David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…And it’s an iterative process where you’re going to hear a bunch of feedback from brands and you’re going to say, ooh, we got to modify the ad products, which still continues to this day. They roll out and modify ad products. This is not all right, we now have ads in the newsfeed. We’re good. The job is never done here. Of course, quarterbacking all this is going to fall to Sheryl and her team. But again, as you said Ben, this is an iterative process. You can’t divorce product from the feedback from advertisers. And the big advertisers are sure as hell going to expect someone from product who is leading this thing to show up and tell them about it. So Boz needs to come along to these meetings. On December 18th—Boz remembers the exact day—Mark calls him up and is like, Boz, great job working on ads. Hey, I really still need you to come back and work on ads. Boz is like, no way man. I did the past six months for you. I just got married. I’m going on my honeymoon. I’m out. Mark’s like, okay, okay, okay. The next day calls him back December 19th and he’s like, Boz, I just want to say really, really great job again. The company’s in a really tough spot and I really think that you should come keep running ads here. Boz is like, okay, all right. I will reduce my sabbatical from six months to six weeks. I’ll take the holidays the beginning of the year. I’m going to cancel the last four months of my trip. I will do six weeks with my wife and then we’ll fly her friends out to the last two weeks with her. Then I’m going to go fly around the world with Sheryl on a very different trip here. That’s what they do. For most of 2013, Boz and Sheryl are out on the road. They’re pitching advertisers, they’re explaining sponsored stories in the newsfeed on mobile. Why this is so important. Not only do advertisers need education about this new Facebook ad unit, they also need education about mobile advertising in general. They’d only just gotten used to digital advertising on desktop. Totally. Do you remember those Mary Meeker decks that used to go around? Where it would show the mobile advertising, basically the shortcoming. Look at all this attention that has shifted to mobile and yet the monetization just isn’t there. That was a story every year for a decade.…

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