Hey everyone, Josh here.
Welcome to Super Bowl Week. It's the most euphemistic time of the year, when companies avoid using "Super Bowl" in their copy for fear of getting sacked by the NFL; when companies pony up $5.6 million for 30-seconds to use the world's biggest media stage to try to influence 115 million people.
(For all the ads that are in the Super Bowl, check out our Super Bowl Ad Tracker.)
It's fitting, perhaps, that at a time when Facebook is at the center of several capital-C Conversations (its role in 2016; its role in spreading misinformation; its role in siphoning off ad revenue from publishers; its role in 2020; its role in data privacy regulation; you get the drift), the social behemoth is using the Super Bowl to push its Facebook Groups product. (Facebook said last week that 1.4 billion people use Groups each month.)
Facebook's CMO, Antonio Lucio, told my colleague David Cohen, that “The focus in 2020 is to ensure that the Facebook brand is more present in moments of culture.”
What is a bigger "moment of culture" than the Super Bowl?
Lucio then added: “Cultural moments are experienced through our platform every day. We felt this year that we wanted to be part of that conversation in a more direct way.”
Irony alert.
Facebook has been pushing its consumer products - most notably its video assistant Portal - for the last few months, with a series of campaigns using the beloved Muppets. And now it turns to Rocky and Chris Rock to get us to love Groups.
It seems that the company is trying to convince TV viewers that it isn't the evil company that the press and politicians make it out to be. With a huge spend over the back-half of 2019, culminating in an ad in the Super Bowl, Facebook really wants to change its perception. And as the company continues to bring all of its brands - Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus - under the Facebook umbrella, its messaging becomes more evident.
But does it even matter? Facebook has the world wrapped around its Like button. In January 2019, for example, Consumer Reports found that even though public trust has eroded post-Cambridge Analytica, people still rely on the social network for keeping in touch with family, keep up with news, and the need to organize/participate in groups.
In other words, the company can do bad things (from data breaches to forcing an industry to 'pivot to video' based on false metrics) and people will still use it because they've been trained to think that they must. And it gets a push from Wieden+Kennedy, the same agency that brought us Nike's Colin Kaepernick spot.
It's like Facebook knows advertising can work.
Hope everyone has a great week, and that you have fun watching the Niners and the Chiefs battle it out for Joe Montana's heart.
If you have any tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, please drop me an email. Thanks for reading!
Josh Sternberg
Media and Tech Editor, Adweek
