Facebook Delivers Confident Pitch to Advertisers

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Facebook Delivers Confident Pitch to Advertisers

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Facebook on Tuesday made a pointed pitch to Madison Avenue: We know how to get your messages to real people, nearly one billion of them, because we know exactly who they are and whom they trust.

Speaking to marketers in New York at a time when the company faces acute pressure to increase revenue, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, sought to assure the industry that Facebook was single-mindedly focused on proving the promise of advertising on its platform.

“Rather than just talk at large groups of anonymous people, businesses can relate to a consumer and establish an ongoing relationship,” she said at the Advertising Week conference. “And importantly, that consumer has an average of 130 friends there, so when they are talking to that consumer, that person brings their friends along.”

Ms. Sandberg played down the company’s falling stock price, saying the ethos of the West Coast meant that the company had already moved on.

“While certainly people were disappointed, you know, Silicon Valley companies, we cycle quickly,” she said. “We iterate so quickly, and so we’re pretty good at moving forward. We launch products. Some of them work. We launch the next product.”

Ms. Sandberg, pressed by her interlocutor, the television journalist Charlie Rose, said that pressure from investors had neither damped confidence among employees nor stymied their ability to churn out new products. “We are really happy with the progress we are making,” she said.

The enthusiasm has not spread to Wall Street. The company has lost nearly half its value since its initial public offering in May, and its executives have been criticized for setting high expectations and failing to meet them.

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