AdWords and AdSense had turned Google into an advertising behemoth. And Sandberg was expected to apply her expertise to jump-start Facebook’s ad business, which was lagging in proportion to its skyrocketing user growth. The executives gathered with Sandberg that day were there to diagnose what wasn’t working and to home in on Facebook’s unique proposition to advertisers.
Over the course of a few more meetings, the group determined that Facebook would focus on the biggest and most traditional form of advertising: brand awareness. Facebook, Sandberg pointed out, had a distinct advantage over television, newspapers, and websites like Yahoo and MSN, which had dominated brand advertising in recent years. The social network had much more than just detailed profile information on users; the company also had information about everyone’s activity. Facebook’s great strength was the unparalleled engagement of its users. Facebook knew its users, and it had all their data in one place, so that advertisers didn’t have to rely on cookies.
A forty-year-old mother living in a wealthy suburb who had visited a Facebook page of a ski resort in Park City, Utah, for instance, and who had other wealthy suburban friends who shared photos of their ski vacations, was likely the perfect audience for UGG’s $150 shearling-lined boots. And rather than sell ugly banner ads, Facebook could invite brands to create, and capitalize on, user activity by designing campaigns on the site that drew users to interact through polls, quizzes, and brand pages. Users themselves could comment and share these with friends, generating even more data for both Facebook and its clients.
The way Sandberg saw it, if Google filled demand, then Facebook would create it. Facebook users weren’t there to shop, but advertisers could use the company’s understanding of its users to convert them into shoppers. What she was proposing was essentially a whole new level of tracking. The plan to execute her vision was similarly bold, involving hiring more staff to work under her as well as engineers to develop new ad products. It required Facebook to participate in ad shows and to court the biggest brands.
When Zuckerberg returned from his vacation, he signed off on the new business model. Facebook would run its own ad business and, eventually, rely less on Microsoft as it focused on targeted advertising and new ad tools like games and promotions to get brands directly in front of users. But he wasn’t all that interested in the details—an attitude that Sandberg found baffling. She had thought, from his interest during their courtship dinners, that Zuckerberg was committed to strengthening the business and that he would be actively supportive of her role. As the weeks went by, though, it became apparent that she would have to fight to capture his attention. When she suggested carving out time to talk about the ad business, or asked for more staff or a bigger budget, he brushed off her requests. It was clear that profits ranked far below technology. This was something all Zuckerberg’s early employees knew. “His first priority will always be to build a product that people like, that they feel good about, and that fills a particular need,” explained Mike Hoefflinger, who was the head of business marketing in 2008.
When Sandberg was hired, she had insisted on twice-weekly meetings with Zuckerberg to talk about their agendas and the biggest problems facing the company. She scheduled the meetings for Monday and Friday, so they could start and end the week together. But she didn’t naturally command his attention inside and outside the office in the way Boz and Cox, his friends and peers, did. She struggled to get the resources and the attention she wanted to grow the ad business more quickly. A bifurcation, a wedge between the teams of tech and non-tech employees, soon developed. The people she poached from Google and hired from her network of Treasury alumni became known as “Friends of Sheryl Sandberg,” or FOSS. Most senior employees were unofficially divided into two camps, “Sheryl people” or “Mark people.”18
It could get territorial. Sandberg gave unsolicited opinions on products and engineering, some employees said. Ad tools required developers to build them, but Zuckerberg was reluctant to take engineers off the development of new features for the site to help build Sandberg’s side of the ad business. There was mutual distrust and annoyance. Engineers looked down on the “marketing guys,” and the business managers struggled to get into meetings with Zuckerberg’s teams. “I’ve been consistently puzzled about the public portrayal of them as amazing partners,” one business-side employee observed. “Meetings I’ve had with Mark and Sheryl, he was explicitly dismissive of what she said.”
Sandberg had begun at Google in the same place: with few resources and little attention from founders who held their nose at making money. Undeterred, she began wooing the biggest brands, including Ford, Coke, and Starbucks. In her pitches, she emphasized how, unlike users of other platforms, including the rapidly growing Twitter, users on Facebook were required to give their real identities. Sandberg asked: Wouldn’t you want to be part of those conversations? Facebook was the biggest word-of-mouth advertising platform in the world, she said. With the right campaigns, users themselves would persuade their friends to buy products. Meanwhile, the brands could keep track of users who made comments about them and joined their brand pages.19
Even with Sandberg’s reputation, the major brands were hard to convince. The heads of the top ad agencies doubted that people coming to the platform to comment on vacation photos would willingly spread the word about Verizon wireless service. And while her message about creating demand resonated with advertisers, they weren’t convinced that Facebook could influence consumer hearts and minds better than a well-placed primetime television spot. Its targeting abilities may have been enticing, but the social network was still using display and banner ads that didn’t seem to offer anything new.
Sandberg was responsive to the feedback from Facebook’s advertising skeptics. When Sony’s chief executive, Michael Lynton, expressed his doubt about the payoff of advertising on a platform that wasn’t even measured by the ad industry, Sandberg responded by negotiating a partnership with Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, to measure attention for ads on the social network. “Unlike any other executive, instead of just nodding her head, she and Facebook acted incredibly quickly,” Lynton said.20
She was making headway, but was thwarted by Zuckerberg. She needed his participation in these sales pitches. She needed more advertising sales staff, and engineers to design new ad features. Instead, he was hoarding the engineering talent to work on user features. She finally took her complaints to Don Graham, who in late 2008 was named to Facebook’s board of directors, which had expanded to include Marc Andreessen. She asked Graham to intervene and lobby Zuckerberg for more resources on her behalf.
As the only board member who worked in a business that also relied on advertising, Graham understood Sandberg’s frustration, but it was hard to convince Zuckerberg to take her concerns seriously. Graham was also mindful of the limits of his role; the company was ultimately Zuckerberg’s. “His priority of growth was miles above advertising, revenue, and profits,” Graham recalled. “It became my job to call him after every time Sheryl called and try to convince him about the importance of advertising, and not to change his priorities, but to help move him a little.”