The focus is on building scalable products: Facebook's Sandeep Bhushan

We go by the philosophy that I have the right to be in business only if I can help your business grow, he says

We are running internal audits to get to the issue of data security and strengthen our commitment to data privacy, Sandeep Bhushan tells Sangeeta Tanwar.

What has been the business impact of the ongoing data sharing row that Facebook is facing?

We have a long-standing partnership of trust with our advertisers. Our engagement with most of the advertisers is not short-term. There is an understanding that we bring value to them at the every stage of communication. Yes, advertisers have questions and these are the same questions that everybody has. And those questions are what are the facts of the case? And what is Facebook doing about it? I think we have been consistent in our communication to all the stakeholders — to the press, users and advertisers from the time when we figured out what the issue is. We are proud to say that in all of this, we have not lost even a single advertiser. They are seeing the things we are doing. 

What are the key steps that the company has taken to allay user and advertiser fear around data privacy and security?

To tackle the situation, we have made three points critically. The first is that we are not at all proud of what has happened. We have owned up to the issue and said that such things are not acceptable. The second point is that we have said that we will cooperate to fix this with every piece of understanding that we have got. We are running huge amount of internal audits to get to the issue and strengthen our commitment to data privacy. And third we have made a slew of changes that are required to make the user experience better in two dimensions — privacy and transparency.

For example, in the area of advertising there could be many pieces of advertisements that could be published and earlier consumers and certain section of publishers could not see that it has been published. Today, you can go back and see that. All of this work has not started now. We have been putting some of these pieces together as early as 2015. All these efforts have now gathered pace. Again, take the issue of access to friends’ profile on Facebook — we shut down Kogan’s app in 2015. Infact, in 2014 we had made changes to our platform to prevent abusive apps, dramatically limiting data apps could access. And earlier this year we banned Cambridge Analytica from Facebook — which has been in news. 

We have been on this journey of strengthening data security and promoting transparency for some time. We are by no means done. This is a process that will go on further. 

What are the key focus areas on the product front for Facebook?

We go by the philosophy that I have the right to be in business only if I can help your business grow. So, the question that we continuously ask ourselves is what are the products that we can bring out to help clients grow their business and can solve their business problems. We also see how we can measure value. Everything works on these two dynamics.

Facebook works on the twin axes of products and platforms. We offer dual advantage of delivering advertisers the largest reach and the right frequency of delivering communication messages. The latter is what I will call a continuous source of our advantage. One of our interesting products is dynamic ads. If a user is looking for, say, some lodging options in travel industry online, our products can give more choices to the user in the same segment in real time. We are big on following the consumer trend. We now have interesting formats like Stories on both Facebook and Instagram. For Stories we are working closely with a lot of stakeholders because this is something new and requires deep understanding of the consumers. We are working closely with creative agencies to build advertisements that look appropriate in Stories and whose impact can be measured.

We are focused on building consumer products that can scale-up. Facebook Live is one such product. For advertisers launching a new product, be it a car or any other offering — an interview featuring brand ambassador is a given. Globally, video is the next big thing. We are big on video as is evident from the fact that 2.2 billion people can broadcast straight up using our product.

Facebook is driving the narrative to shift the measurement debate from clicks and impressions to measuring the business impact. Where does the industry stand on this?

One of the challenges on digital measurement is that both digital industry and advertisers are focused on internal matrices like clicks, click through and cost of clicks and not focused on what it will do for the business.

This conversation has heated up in the last two years. We work closely with stakeholders like Nielsen and Millword Brown to sharpen the conversation on outcome variables on running campaign in different media channels. According to a Millword Brown study, digital stands out as the most efficient reach medium in terms of cost spent to absolute reach and impact for every advertising dollar spent by the marketers. With Nielsen, we do sales lift. Take for instance, L’Oreal which witnessed a sharp rise in the in-store sales of Garnier acne-fighting face wash products for men in the markets where it ran a campaign exclusively on Facebook. The objective here is to help advertisers correctly allocate money either to brand imagery or sales uplift. 

The third piece related to digital measurement is ‘attribution’ that the industry is working on. Herein, the focus is to figure out that when it comes to performance (sales) that is direct response in the e-commerce space which channel (media platform) got the traffic or the result. These are the areas where we are working closely with the industry stakeholders to get the industry more measurement-centric to focus on the business impact flowing out of the marketing expenditure.

At Facebook, we offer advertisers measurement in three buckets – reach, resonance as to whether the brand got the right imagery and the third is impact (the sales). Whatever aspect of the communication value chain we are looking at, we have products to measure the same for our advertisers. We are asking industry stakeholders to ask the right questions.

The advertisers need to ask what is the cost of making business impact instead of asking the cost of clicks. You need to measure the outcome of the problem that you want to solve. So how would you go about creating a real time experience for consumers across categories?

There are two parts that have to come together to solve the experience puzzle. To deliver experiences one needs content and data. The content part is what gets delivered to clients through images or videos. We are the biggest player on content creation — that is the creative cloud. Adobe is the original creative company. We have got billions of images and trillions of data assets available to us . We are using AI to actually get some intelligent meaning out of it. For example, how do you actually select an image out of millions of images? We cannot do that manually. Again, how do you target anonymous users visiting your website and other digital assets? Apart from content, data is crucial to delivering experiences. This is where our experience cloud comes in to picture. We combine both content and data in real time to deliver experiences.