Working at Meta will change a person. In a good way.
“What exactly was your job at Facebook, er, Meta?”
It’s a good question. I was part of a team of former brand and agency misfits and specialists called Creative Shop. In short, we helped brands and agencies bring big ideas to life on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and whatever cool, new thing Meta made available to advertisers. I was (am) two parts creative director, one part strategist, and one part general tech and data nerd.
For brands, we helped them behave purposefully on our platforms and drive their business goals. This process typically involved deep collaboration with their agencies or internal creative teams. I worked with Meta’s largest global brand partners and helped to build a global team to support them.
P&G, Unilever, Target, Walmart, Nike, Visa, Taco Bell, AB InBev, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola, to name a few.
Oftentimes, we were working with our clients’ creative agencies. We’d work upstream, using data-inspired insights to help to shape briefs. We would then sit in a room with the creatives to help translate their ideas to Meta’s unique creative spaces. For the agencies who were leaning in, we’d work with leadership to develop agency-wide initiatives. Every year, we’d bring together global leaders from the most influential agencies for Meta’s Creative Council in Cannes.
I led the creation of two methods that the entire Creative Shop organization adopted. Brand Cornerstone was a two-day workshop for performance marketers designed to establish brand fundamentals so that their publishing would become purposeful. HyperHack was a two-day hot house session with a creative agency in which we would go from brief to big idea to building prototypes, then finally, client presentation. The methods were chaotic and far from perfect, but that’s why they worked.
Creative Shop was different from a typical agency job. It forced me to uncover skills I didn’t know I had. But mostly, it was fun and felt important. We launched Super Bowl activations, built content for global audiences, personalized content for specific audiences, launched new ad products, infiltrated popular culture, and ate a lot of free food while doing it.
“Did you meet Mark?” is another thing people ask me. He seemed like a pretty busy guy but I did get a chance to work with him when we made this video for Cannes one year. 👇
