I am trying to wrap my head around Facebook’s first commercial. It was created to celebrate the social media platform’s 1 billion active monthly users and my takeaway is that Facebook is an empty chair.
Clint Eastwood would be pleased.
Actually, Eastwood knows something about good advertising. He was the voice behind Chrysler’s “It’s Halftime in America”
Super Bowl spot that was so stirring people thought it was a political
ad. It wasn’t, but it effectively drove home the message and, until
Eastwood talked to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, it made Eastwood the coolest octogenarian on the planet.Chairs, of course, are a metaphor for what Facebook is for us. From the voiceover:
“Chairs. They’re made so people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair and if the chair is a large enough they can sit down together and tell jokes or make up stories or just listen. Chairs are for people and that’s why chairs are like Facebook.”When you read it and see it on a page, it sounds sort of obvious and ridiculous. Of course chairs are for people! People invented them. We also like to call big chairs “couches,” not chairs.
The ad tries to drive home the concept with a series of images of chairs, many chairs.
Facebook is also like:
- Doorbells
- Airplanes
- Bridges All of them are described as things we use to get together. I can buy “airplanes” and “bridges,” but “doorbells?”
Facebook is also like dancefloors and basketball. Okay, I can see that, a little. These are gathering places, though most of us who are busy working, raising families and doing a billion other things are unlikely to hit the dancefloor anytime soon. Facebook’s benefit is that you can use it without having to go someplace else like a dance floor or a stadium — just pick up your smartphone.
I actually think Facebook is on surer footing when it compares the social network to a “great nation.” It’s now big enough to be many great nations.
Facebook then talks about the universe, but it’s no longer comparing the service — I think. Unless Mark Zuckerberg wants us to think of Facebook as “vast, and dark and makes us wonder if we are alone.”
Actually, Facebook is there, the ad says, to remind us that we’re not alone. That’s clearly the spot’s best line, but this coda doesn’t really work.
Here’s why:
The preceding minute and 10 seconds were spent confusing us with lame analogies.
The elegiac and evocative video does not show a single computer. In fact, the only visible technologies in the whole spot are a flat screen display over a lecture hall, the basketball court scoreboard and a 1950’s-era telephone. No smartphones, no tablets, no computers, no HDTVs, nothing.
When people are sitting in those all-important chairs, they’re reading paper books and newspapers! The first chair isn’t even in a modern home; it’s floating amidst the trees in a beautiful forest.
This is not the ad to tell people why Facebook is so wonderful or so important in so many millions of people’s lives.
If I were making an ad for Facebook, I would have shown Mark Zuckerberg (though I do not think I would have let him speak) and maybe some of the regular people and faces that work on the social network. I would seek to humanize and connect the audience to the people with whom we trust our deepest thoughts, desires, images and videos. Facebook is not a faceless blue-and white interface that sucks in your personal data and spits out new posts and “likes” at an alarming rate. It is a place run by people just like you and me. It cares because the people behind it care.
Obviously, I’d make all this look just as beautiful as the current commercial. I would show Zuckerberg smiling and talking to coworkers (though you still wouldn’t be able to hear his voice) and maybe even intersperse a couple of screens of images of the early years, just so I could take back the original story of Facebook from The Social Network.
The whole concept makes me tear up a little bit.
Facebook is not a chair, or a doorbell or a dancefloor. It’s the first truly global social network, a vast conversation that involves one-seventh of the world’s population. Facebook’s goal is not to make it mysterious, but more accessible and inviting for the remaining 6 billion people. This ad misses that mark.
Now I’m going to go sit in a chair for a while. I need to be alone.
