Rob Norman, CEO at GroupM Interaction Worldwide, discusses the online advertising and privacy with Facebook and mobile phones.
Transcript: GroupM Interaction Worldwide's Rob Norman
Agencies thrive through complexity. The more difficult it is to do something, the more important it is for the two principles, in this case the clients on the one hand and the owners of the media inventory on the other, to have intermediaries like us that can help both of them navigate the needs of the other. So it s shifting, and it s shifting in a way that I think we like.
We re able to sell more people more services. The more granular things become, the more there is a need to look at how those things work individually, how they work in combination, crucially, and as paradigms shift and the way that consumers use media changes, having people with the ability to understand what the impact of those changes is, both in the media they re now using that is new, but also the effect that it has on the media that they used to use, and all of those associated behaviors like purchase patterns and purchase behaviors, becomes a key part of our job.
We have been talking about mobile advertising for any amount of time, and it s felt like it's the thing that is waiting to happen, the next big thing, but it s been held back by so many things. It's been held back by network performance, obviously in terms of bandwidth. It's been held back handset performance in terms of the capabilities. Its been held back by interface performance as in terms of punching keys and intuitive navigation and so forth, and when we look at what s changed in all of those, they ve all changed a little bit, but have they changed so much? I m not sure. The mobile screen is still the size by in large of the mobile screen. And you could argue by in large that there is a fundamental issue here, that the devices people use in the mobile market by in large were developed as voice devices, ways for people to have conversations with one another, and the screens that you got with them were sufficient to display the information, the number, or brief text that would support that particular function. My contention is that it requires a new generation of devices and massively popular new generation of devices that are connectivity and communication devices in the widest sense that, sure, people still use to make phone calls on, and sure, people still use to text, but it s not their only reason for being. And I think we re a way back still on the device side, and whilst the iPhone clearly is a Trojan horse in that direction, one of the challenges that that device faces despite it s beauty, is firstly it s on a 2G connection via the edge network, which is a pretty poor experience from an internet and content point of view, and secondly, a problem that my niece identified (she s nine, incidentally) is you can t text on an iPhone without looking at the screen. So one of the key interface advantages of the old technology, she feels she s loosing with the new.
From my own part, I am a somewhat guilty user of Facebook, in that I felt like an interloper, to start with, but I ve discovered that even people of my venerability are finding it useful. Now, whether they re going to find any extension of that in the ad model useful and valuable, that s another questions altogether.
My favorite thing today, because that s all the context I can manage, is the Blackberry Facebook application, which I downloaded today, and no doubt I am now one of 813,000,000 who did the same thing in the last 24 hours, and I ve discovered that 95% of Facebooks functionality is now available on my mobile.
Well at first blush the Facebook model that applies all the characteristics of social networking and the social graph as Facebook refers to it, sounds utterly compelling. My own sake feel and and I fear the notion of the social schill. I find it very very worrying that all of the people around me in a passive kind of will appear to be actively recommending things to me. That somehow their actions will be interpreted as recommendations and those recommendations will find its way into my space. I think Facebook has gone over hurdles before, it was a big hurdle to go from a college product to an everyone product, but the people who were in the college product were never affected negatively by the everyone product --- well there were a few people that were horrified by their moms and people like me, their uncles, in my case, going on face book. They were challenged again I think when they developed the mini-feed and news feed idea, which suddenly involved push into your Facebook environment rather than pull into you Facebook environment. And I think they ve gotten over that as well, because the same utility, the same connectedness, and awareness of people around seems applicable in both of those cases. I think the advertising model, the idea that I gave up some very declarative data about myself, which was really stuff I told my friends, and wanted my friends to know, was happy for them to know, is then being used without my explicit permission, to be advertising targeted, or with my explicit permission to be an advertising recommender, I find pretty concerning, and I don t think I ll be alone in that
Well, it's interesting, isn't it, because you have one argument that says Well, you ve got to expect just to monetize it in one way, and if they weren't paying $4.99 to be a member of Facebook, you kind of get what you pay for, and if you pay nothing, then you get, by in large, what you ve given. And I can sort of understand that, on one dimension, but I think the Facebook ecosystem is both huge and enormously delicate, and I think it s terribly, terribly, fragile. Facebook will tell you that Facebook is not a social community at all, it s actually an aggregation of 57,000 social communities made up of Stanford students, WPP workers, people who are interested in tangerines, whatever it may happen to be, and within those environments they think they will find it acceptable. I m really not so sure, I m not convinced that this is the way that monetization is going to come to Facebook whilst maintaining the confidence of the it s community.
