Live What You Love: Facebook

The Live What You Love ad campaign by Facebook (now Meta) back in 2018 is a series of ads that I have been obsessed with over the last few years. It got me thinking quite a lot as to why is Facebook trying to run ads. Yes, why Facebook? The Mark Zuckerburg run Facebook. The platform that advertises to the world, is now advertising about the platform.

Big Picture: What is this Hype?

The year is 2018, privacy play is at the top, Facebook has been accused of leaking personal information, Facebook has been accused of no more being a Social Media platform, and more of an advertisement portal. Facebook was down. Facebook was out. Facebook was in trouble. They have been constantly clocking great increase in % of new users, and growth as it is quite evident from the graph below:

We are talking about close to 3 Billion users on Facebook, that is almost 40% of the world's population. Talk about a revolution. If we now extrapolate this data, and open up the stats between Q4 2016 to Q3 of 2019, we will notice something very remarkable.

What we notice here is that something happened between 2018 Q1 and Q2, and since then Facebook membership growth has not been increasing the same way it had been earlier. Incidentally, it was the time when people gradually started understanding the major issues related to Facebook and its partner companies. Sharing the timeline of the sequence of events that occurred in 2016 to lead to this fall in membership growth in 2018.

Facebook and its Reaction

Facebook had to react and they had to win back the pole position they always occupied. Their belly feeder was the fact that they had so many users, and it was through this medium they found ways to advertise and make money. Someone was targeting their belly, and they needed to win that back. The biggest market for Facebook to target for that was India. They realized that India has a huge population and this population can be tapped into. They felt that the current urban youth of India are losing trust on Facebook, and they have stopped posting and using status updates on Facebook to share moments of their lives. Moments which are so close to them are not being shared, and if they are not joining the app and deciding against sharing, people will leave. It was a vicious cycle. Attaching below is the series of the beautiful ads.

This ad talks about a regular Indian, doing regular daily things and also ensuring she posts every information about her day to day to activity on Facebook. Despite being busy, she finds time to share her life stories to her friends on Facebook.

Facebook has tried so hard to bring to life the fact that they are a trustworthy organization who can be relied upon to share their things, and all young Indians are sticking to Facebook to share their life moments. People in the ad are Indians living a regular life, living in small yet urban cities, connecting with the millions of Indian youths. They talk about their everyday life and how they share these moments with everyone.

Live What You Love is a series of many ads which were run in almost every platform, print, TV, newspapers, Online, radio, everywhere. They appealed to all the Indians from all walks of life, and it attracted a bunch of youth to be a close member of this "community" where sharing your "moments" of life is not an issue at all.

This was a very successful campaign where Facebook, not only won the trust and heart of Indians, but also shaped themselves to be the biggest, trustworthy player in the market. As a result of this campaign, they increased their membership growth rate and also got back on their winning ways.

What is your view on the Facebook campaign? Share in the comments below. Also if you like content like this, do share this with your friends and colleagues!