Last year, travel group AAA estimated that about 80 million Americans traveled during the Thanksgiving holiday. It was the busiest Thanksgiving ever at airports across the country, and say some reports those records could be broken this year.
Much of that travel will be done by young adults returning home from school or new cities to see family and reconnect with old friends. That last part is the core of Facebook’s first brand campaign in four years.
In a new advertisement called ‘Home For The Holidays’ we see people on their way home and we see that various gatherings are being organized on Facebook. Created by agency Droga5 and set to the tune of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash’s ‘Girl From the North Country’, the spot skillfully evokes the comfort and emotional security that only the warm embrace of old friends and familiar surroundings can provide.
The goal here is to reintroduce Facebook to a new generation of users and remind people “what made Facebook magic in the first place,” according to the campaign’s press release. It’s just the beginning of the brand’s efforts in the coming months to reach younger audiences, including upcoming partnerships with Sports Illustrated and 10 U.S. universities related to college sports.
Briana de Veer, Facebook’s Global Marketing Director, says one in four young adults (ages 18 to 29) in the US and Canada use Facebook Marketplace. Hundreds of thousands of young adults in the US and Canada create Facebook Dating profiles every month, and young adult matches are increasing 10% year over year. “We see young adults using Facebook to help them navigate through life stages,” says de Veer. “They move into their first apartment and turn to Marketplace to furnish it on a budget, or use Facebook Dating to find love or join Facebook groups to meet people in a new city.”
Sounds great. Except that compared to Facebook’s cultural reality, the new ad is as much a fantasy as meeting your high school crush on the next trip home. This may be Facebook’s first brand campaign in four years, but it picks up exactly where it left off: presenting a brand image that neither reflects nor defends who it actually is in the real world. Because in the real version of this place, these old friends would probably be standing in the bar yelling at each other about political grandstanding, health care facts, and anti-immigrant rants.
Look, we all know advertising is about ambition. For brands, it’s about projecting the roles they want to play in our lives. For us it’s about seeing an image that we might want to identify with. But marketers must find a balance between that manufactured ideal and the reality of how they exist in the world. There is ambition and there is delusion, and it is a brand’s job to know the difference.
The bad things
It’s hard to ignore the obvious dichotomy between Facebook’s advertising and its decisions on the ground. In January, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a slew of changes to the company’s content moderation, including scrapping its fact-checking program, which was originally created to combat the spread of misinformation through its social media apps. “It’s time to return to our roots around free speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. He also acknowledged that there would be more “bad things” on the platforms as a result of the decision.
“The reality is this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means we’ll intercept less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s messages and accounts we accidentally delete.”
Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, told The New York Times that this “reopened the floodgates to the very same wave of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that January 6 unleashed – and which continues to incite violence in the real world.”
A former Meta employee said Platformer”I really think this is a precursor to genocide […] We have seen it happen. The lives of real people will actually be at risk.” Amnesty International said these changes “posed a serious threat to vulnerable communities worldwide” and “dramatically increased the risk that the company would once again contribute to mass violence and gross human rights abuses – just as it did in Burma in 2017.”
However, that’s not all. As Meta continues to build AI superintelligence at full speed, it leaves a path of ill-considered consequences in its wake. In August, Reuters reported this that an internal Meta memo revealed that the company’s rules for AI chatbots had allowed “sensual” chats with children.
Not quite the warm, fuzzy vibe the brand is going for.
I asked De Veer how the company thinks about balancing the parts of the brand they want to reflect back into the world with a campaign like this, and the obvious challenges that remain. “We continue to invest in keeping people safe on our platforms and removing harmful content that violates our policies,” she said. “That’s critical foundational work that allows people to see and experience the brand’s core value, which is the focus of this campaign.”
Back to the future
At the end of 2020, I named Facebook the worst brand of the year, based on the Grand Canyon-sized gap between the company it imagined itself to be and the company defined by its actual, real-world actions. At the time, I called out Facebook for the way it portrayed itself as a warm and fuzzy marketplace of ideas while knowingly facilitating the spread of health misinformation and political falsehoods.
Sound familiar?
In 2021, the last time Facebook launched a brand campaign, that old familiar feeling was back. This time it was a place called “The Tiger & The Buffalo,” which somehow hoped that dropping some friends in a 1908 Henri Rousseau painting would distract us from the revelations in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook filesthe testimony of whistleblower Frances Haugen, and a study about how climate change denial spread unchecked on Facebook.
The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same at Facebook, it seems. I actually feel sorry for ad agency Droga5, which has created some truly impressive ads for the brand over the years, including two of the very best to come out of COVID: ‘Never Lost’ and ‘To survive’about a beloved restaurant in New York called Coogan’s.
Not only is Facebook’s algorithm still fine-tuned to bring you the angriest, most controversial content it can, it’s also pulling back on efforts to combat misinformation and vitriol known to incite violence. With its new campaign, it offers yet another distraction from its problematic role in the culture.
The strategy here is to remind people why Facebook mattered in the first place. It is a reference to the golden times between 2006 and 2010, when it was actually a tool to mainly connect with people. Twenty years later, Facebook is all that and more – plus, you know, anger-inducing. Instead of living in the past, the brand should celebrate its best moments while actively working to fix the worst.It’s definitely not a chair.
Perhaps the closest the brand came to that was in the ad called ‘Here together.” It acknowledged what Zuckerberg recently called the “bad things,” and defined its role in regulating them, saying, “From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy, so we can all get back to what made Facebook great in the first place.”
That was in 2018, when all the people in ‘Home For The Holidays’ were still in high school. It’s time for this brand to mature too.
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