Facebook Marketing Conference: What's On Tap?
Tomorrow's fMC may include ad product surprises.
Tomorrow's fMC may include ad product surprises.
For the second time in less than 10 months, Facebook tomorrow will court Madison Avenue with an advertising-focused summit in New York. Last year’s conference was headlined by Facebook Global Marketing Solutions leaders Carolyn Everson, Jennifer Kattula, and Blake Chandlee. The company’s event on Wednesday will be keynoted by COO Sheryl Sandberg, starting at noon and running till 6 p.m.
Dubbed the first-ever fMC (short for Facebook Marketing Conference), the show’s schedule doesn’t include CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose speeches at the firm’s annual f8 developers conference have turned into online must-sees for the worldwide tech community. But sending Sandberg, the brand’s business community celebrity, appears to send a strong message to advertisers that they aren’t an afterthought.
“It’s the f8 for advertisers and marketers,” said Joe Ciarallo, a rep for Buddy Media. “During the developers conference, I think some of the marketing community was feeling left out. So this is Facebook’s way of reaching out to the advertising crowd.”
ClickZ News will report from the event at the American Museum of Natural History. Menlo Park, CA-based Facebook has been mum on specifics of what it plans to share with advertisers on this Leap Day, but here are a few possibilities:
When asked about what would hypothetically be the most important development, Shaun Quigley, a VP and digital director at ad agency Brunner, pointed to Timelines for brands.
“One top Timeline consideration is that a brand’s Facebook presence no longer must date to when it joined the site but can be represented with content populating its Timeline from throughout its history,” Quigley explained. “Brands, for example, can add an event for when they were introduced commercially, and literally tell the entire story of the brand. Also, from a pure look and feel perspective, brands have more visual power with timeline.”