Members of a Facebook Dads-and-Daughters Group.
Facebook today debuts a brand campaign, its first true multimedia, broad-reach brand campaign and the first under the watch of Global CMO Antonio Lucio since he joined in September. It features Facebook Groups, with the tagline, “More Together.” The work, from Wieden + Kennedy, along with Facebook’s internal agency, Creative X, and Freud Communications, will roll out over the next two weeks and include TV, digital and out-of-home advertising in key markets. It’s the beginning of a long-term “More Together” effort that will eventually highlight other Facebook components such as Facebook Watch.
Out-of-home advertisement as part of Facebook's new "More Together" campaign.
It comes on the heels of Facebook’s F8 developer conference, where the company announced, among other changes and updates, a new and improved Groups product—informed by the acknowledgement that more than 400 million people already belong to groups on the social network and that it is core to many users’ Facebook experience—as well as a redesign that makes it easier for people to find and join the groups relevant to them.
The campaign is part of Lucio’s and the executive team’s overall vision for consumer marketing at Facebook, and it is the first brand advertising for the company—not counting a damage-control campaign that ran following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Historically Facebook’s marketing has been largely limited to product marketing on its own platform and, more recently, sponsored content.
This first Groups-focused advertising is a move that helps bolster Facebook as less of a place for news and more of a destination for communities and a vehicle for bringing people together—certainly a longtime positioning— but in safer, more private and more relevant contexts. “In the last few years, we’ve seen people really connecting [on Facebook],” said Fidji Simo, VP of product management. “We are starting to see much more usage [of the network for communities]. What you’re seeing this week is a new redesign that puts these communities in the center,” she said. “We are also really seeing the growth of more private types of communications. And Groups is very much a part of that. Given that we’re seeing that trend, we decided it make it even easier on the platform.”
The ads feature real people in real Groups from across the country—groups like dog lovers, dads and daughters, and motorheads. “[The concept of] ‘find your Facebook Group because we are more together’ made incredible sense,” Lucio said. “This is real people, real stories, real groups, real words. Our groups have been leveraged to provide some of the insights,” he said.
“When the Facebook experience is at its best, people connect with people to unleash human potential,” especially, he said, at a time of intense polarization around the world. “That experience is more typical and felt directly within the context of Groups, which is what unleashed the whole idea.”
The campaign, of course, comes at a time when Facebook is still working to polish a tarnished image after a relentless string of prominent scandals that have eroded public trust, including reported election meddling, abuse and misuse of the platform, and questions around Facebook’s security, safety and societal impact—even as it has tried to connect the world.
In appointing Lucio, one of the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs and one of the most revered executives in the advertising and marketing industry, Facebook gained a wealth of experience, expertise and global perspective rooted in stints at PepsiCo, Visa and most recently HP Inc. Classic, global marketing leadership and culture-building has been a hallmark of Lucio’s reputation and success as a marketer.
Now in his new role, Lucio is leaning on his “experience of building brands that stand the test of time and being able to share the fact that as a corporation we need a narrative and consistency in a narrative,” he said.
“The big objective is to rebuild trust for the platform and to build value for each and every one of the individual apps,” he said. “That’s what I’m here to do. Obviously you can’t do this on your own; this is what you do [with an] amazing group of people like [VP, Global Affairs and Communications] Nick Clegg and Fidji on the product side to make sure we address the trust and the value issue. On the trust [issue], the first order of business was to create a compelling corporate narrative that will allow Facebook as a corporation to own its narrative. Because we have not been proactive and fully engaged over the past several years, that narrative escaped us.”
Together with fellow Facebook leaders including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, Lucio has been constructing that narrative around three pillars: responsibility (“the things we are fixing and need to be fixed,” such as privacy, transparency and removal of hateful content), social impact (“the things working well that more people need to know about,” for example, its efforts to support small business), and innovation (“our vision of the future of putting technology and information at the service of people to enhance life in the internet age”).
That has meant being more proactive, he said. “Over the last eight weeks what you’re seeing from us is a very regular drumbeat of stories and announcements: Mark talking about privacy and what it means for more intimate communication in groups and the interoperability of apps (such as Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp)—that was an important pronouncement.”
An equally important message the company needs to relay, Lucio said, was that it “cannot and should not solve some of the big issues of the world,” such as election interference. “We welcome input from policy makers to help sort these things out.” What it is doing, however, is “becoming more aggressive in removing harmful content,” such as white-supremacist propaganda, and creating new tools that enable “more transparency and control for people,” he said.
“In order to deliver our objective of delivering trust and adding value, you need end-to-end communication across all the stakeholders—employees, users, corporate clients (our advertisers), opinion leaders, policy makers and journalists,” he said. “You need a lot of collaboration, and that’s why Nick and I are spending so much time together and with app leads like Fidji who are driving an enhanced experience for our users.”
"More Together" will be a multi-year, multi-platform effort. “This is the beginning of a long journey,” Lucio said. “Dealing with our trust issue will mean being consistent on those three pillars. This is going to take years of consistency. Building a brand that stands the test of time means we stay single-minded and behave with integrity.
“I’m just excited that we are finally taking the first step in the journey," Lucio said. "This is no silver bullet; this is just the start of a different conversation with the Facebook app, and hopefully we are beginning to change the conversation around the corporate narrative and the conversation about the apps themselves, which is what we are trying to do with the campaign.”
