An Ad for Facebook or Chairs?

Today, Facebook officially has 1 billion users.  They also have their first official advertisement. (Click to watch the Facebook Ad). For an example of the general response to this new video, just check out the article in “The Week”: “Facebook’s completely bizarre first commercial… about chairs.” Not great. And I have to agree, the chair thing is a strange.

The primary message in the new ad, starting from the very first image of a chair levitating in a forest of trees, apart from simply being strange,  is not actually communicating the important messege: “Facebook is a thing that connects us.”  What the film communicates, in order, is “chairs are worth celebrating” and then, “Facebook is like chairs”–literally it says this in white words across the screen.  Next, with a lot of images of groups of people: “people gather.” And finally, “chairs connect us … so Facebook, since it is like chairs, and a lot of other technolgies, like phones, also connects us.” Oh, and I almost forgot: man is small in the universe.

This final theme is perhaps the most disconnected part of all of it and encapsulates exactly how off-tone the commercial is. As AdAge reports, Facebook felt that its comparison to a chair was humble. I would say that apart from the ‘idea’ of a chair that structures the commercial, there is nothing humble about it. Indeed, it is much more about massive things, huge crowds, omniscience, and, yes, the universe. By the logic of the commercial, Facebook too is massive (Here is the hidden reference to 1 billion people) and not humble — it is the force that combats the vast expanse of the universe. As Dominque Mosburgen of the Huffington Post jokes of the ad: “it’s quite, shall we say, ambitious.”

Certainly Facebook would like to think that it is a force comparible in scope and power to ‘the universe.’ Especially given the company’s current inability to find exactly what makes it important, and most importantly, profitable.  As the news recently quipped, Zuckerburg is “in over his hoodie.” Perhaps no man can control something as powerful as the universe…?

Jokes aside, Facebook is clearly struggling to define and communicate what makes it both critical to its target audience (everyone) and to investors. This new commercial accompanies the launch of new strategies to monetize Facebook’s main asset: users. One very interesting new plan that deserves brief mention here is to allow users to advertise themselves and pay for premium placement on their friends’ news feeds. In TechCrunch, Josh Constine suggests that this might allow users to advertise, for example, yard sales, and would futher Facebook’s goal of introducing more commerce. But who really knows what parts of themselves people will choose to advertise, or if they will even choose to engage with this new tool. You can look forward to future posts on the fallout from that plan and its ethics.

Until then, make sure you scroll back up and watch the film. What are your thoughts on this advertising strategy?