Facebook turns to old-fashioned methods for advertising campaign

Facebook made its fortunes by convincing marketers to shift their advertising budgets to the internet. But the social media company is embarking on advertising campaigns of its own - and is turning to the old-fashioned formats of billboards and television.

In February the company launched a campaign in the UK that has seen its ads appear everywhere from the London Underground to the country's most popular TV channels.

According to data from Nielsen, Facebook has splashed out more than £6m on traditional media in the UK this year - up from £16,000 in the whole of last year.

While that spending is tiny in the context of Facebook's annual revenues of $12.4bn or the UK's £18bn advertising market, it highlights a change in the company's approach. Until recently, it built its business through word of mouth, without spending on traditional media.

Neil Spencer, a consultant at Slik Media, said it was ironic that Facebook, which has long sought to convince brands that its platform is more efficient than traditional media, is using "a mass medium with loads of wastage to promote themselves".

Facebook declined to detail the strategic rationale for the campaign, saying only that the ads "celebrate" the connections that people make through the site "and the different kinds of friendship that enrich our lives both on and off Facebook".

Shaun Gregory, chief executive of Exterion Media, which delivers advertising throughout the London Underground, said the reason Facebook had started to invest "shedloads of cash in out-of-home advertising" was that mass media are an essential tool in building a brand and establishing trust with consumers.

"Facebook is going to emerge as one of the major advertisers in the next few years," he predicted.

Facebook more than doubled its global advertising spend from 2012 to 2014, when it spent $135m on adverts, according to last year's earnings statement. Last autumn, it launched its first ever billboard ads, promoting its Messenger App on signs in Los Angeles and Chicago, in a campaign also accompanied by TV spots.

This year, the company has also started buying ads in mass media in Canada and Australia.

In the UK, Facebook's campaign is called "the friends" and features scenes of friends having fun with one another. The ads are lightly branded, featuring only a small Facebook logo, and were designed by the company's in-house creative team, which it calls The Factory.

Since the campaign started in February, Facebook has spent more than £3m on television, £1.5m on outdoor media, £900,000 on cinema, and £600,000 on press, according to the Nielsen data.

In turning to traditional media, Facebook is following Google and many other digital media companies that have adopted old-fashioned methods for brand-building.

Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, said most large web-based or ecommerce marketers were spending at least some money on traditional advertising, with Amazon, Priceline and Google among the largest advertisers on US TV.

British price comparison sites such as Moneysupermarket and Compare the Market have for years ranked among the biggest-spending advertisers in the UK, building their brands through television campaigns worth tens of millions of pounds.

"For Facebook, building and sustaining a brand can't hurt and is relatively costless compared with the revenue opportunity they are pursuing," Mr Wieser said.

Apple and Google also use old media

Apple has for years embraced traditional media to sell its devices. This year it launched a worldwide campaign called "shot on iPhone 6", which features photographs taken with its latest smartphone. The photos are mostly of the outdoors, ranging from forests to lakes, and have appeared in magazines, newspapers, billboards and more.

Google has used traditional media to promote everything from its Android smartphones to Google Maps and Google Play, its app store. Last year the company bought TV, press and outdoor ads to publicise some of the most popular channels on YouTube, its video site. Zoella, the British fashion and beauty vlogger, was among the YouTube stars featured in the promotions.

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