question, and this is from a fellow consultant, but it could be any business owner. For example, when we're stuck on a Facebook campaign being rejected, maybe they're trying to advertise, are you aware, is there an email or a group or maybe live chat where you can get back in touch and see what's wrong and how to get it fixed or any sort of support?

I'm not specifically familiar with what channels we offer that are helping to troubleshoot or to address those issues. I've got to imagine that there is a resource. I don't know about a live chat, but there should be a link of some sort that provides a way around because ultimately just being stuck and not moving things forward isn't very good. It's not good for anyone. I'm not familiar with the specifics I would think there would be something.

We ran into that situation once with a client. There's a 20% maximum text restriction on advertisements, and we bumped our head against that. And text was a little bit ambiguous because it was part of a logo, but it really wasn't text, but it was. And I can't remember how I got in touch, but there was a link that was part of the rejection that I followed up on, and I will say Facebook did respond back to me and we were able to get it resolved. And with a couple little minor tweaks, we got it resubmitted and it got approved really quickly. So there are actually real people on the other end of those. They pay attention to that stuff. So that's good. So cool. Well, listen, we, we are out of time. If you do have questions, by all means feel free to get in touch with me, Eric, at Powered by WSI. And I will be happy to get those over to Shane and see if we need any more follow-up. But that concludes this week's Free Webinar Wednesdays episode. We'll look forward to seeing you next Wednesday and every Wednesday at 1 o'clock Eastern time here at freewebinarwednesdays.com.

Until then, have a great week everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.