CMO World Tour: David Fischer, Facebook's VP of advertising and global operations

In digital marketing, sometimes moving fast is more important than being perfect. So says David Fischer, VP of advertising and global operations at Facebook.

Mistakes happen. But brands (Facebook included) are better off acting quickly and taking ownership of mistakes, rather than waiting and polishing their message until it’s absolutely perfect. 

“The benefit is you are much more genuine, you are direct, you are in real time and you are part of the conversation,” says Fischer, who always has a Mac, an iPhone or an iPad close by.

“I was just on vacation with my family last week and we were talking about how much has changed, that even if you go five minutes and you don’t have access, how you feel like life is about to end. It’s a funny place where we have reached,” he notes.

The key to getting started with Facebook, Fischer says, is to just get started. At Facebook delivering this ethos sometimes takes the form of a “Hackathon,” an all-day, all-night work session at the company’s headquarters to collaborate and innovate some successful (and not so successful) ideas. Pizza is brought in, sometimes a live band plays music and staff show off their results – or walk back to the drawing-board.

Fischer tries to impart that momentum-building spirit on to Facebook’s clients, reminding them to keep up pace not only with their competitors, but also with the real key decision-makers of today’s marketing strategy: people.

But return-on-investment is not always valued on ranking first in number of fans, says Fischer, who used to work at Google. Fans are also means to an end.

Reports from Nielsen and comScore are proving the value of advertising with a social context, he says. A person is four-times more likely to purchase from a brand after he’s seen his or her friend has bought that brand’s product or has visited its store.

“You want to build your brands around people,” Fischer says. “You want to build those connections and you want to make it personalised, and then you want people to share and talk about [your message.]”

For example, if Starbucks issues an advertisement for a pumpkin spice latte to its 30 million Facebook fans, the company actually has the chance to reach those fans’ 300 million friends. “That’s incredibly powerful,” Fischer says.

Building an equity of personal connections came to Taco Bell’s rescue last year. When false rumours started spreading about the quality of the food products, loyal fans started pouring defence on to the restaurant’s 5-million member Facebook page.

So how does the VP of advertising use Facebook for his own personal life? “It’s probably not that different from lots of other people,” he says.

Fischer recently posted photos of his child’s first day of school, checked-in at locations on his holiday in Mexico and asked for friends’ recommendations on which car his wife should buy. But that’s not all.

“I’m friends with any number of CMOs,” he says. It’s a “fun way to connect”.

Frédéric Colas: Are you able to judge how comfortable CMOs are with digital?

David Fischer: I think there is a personal level of comfort with their own experiences and how they use digital, and then I think there is a sense of the opportunity that presents for that brand.

What we are really seeing is there is not a CMO or other executive from a major brand that I can think of whom we have met with or we have talked to who hasn’t been interested in Facebook and the opportunity that it presents. I do think there has been some distinction between who is really innovating and leading the way (and frankly they’re reaping a lot of the benefits on Facebook), and who is maybe still in the tyre-kicking, feeling-around stage.

[There is] a recognition that Facebook is a marketing platform. It is an ecosystem. And so there are opportunities for a brand to have pages and a place that you can come and represent your brand. And take the fact that 750 million people around the world are on Facebook spending more time on Facebook than any other site. And connect with those people and publish to those people. And then so you have a page, you have a publishing strategy, you have an advertising and marketing strategy. All of that adds up together.

FC: What would you say to a CMO who says ‘yeah I think Facebook is interesting, but I let my teams figure out what to do and I’m not being involved myself?’

DF: I think in terms of actually leading the way, all of us are in competitive businesses. Facebook and every marketer who is active on Facebook, we all have competitors out there. And one of the keys to success, one of the opportunities that Facebook presents as a marketing ecosystem, it brings lots of components together. But one of the challenges it presents is that it doesn’t fit into any one bucket. So most organisational structures where you have a marketing team and a PR team and an operations team and other pieces and then different global parts of the organisation, it often takes actually bringing together the key parts.

…It’s sort of a virtual cycle when you involve all the different parts of the pages, of the ads of the publishing strategy, of the apps you might build. That’s when you really get more than just the sum of the parts.

But the problem is if you don’t have a leader who is helping to say look we actually need to behave differently as a company, then perhaps we have behaved in traditional media, in traditional marketing. Then it can be harder. Maybe there are some companies that get there quickly, but for most of them, it actually takes some leadership to say this is important and we are going to embrace this and try to beat our competitors to the punch. 

What are the questions that CMO’s ask you most about Facebook?

DF: One of the [questions] that we often get asked around is, ‘okay so there are lots of people out there, but what are the measurements?’ I understand TV and I understand some of the metrics with TV. And I understand search because I understand that it’s a very much sort of a clear return. And what Facebook is, Facebook is you know: if search is very much about, ‘I need this, I enter it, I get a result,’ Facebook is much more. It’s a little bit like how we live real life.

People are organising the principal of most of our lives. We meet people, we chat with them, we see what’s going on. We go to Facebook, we see what people are talking about, what’s new with people. So you are in constant discovery mode, and you discover what you might want, what you aspire to, what your friends are buying, where they are going. And so it creates this certainly strong top of the funnel brand awareness, brand building opportunities all the way down to direct response opportunities.

FC: You insist on the fact, ‘get started, get involved.’ Is that on both the brand and on the CMO personally?

DF: It is the case that for, I would say, the majority of the brands who are having the most success on Facebook, there is an active CMO who has personally lent her or his time and credibility and gotten involved. It doesn’t have to be the case, but there has to be someone with influence and strength in the organisation and the ability to make things happen. Who jumps in and participates because a lot of it is: if you come up with a great idea then you actually need to go and execute.

…There is a number of people, I think if we are being honest about it, who feel that …it is important for them to ‘check’ the Facebook ‘box.’ So when they are asked by their boss or their board, ‘are we active on Facebook?’ they say yes we are doing something on Facebook.

But if that is the motivation, then it is unlikely that great things are going to happen or that you are going to move ahead of your competitors and take advantage of the opportunity that Facebook creates. So I think it’s that… it’s having a vision about what that opportunity is that we work on together, and then we go and execute and try to move quickly on.