Ep 22: Facebook’s Head of Local, Phillip Rather, on how multi-location brands should leverage the platform for brand and performance marketing at the national and local levels
As marketers plan for 2021, their strategies will have to shift accordingly or they will get left behind. These are new trends, habits, and behaviors that will not change when the COVID crisis has passed, including the consumer view on what it means to be local and the importance of investing in local connections and communities, especially through digital, as well as focusing on brand purpose throughout every level of how companies operate. Today’s guest is Phillip Rather, Head of Local for Facebook. He has been with Facebook for more than a decade, and he has a broad perspective on the Facebook platform and a deep understanding of the multi-location marketing paradigm. Listen in as Phillip shares an analogy between the railroad and the future of digital, makes the distinction between SMBs and local, and explains what he focuses on in his role. We also learn about the relationship between national and local across mediums and the importance of collaboration versus centralized understanding, and Phillip describes some of the vertical use cases he hopes to address. Tune in to find out how Facebook has been affected by COVID and how COVID will change the face of digital marketing forever, as well as Phillip’s advice for how businesses – both direct-to-consumer and big brands – can prepare themselves for the upcoming wave of creative digital innovation!
Key Points From This Episode:
Phillip’s fun fact: A hamburger his grandparents created was on the front page of USA Today.
The analogy between the railroad and digital and investing in where it is going.
Phillip makes the distinction between SMBs and local and what he focuses on in his role.
Cleaning up the historically messy relationship between national and local across mediums.
Collaboration between two different actors in the system versus centralized understanding.
Learn about collaborative ads and the vertical use cases Phillip seeks to address.
How Walmart’s national-local marketing is progressive and empowering for franchisees.
Why marketers are moving towards simple machine learning over complicated solutions.
The importance of collaboration and communication and how advertising and communication have become intertwined during COVID.
How Facebook is solving basic problems with their parent-child structures.
The innovation Phillip sees in Facebook Marketing Partners to make repetitive tasks easier.
National and local friction during COVID, how Facebook sought to alleviate it with free tools.
How Facebook is preparing for the wave of digital marketing coming out of the pandemic.
The value of providing not only the technology but also education for digital marketing.
Phillip’s advice brands is to get their business in order to prepare for the future of digital.
What a CMO of a national franchise business needs to do to be ready for the next wave of creative innovation.
Why local community has never mattered more – Facebook is global, but they’re going local.
Brand work and polished content versus creatively appealing to the heart of the consumer.
The need for more a sophisticated measurement of lead and conversion.
Phillip’s take on the CoVID-19 vaccine, remote work, and increased hours on Facebook.
Tweetables:
“I actually was doing local before I realized it, but I've always thought about things in a very scalable way. When I got to Facebook, I was working on what became the Facebook Marketing Partner program, and it really reinforced this idea that, through ad tech and automation, we can clean [up] some of [the] historically messy relationship between national and local across all these mediums.” — @PhillipRather [0:13:08]
“A lot of this is about collaboration and communication, and we're seeing that internally and externally. Communication is difficult with a national brand but, also, you have to communicate even more with your customers. Marketing and communications over COVID have become intertwined. What's the difference between advertising and communication? Especially when you're using things like Messenger and all of these other use cases we began to see.” — @PhillipRather [0:21:57]
“I think we need to help, through education and through the set up, to make them feel confident on a local level that what they're buying into on Facebook is done appropriately. How do you have that level of customization, but also the best practices of communication and marketing built into it? I think it's a line that can be towed, but the personal relationships are always more complicated in the technology.” — @PhillipRather [0:36:20]
“My point to any brand would be get your business in order. Get it all in order right now, open the lines of communication, open, the lines of education, and support, collaboration, we will help with that, partners can help with that. But if you get yourself in order, then you'll be prepared for the things that come which is potentially more personalization within this big framework.” — @PhillipRather [0:42:20]
“We've got a world out there where creating content that is not as polished is working very well. That's what you see with some of the direct-to-consumer brands, not these big brands, is being much more nimble, still using brand with the purpose of DR, and trying to figure out, ‘Do I run a video and then I retarget the people who watched it for three seconds, and then I hit him with the local ad?’ There are some definitely some very scientific, smart people out there doing this stuff, but at the end of the day, brand still tugs on your heart.” — @PhillipRather [0:51:29]