LIVE: Facebook Execs Tells 1,000 Madison Avenue Execs To Spend Billions

Facebook is hosting a big marketing conference today in New York.
The mission is simple, if unstated: reverse the creeping deceleration of Facebook's advertising revenues.
To do that, Facebook will need to get the suits in the seats to stop spending on 30 second spots and start experimenting with Facebook ads.
This shouldn't be hard! The amount of people who visit Facebook every day is four times larger than the Super Bowl's audience.
We'll be posting updates here and on SAI throught the day, so stay tuned.
LIVE NOTES:
If it's not in quotes, it's not a quote, just a paraphrase.
12:58 – They are asking us to take our seats! Big press contigent here. PandoDaily, the Verge, Erick Schonfeld, etc. We saw Facebook execs Grady Burnett and Carolyn Everson in the halls, schmoozing.
1:01 – Big crowd in general. The LeFrank Theater we're in sits 944 and it is basically full. Here's the theater:

1:05 – The news already announced today was new Pages for brands. They will get to use the Timeline you have in your profile. From the release:
Facebook announced a new design for Pages, giving brands and businesses more ways to tell their story. The redesigned Pages are more personalized and complementary to the look and feel of individual profiles. Now, when you visit a Page, you can see your friends’ interactions with that Page as friend activity, making the experience more dynamic and relevant for Facebook users..
1:08 – The lights are dimming, here we go! Sheryl takes the stage to rock music. Heavy guitar riffs!
1:09 – Sheryl says: We're at the natural history museum because there are elephants and whales here, and Facebook is always thinking big.
1:10 – Sheryl just pulled the state of the union trick where she tells the story of a Facebook user, and then points out that the user is in the audience. The first story was about a user who had her baby's sickness diagnosed through Facebook friend. Now we're hearing about an Eygptian protestor.
1:12 – The stories mean: technology is powering us. Sheryl is talking about how the Internet has changed our lives.
1:15 – Sheryl is good with a crowd. She's being funny: "I used to look things up in a card catalogue. There are people who don't know what a card catalogue is. And I've chosen to work with all of them."
1:17 – "I know that people think technology tears us apart. We think technology brings us together."
1:18 – This speech reminds me of that Mad Men scene when Don Draper goes through the slideshow, talking about memories.
1:20 – The big concern brands have with Facebook is that it is a hard place to tell a brand story. So Sheryl is telling stories. She's talking about how Victor Cruz (the Giants wide receiver) published his music playlist on Facebook before the Super Bowl so fans could get pumped up with him.
1:21 –The pitch: People don't expect to be just talked at anymore, they want to be a part of the conversation. Your customers are listening, your customers are talking. Engage them.
1:24 – Facebook is a partnership company. As social media tranforms different industries, we're not doing it. Partners are doing it. Zynga did it in games. Spotify is doing it in music. If marketing is going to be social, it won't be Facebook "it will be the people in this room today."
1:25 – Here's Chris Cox, VP of product. He's talking about his interview. That day in 2005, he didn't think Facebook was the real deal, or that it was working on a serious product that matter.
1:27 – But a Faceobok cofounder (Dustin Moscovitz) told him: "If you think of Facebook as a blue and white dating site, you're incorrect. It is a collaboratively-built directory of people, places and things."
1:30 – Now he's talking about the Facebook Timeline. He's re-using a lot of his speech from when Facebook announced the thing. It's about turning Facebook from a 5 minute conversation about the people you know and your interests, into an hours long conversation.
1:31 – Chris Cox is talking about Marshall Mcluhan. The number of publishers are going up toward the size of the population. Some company needs to help people find what's interesting. That's Facebook, in this story.
1:34 – Chris says the best thing in fashion magazines are the ads. He says Facebook advertisers are getting better at doing that.
1:35 – ZOMg! Chris just hinted that Alicia Keys will be performing at the after-party tonight. They really are pulling out all the stops.
1:39 – Now a Facebook advertising products guy is on stage telling the story of Gillette.
1:41 – He is telling the crowd to think less about "ads" and more about "stories."
1:42 – He's showing off Facebook's new brand page. It looks more like a user profile with the timeline and everything:

1:45 – New feature: Brands can be "messaged" just like a user.
1:46 – This guy has the cadence of William Shatner. This. New Page. Will. Excite. Your. Customers.
1:47 – We just watched a video that scrolls down a brands facebook page. It was very dramatic and exciting – zooming and full of video. If Facebook Timelines were 25% as cool as the videos Facebook makes to promote Timelines, they would be as cool as Facebook execs want the rest of us to think they are.
1:49 – This guy says Facebook can build a product to help brands reach 75% of their fans every week with "stories." It's called "reach generator." You can move "stories" that are posted to the brand page timeline into an ad unit on the Facebook home page.
1:52 – Butterfinger did this and doubled the amount of people talking about them on Facebook. Their brand favorability increased 6% during the two month experiment.
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