For the past few years Zuckerberg’s challenge was to show investors and advertisers the profit that could be made from Facebook’s most valuable asset, the personal data. Mark great as he was at vision and product, he had very little experience in building a big advertising business. That would be the job of Zuckerberg deputy Sheryl Sandberg, who had done the same for Google.
< At Facebook we have a broad mission, we want to make the world more open and connected > Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
The business model we see today was created by Sheryl Sandberg and the team she built at Facebook. Publicly Sandberg and Zuckerberg had been downplaying the extent of the personal data Facebook was collecting, and emphasizing users privacy.
< That’s our mission, we have to do that, because if people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things then we’re failing them > – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
But internally Sandberg ( The COO Of Facebook) would soon lead Facebook in a very different direction. In 2012, there’s a meeting in which it was everyone who built stuff inside ads and Sandberg basically recited the reality which is revenue was flattening, it wasn’t slow or declining but it wasn’t growing nearly as fast as investors would have guessed so she basically said like investors have to do something.
So there was a big effort to basically pull out all the stops and start experimenting way more aggressively. The realities is that Facebook has a lot of personal data, and the truth is that none of that is actually valuable to any marketer, they want commercially interesting data, like what products did you take off the shelf at BestBuy, what did you buy in your last grocery, did it include diapers? do you have kids? are you a head of household? it’s things like that, things that exist in the outside world that just do not exist inside Facebook at all.
Sandburg’s team started developing new ways to collect personal data from users, wherever they went on the internet
and when they weren’t on the Internet at all. So there’s this extraordinary thing that happens that doesn’t get much attention at the time about four or five months before the IPO, and the company announces its first relationship with data broker companies companies that most Americans aren’t all aware of. Thoses companies wanted that go out and buy up data about each and every one of us. where we shop? where we live? what our traffic patterns are? what our families are doing? what magazines we read?.
Data that the consumer doesn’t even know that’s ot’s being collected about them, because it’s being collected from the rest of their lives by companies they don’t know, and it’s now being shared with Facebook so that Facebook can target ads back to the user
What Facebook does is profile you, if you’re on Facebook, it’s collecting everything you do, if you’re off Facebook it’s using tracking pixels to collect what you’re browsing and for its micro-targeting to work for its business model toward, it has to remain a surveillance machine. They made a product that was a better tool for advertisers than anything that had ever come before.
