A few months ago, Meta – née Facebook – surprised the world with a rebrand and a stated intention to play a major role in building the next version of the internet. In this episode, we sit down with VP Global Business Group Nicola Mendelsohn, who sheds light on the name change and shift in business strategy as she takes on a new global role within the company. Mendelsohn also gives her take on defining the elusive term “metaverse” and how marketers can begin to dip their toes in a medium that’s still in the making. We also discuss the ongoing privacy conundrum in advertising and how the company is hoping to build guardrails in the future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good Company is a production of I Heart Radio. The
Metaverse is really about letting us feel that we're experiencing
moments when we're not together and actually sharing a space together,
and that's going to be the next big shift that
we're all going to play A Pardon Hi, I'm Michael Casson.
(00:20):
Welcome to Good Company, where I'll explore how marketing, media,
entertainment and tech are intersecting, transforming our lives and the
way we do business at a breakneck speed. I'll be
joined by some of the greatest business minds at strongest
leaders who will share how they build companies from the
ground up or transform them from the inside out. My
bed is you'll pick up a lesson or two along
(00:41):
the way. It's all good. It's an extraordinary pleasure today
for me to welcome to Good Company. Nicola Mendelssohn. Hard
to describe Nicola in the amount of time we have today,
but I'm just going to say that as the VP
of Global Business Group at Meta, Nicola is arguably and
(01:03):
has been recognized in in British press as arguably one
of the most powerful women in in the tech industry.
So it's a great pleasure to welcome somebody as important
as Nicola, but more importantly somebody who is my friend. Nicola,
Thank you and welcome. Thank you so much, Michael. I
(01:24):
am absolutely thrilled and delighted to be able to have
this conversation with you today. Well, Nicola, first of all,
you've officially moved across the pond. How's New York treating you?
I feel like I'm having the most extraordinary adventure. I
love this city, I love the people, I love everything
about it, the buzz, and I'm just delighted that this
is now my home. Welcome. I'm not the official welcoming committee,
(01:46):
but I'm a Brooklyn boy, so I can welcome you
to New York by way of my my own heritage. Nicola.
Let's start off when when Facebook became Meta, I had
a kind of funny comment in the press, which was
someone said, what do you think I said you mean of?
You know, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Tell
me a little bit, if you will, about the y
(02:09):
and obviously, whilst you have a new role, you were
obviously very senior running a maya and whatnot during that transition.
But tell me a little bit, and tell our audience
a little bit about why number one. And you know,
if you change your name, that doesn't necessarily mean you
change your business, but in this case, I think it
(02:30):
reordered some priorities within the business. So I'd love to
let you riff a bit on the y and and
what does it actually mean once you just change your
logo and you know, change your business card if if
anybody carries business cards anymore, I'm not sure. But I
don't even know where my business cards are anymore. So
that's something else I'm gonna have to dig out when
I when we all get back to whatever new normal
(02:52):
looks like. So we did change the name of the company,
and I think it really represents a new chapter. And
I think that's where you were going with the second
part of your question, because the name Meta really captures
where the company is going and also the future that
we want to help to build. But it's not I
want to be really clear about turning away from our past,
because our mission hasn't changed. It is about now helping
(03:15):
to build the metaverse and letting people to be able
to connect, find communities, and grow businesses. So that's the
same things we've always been doing, but we're going to
have new and more immersive ways of actually being able
to do that as we go down the road, I
think if it's also fair to say there was some confusion,
and there was confusion by having a company name sharing
(03:36):
a name with our biggest app, and and that was fine,
you know when we first started as Facebook as a
single app work nearly twenty years ago. But today are
our company is more than just one brand and one product.
So you know, very much from a brand architectural perspective,
actually makes sense to be able to separate out our
company from our largest app and bring all of our apps,
(03:57):
all our technologies under one new company ran Matter. And
then the final area is really about, you know, reflecting
on the future that we're building towards, which is you know,
in plicit in the name Matter is about going beyond.
And it's really about going beyond what digital connection is
today to where it's going to be in the future,
and really signaling what we think the vision of the
(04:20):
company is going to be going forwards. And and Nicola,
you have an educational challenge, and I don't mean necessarily
for you, although we all do. And you and I
talked about, uh, you know, going back to school together
potentially on on some uh on some basis, because we
all have to learn. You know, I liken this to
twenty years ago when I started media Link a little
(04:41):
less than twenty years ago, but we were coming off
dot Com and I had had an eighteen month period
in my life where I was in a covenant not
to compete, and I used that time to steep myself
in all things dot Com. Different period, and because I
wanted to be more conversant than just at a cocktail party.
And you know, I didn't want to be somebody who
had previously run a large media agency, so that my
(05:03):
calling card was I ran a large media agency. I
wanted to be somebody that was current. And if you're
somebody that desires to be current today, you need to
have an education on what the metaverse means. You know,
I know that I don't know enough, so I'm going
about learning. You know that with your partners, and you
don't look at at the people you do business with
(05:25):
as clients. I know this because it's ingrained in you.
In fact, I think your previous title had partner in it.
I mean, you know you you look at the folks
you work with as partners, whether it's s MB or
large multinational advertisers. People need to be educated. Can you
give us a start and kind of talk about what
(05:46):
does that mean the metaverse? What are we what are
we talking about when we say it so that we
level set. Is that a fair and open ended question.
It certainly is, and it also speaks to why I
absolutely love the job that I do because for the
last d eight and a half years at this company,
I have learned something new every single day, and now
(06:06):
my learning is in another kind of massive hockey stick
of learning. Because what is the metaverse? I'm thinking of
it as a set of digital spaces, and that includes
immersive three D experiences and they're all interconnected so you're
able to easily move between them, and it lets you
do things in the physical world with people that you
can't physically be with. And it's going to feel, I think,
(06:29):
like a hybrid of today's online social experiences sometimes that
they'll be expanded into three dimensions or you know, projected
into the physical world, but then seamlessly stitched together so
that you can easily jump from one thing to another.
It really is the next evolution in social technologies and
also the successor to the mobile internet. You know, the
(06:51):
metaverse is really about letting us feel that we're experiencing
moments when we're not together and actually sharing a space together.
And that's going to be the next big shift that
we're all going to lay a parton. And when you
say that, you know the solitude that we all experienced
during the pandemic when we weren't interacting, and we've all
(07:11):
heard what the impact has been on children that you
know most acutely that you know the lack of social
interaction and the lack of being in class and engaging
with friends. We're veterans. We missed it, but we adjusted.
When you think about the impact it's had and what
psychologists are saying the impact has been on children, are
(07:33):
we as we enter the metaverse? Is that taking the
place of I R L? Is that taking the place
of in real life? Definitely not No, nothing beats being
together in person, but look, there is a reality. We
do spend time in front of screens, different types of screens,
and when we can't be together in person, what the
metaverse does is get us together even closer to feeling
(07:56):
that we've got that in person connection. And it's a
quite a hard thing to this gribe if you haven't
actually tried it. So some of the things that I've
been doing, I'm making sure that in my leadership meetings
that I'm actually spending time in one of our products,
Horizon workrooms every week, so we're coming together. My current
setup has my my kind of conference room has the
(08:17):
looks like the Alps and a beautiful lake altogether, because
that's kind of gives me pleasure to be able to
look and I keep changing the art because you can
keep changing the art by clicking your fingers and having
some fun with it. But the wonderful thing is is
that when you're sat around this virtual table, albeit as
avatars today, and there's the opportunity for people that don't
have the headsets to be able to come in on,
(08:39):
you know, through video conferencing. It feels so much different
than just doing it across the screen. Why because where
the sound takes you to where the conversation is exactly
like it does in real life. It's amazing, and so
you do feel closer. You can brainstorm, you can white
board together in the way that's really hard to do
when you're just looking at somebody else through a flat screen.
(09:01):
Did you participate. When we did the version of can
Lions and we had that that metaverse like event where um,
you know, within the context of it, you would follow
the people and you could actually go have conversations. You
could actually be in the room when we were all
(09:23):
virtual and we were all on in the metaverse. I mean,
you know, if I saw you on the screen, I
could say, Nicola, meet me over here, and you and
I actually engaged in a conversation. And it was where
I first experienced it, and it really worked. It really
people were like, whoa, I'm actually in the room with Nicola.
(09:45):
I'm actually in the room with Sally or Bobby or
Billy or you know, Mary, and and yet I'm not.
I'm in California, You're in London, You're in Cleveland. I mean,
you know, it actually does work as you does, and
that technology is already eighteen months ago, and so it's
already moved on. But you also are something around about children,
(10:07):
and actually the metaverse offers the most extraordinary opportunities when
it comes to learning and to education and to bring
it to life in a completely different way. Now, I
don't know about you, but when when I was a kid,
I was I was pretty obsessed with with ancient Rome,
but also with the ancient Egyptians. And you know, of
course you can go and visit and see the ruins today,
but in the metaverse, you can actually kind of walk
(10:29):
down the streets and imagine what it would have been
like a couple of thousand years ago and really experience
that vibrancy. I think it takes education to a whole
new level of engagement for young people. So I'm excited
about how that's going to play out as well. Well,
you know, it is that moment, and it's an inflection
point for all of us as we are getting back
(10:49):
to somewhat of a as you said, normal or a
new normal. I'm not sure what that means anymore, you know,
because lots of what we experienced we're not going to
experience any longer, and we're going to experience new and
different things. You know, if you look around the corner,
it's exciting for me. So I want to go back,
you know, Nicola, eleven years ago, now almost twelve years ago,
(11:12):
we lad, as you might recall, you weren't at Meta
at that time, but media Link led one of the
early digital journeys and we did that for Uni Leaver,
and it became quite famous and we were very honored
to be part of it. Now, others had made the
pilgrimage to Silicon Valley before, but it had never been
done quite the way we did it. And that the
(11:33):
test case for us was Unilever, and you know, in
those days, they were and still considered one of the
more inventive and aggressive and forward thinking marketers, understanding what
digital meant. And I'm using the word digital, which of
course is meaningless today, but then it wasn't. And we
called it the Digital Journey, and we took them out
(11:53):
to California, and we took the forty you know, senior leaders.
We spent time with all the tech companies. We went
up to Seattle to visit the few that we're up there,
and the two then in Seattle that mattered to us
were Amazon and Microsoft. And coming back to the Valley
where we spent three days. I believe, and I could
(12:15):
be wrong, it was Mark Zuckerberg's first real meeting with advertisers,
which happened in May of two thousand and ten. Now
I'm sure that's not true that it was his first meeting,
but it was his first real meeting at that level
with an advertiser on the scale and scope of Unilever,
and Chris Cox and Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg came
in and entertained the whole Unilever crew. And you know,
(12:37):
Facebook then was looking at advertising as a necessary evil,
not the exciting part. That was how it felt. I
think that was part of the transition to where Mark
Zuckerberg and the leadership at Facebook embraced advertising and advertisers
in a different way. And it's been a journey, god knows.
(13:00):
You know, back then it was probably single digit millions
of dollars of advertising. Today it's you know, dollars of
advertising or some crazy number, not crazy, a wonderful number.
That's been a journey, and there's been some speed bumps
along the way, Let's be honest. There's been issues that
have come up in the in the conversations. But as
(13:22):
you have now transitioned into your new role, what are
you hearing from the marketers? What would you draw as
the conversation on the one hand, from the small and
medium sized businesses and on the other hand from the
large multinational advertisers, because both are critically important to meta
and to you fast and foremost, I want you to
(13:42):
know that the people that partner with us matter disproportionately
to us, and what we want to help to do
is to help to be a place for him to
connect with that customers, help them to grow, help them
to transform. That's the business we're in, and that's the
business that we care about. And you know, there's there's
a lot of conversations that that I'm having, and you know,
(14:04):
it's the best bit of my job is when I
get to be out with with with our partners, whether
they're the smallest businesses on the planet or the largest businesses.
I think there's a few themes that are coming through,
and I'll leave kind of the far future in the
metaverse to the end, but what's on top of people's
minds at the moment is very much the area of commerce.
There's a bit of a step change that's happening now
and I think that's really been ignited through the pandemic
(14:27):
in terms of people buying online and what people are
comfortable buying online as well. You know, if you go back,
you you talked ten years ago, I don't think people
could have imagined buying clothes or big household items or
even cars online that that all those barriers are gone,
and what people now want to look for is, you know,
what's the best way of doing that? What's the most
friction less way that a business can engage with a customer.
(14:51):
That brings us onto so many new innovations in terms
of how we're working closely with partners to be able
to make that happen, things like now that we're doing
like live shopping, how brands can partner with creators. And
we're putting a big investment, you know, billions of dollars
into the crater economy in the crater universe is really
important for us messaging. We've all run out of patients, right.
(15:14):
We want things instantaneously. We want service to be fantastic.
We don't want to sit on telephones anymore. I interrupt
just to tell you the mantra. You know, I'm in
l A today as we're doing this. You know the
mantra in l A is instant gratification isn't quick enough?
So you can steal that absolutely well, But it's true,
(15:35):
isn't it. You don't want to be dialing one dialing
to for a different extension. I know what I want.
I want to know where it is, if the products coming,
when is it going to get to me? And bringing
all that together on on on, on Messenger or in
what's happ in different countries around the world just makes
it so much easier. And so that's what we're in
the business of trying to do, which is to help
(15:55):
the partners that we have to be able to grow
reach new audiences in different ways. And that brings me
then to the future and the metaverse, which the people
that I'm talking to, the CEOs, the cmos, are unbelievably
excited about this opportunity. Why because it's not just meta
that's going to be building the metaverse. The metaverse is
going to be built by so many like the Internet was,
(16:17):
by so many different companies, organizations, charities, all entrepreneurs all
coming together to create it. And I think that that
is very, very exciting, and there's going to be lots
of opportunities for brands. There's going to be lots of
opportunities for people as well. And so one of the
things that people are saying to me, well, what does
the roadmap look like? What what do I need to
(16:39):
be doing today? You stole my next question, So I'm
going to switch chairs with you. That's good exactly. Well,
that's what the way you know what they're they're talking
to you as well and looking to you for advice
as to what to be doing here. And the vision
that Mark's talking about here is probably some five to
ten years off, so we know where that's going to be.
(17:01):
So it's about utilizing the tools that we have today
to get comfortable. What do I mean by that? We
already have a R filters. We're already seeing businesses out
there that are actually selling using them. So whether it's RayBan,
RayBan has got a whole a R shop on its
Instagram page where you can go on, try on the
different you know, glasses and then click and by how
(17:24):
wonderful and exciting is there. We're seeing the makeup brands
like Charlotte Tilbury Sephora where you can go on and
actually see what the different eyeshadows, what the lipsticks look
like on you. Home improvements we've seen the likes of Ikea.
We've seen the likes of Walmart running ads where they've
actually got the products in that you can take a picture,
and those products are selling out because once it's in
(17:47):
people's homes. Then actually you can see exactly what. It
lets your imagination run wild, but it fills in the
blanks for you obvious exactly. So there's so many things
that people can be doing to get involved, even today
in that journey towards building the metavas that we're talking
about Nicola. Last year, a lot of focus was on
the the the privacy issues and the change that happened
(18:11):
with Apple and the operating system and the impact it
had on small and medium sized businesses more than the
large multinationals because the large multinationals have so much first
party data. And I know some of our listeners are
going to probably glaze over on this, but these are
such important issues that we're facing. And you know where
(18:31):
I've seen the small and medium size or the smb
s who literally relied on Meta as their lifeblood, and
some of those changes have made it more difficult, you know,
when targeting and other things. That was was the promise
and the delivery of Facebook now Meta to the small
(18:52):
medium sized businesses because what you allowed them to do
the democratization was to level the playing field and play
as smart as the big people, you know, as the
big guys and the change has had impact on small
and medium sized businesses. How is that? How is how
is that wrinkle getting ironed out? Because I've heard not
(19:13):
as much recently, but in the earlier part, in the
you know, kind of third quarter of last year, second quarter,
third quarter, some of the small and medium sized businesses
were really squealing because it was having massive impact on
their ability to market their their goods and services. Yeah,
I mean, you're you're absolutely right, Michael, And we were
very clear that we felt that, you know, the impact
(19:35):
would be felt in particular by all those small businesses
around the world. So one of the things that we've
been doing, and we've been very clear and setting out
the road map, is around the fact that we believe
in personalized advertising. We think it's a good thing, we
think consumers love it, we know that businesses around the
world love it as well, and so we've been working
to make sure that we're developing new technologies, privously enhanced
(19:58):
technologies in order to address you know, some of the
some of the changes that we saw. But I think
it also speaks to um, you know, when we're thinking
about the creation of the metaverse and some of the
guard rails that go that go into this as well,
and the fact that we absolutely do need to build
in the principles of privacy and you know, safety and
(20:20):
security as well. Those things need to be built in
right from the beginning, right from the start, because if
we get the principles right, then I think that as
a society that will be better at tackling the new
challenges with the technologies as their eyes, to learn the
lessons from what has happened in the past and to
go forwards. And so one of the things that we've
done from a meta perspective is that we announced a
(20:43):
two year global investment of fifty million dollars in programs
and also in external research in order that we can
go about being able to build the metaverse responsibly. And
we want to work here with and we are doing
with people across the industry, civil rights groups, governments, nonprofits,
academic institutions and others to determine how these sorts of
(21:07):
technologies should be built from the get go. But it's
so important because we all have have become so reliant
on technology. As much as people say I don't want
to do it. I was at a breakfast this morning
with somebody and and I said, well, you're aware of
this or that, and the person said, no, no, no,
I come to meetings without searching online at all. I
(21:31):
like to form my own opinions. I don't want, you know,
a third party search engine telling me what I should expect.
When I meet Michael Casson, I said, well, thank god,
because had you done that, you might have canceled the breakfast. No,
but but but but seriously, but I'm not kidding. You know,
there is that moment where you go, do we have
too much information? Not? Not me, because I'm I'm starved
(21:54):
for information. I'm a you know, I've described my management style.
I stole this from a mutual friend of ours name
Wendy Clark, but I just sort of gribed my management
style and as Wendy taught me as a micro nowhere,
not a micro manager. So I like to know stuff,
and you know, then I try to let people make
their own decisions. But I like to know, so I
(22:16):
understand the levers and why people are making decisions and management.
But but that knowledge that thirst number one and number two. Look,
I'm speaking personally here as we always do. The gift
of Facebook for me, the most important gift of Facebook
for me was what I think Mark's original vision was
(22:37):
was connecting people. I mean, my entire life now is
connected my youth and my old Okay like that, you
know the people that I'm in touch with again that
I had lost track of in my life, And I'm
sure there are billions of stories like that. Literally, it
was a great gift for me. It connected my entire
(23:00):
your life. So I'm a happy meta user from that perspective.
But I want to go back to advertising. You know,
we've all grown up in this era on trying to
search for the right device, the right time, the right message,
the right context, the right person, and all of that
is a wonderful thing to shoot for if you're a
(23:22):
marketer and you want to make sure if you're an
auto manufacturer, you want to get that person when they're
in market for the car, when you're in whatever, you
want to make sure that if it's financial services, you
want to make sure you're getting the person when they
need a loan to buy a house or whatever it
may be, or for their business. But I've been a
big believer there is still that moment and that desire
(23:44):
for surprise and delight. Sometimes you think you're reaching the
right person at the right time, on the right device
and the right context, with the right message. And sometimes
you want to surprise somebody who wasn't actually thinking about
buying a new car, or buying a new dress, or
buying a new something, and you get an AD in
front of them and they go, WHOA, I actually maybe
(24:06):
do want to look at a new car. You talked
about the creator economy, and we're at a moment where
content and commerce are so inextricably linked. That's exciting to me.
And what you can do with content as you drive commerce,
as you know the other things that come off of that.
The importance of content hasn't gotten lost, right, I mean,
(24:28):
you know, talk about that for a moment in terms
of how you look at that marriage of content and commerce. Oh,
so many exciting things to share. And you're right. The
early days of the Internet was very much there was
no serendipity. It was very much I'm looking for this
and then you were served an add up for that.
We are now in a whole world that that I'm
thinking of as discovery commerce where it's like I didn't
(24:50):
know I needed that, No, No, exactly, it's fantastic and
I think you know, so many of the people I think,
you know, the vast majority of people that are on
Instagram have born something as a result of an ad
that they've seen on Instagram or because something that they've
seen with a with a creator on on Instagram. So
it's definitely there that serendipity. But that's when you can
(25:10):
hone it in more and you can make it feel
more personalized and get rid of the noise in the
background that wouldn't work. I think of like my feed
versus my Sun's feed. It's completely different experiences. All the
stories that you know that we're seeing, but we're also
seeing that the ways in which people tell stories is
very different. So we're seeing a big shift, you know.
(25:31):
You know, we've been going backwards and forwards, haven't With
the early days of Facebook, we're very text based, and
then we moved to imagery and now we're in videos
and augmented reality. But reels is something that we're seeing
that's really really exciting, and so we're making a big
investment here in video and reels is really it's the
largest contributor now to engagement growth on Instagram. What it
(25:54):
means we're making it easier for people to make and
also watch great videos across all of our platform And
these are some really significant changes that we're making on
both Instagram and Facebook as well, in order to empower
this greater economy, in order to help brands tell their stories,
in order to help consumers to be able to get
those messages. So all of this coming together is very dynamic,
(26:17):
it's very fast moving, and it's exciting right because we're
meeting people where they are. Remember, Michael, we always build,
We always build for people first. Well, it's a great
place to start. Nicola, I want to say two things.
As you said, I didn't need I didn't know I
needed in this product. But our audience unfortunately can't see
that very very cool microphone you have. So I have
(26:39):
microphone envy. Now I need one of those. I mean,
you know, I didn't think I did. I got a
lot of microphones here, but not as cool as that one.
I feel. I feel microphone envy. I just want our
our listeners to know that, Nicola, you and I could
and we will chat for hours. Nicola, I want to
thank you for taking the time today and and even
(27:00):
in this short period of time you've you've shined a
light on so many things that are so critical to
our audience. And look, I think our industry and particularly
now with you over here, is the beneficiary of more
of Nicola Mendelsson. And I'm excited. I know you've got
(27:22):
a lot in front of you as you've taken on
this this much larger remit and um, I just want
to say thank you for bringing a fresh view. Your
damn British accent makes it sound so so good. Um.
You know, I used to get around with our mutual
friend Rob Norman, who everyone thought was so funny. I
(27:44):
used to say, Rob, You're not that funny. It's just
your British accent. It makes you sound funny. In your case,
it just makes you sound smart. But the good news
as you are, so you know, the promise and the reality.
You know, the fantasy and the reality have matched up
well with Nicola Mendelsson. So, um, look, I want you
to promise me you're going to come back and do
(28:05):
pot do of good company because there's so much more
I wanted to ask, and I know we'll have the
opportunity to do that. But I want to thank you, Nicola,
Oh Michael, thank you, thank you for a giving me
the time, and if people are listening, the thing that
I would say is, I'm here. I'm new in America.
I am here to listen. I'm here to learn. But
(28:25):
also I want to be the bridge towards all these
new different ideas that I am, my teams that are
working at matter. I want to be able to hear
for all of them. So where to help you grow,
to help inspire, and to build the metaverse together. Doesn't
get more exciting than that, right, And and to have
a few laughs on the way, Nicola, Oh definitely, I'm
going to hold you to that when I see you, Nicola,
(28:48):
Thank you, thank you. I'm Michael Casson. Thanks for listening
to Good Company. Good Company is a production. I heart IDEA.
Special thanks to Lena Peterson, chief Brand Officer and Managing
Director of Medially for her vision I'm Good Company, and
to Jen Seely, Vice President Marketing Communications Immediately for programming
(29:10):
amazing talent and contentm
Good Company is a production of I Heart Radio. The
Metaverse is really about letting us feel that we're experiencing
moments when we're not together and actually sharing a space together,
and that's going to be the next big shift that
we're all going to play A Pardon Hi, I'm Michael Casson.
(00:20):
Welcome to Good Company, where I'll explore how marketing, media,
entertainment and tech are intersecting, transforming our lives and the
way we do business at a breakneck speed. I'll be
joined by some of the greatest business minds at strongest
leaders who will share how they build companies from the
ground up or transform them from the inside out. My
bed is you'll pick up a lesson or two along
(00:41):
the way. It's all good. It's an extraordinary pleasure today
for me to welcome to Good Company. Nicola Mendelssohn. Hard
to describe Nicola in the amount of time we have today,
but I'm just going to say that as the VP
of Global Business Group at Meta, Nicola is arguably and
(01:03):
has been recognized in in British press as arguably one
of the most powerful women in in the tech industry.
So it's a great pleasure to welcome somebody as important
as Nicola, but more importantly somebody who is my friend. Nicola,
Thank you and welcome. Thank you so much, Michael. I
(01:24):
am absolutely thrilled and delighted to be able to have
this conversation with you today. Well, Nicola, first of all,
you've officially moved across the pond. How's New York treating you?
I feel like I'm having the most extraordinary adventure. I
love this city, I love the people, I love everything
about it, the buzz, and I'm just delighted that this
is now my home. Welcome. I'm not the official welcoming committee,
(01:46):
but I'm a Brooklyn boy, so I can welcome you
to New York by way of my my own heritage. Nicola.
Let's start off when when Facebook became Meta, I had
a kind of funny comment in the press, which was
someone said, what do you think I said you mean of?
You know, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Tell
me a little bit, if you will, about the y
(02:09):
and obviously, whilst you have a new role, you were
obviously very senior running a maya and whatnot during that transition.
But tell me a little bit, and tell our audience
a little bit about why number one. And you know,
if you change your name, that doesn't necessarily mean you
change your business, but in this case, I think it
(02:30):
reordered some priorities within the business. So I'd love to
let you riff a bit on the y and and
what does it actually mean once you just change your
logo and you know, change your business card if if
anybody carries business cards anymore, I'm not sure. But I
don't even know where my business cards are anymore. So
that's something else I'm gonna have to dig out when
I when we all get back to whatever new normal
(02:52):
looks like. So we did change the name of the company,
and I think it really represents a new chapter. And
I think that's where you were going with the second
part of your question, because the name Meta really captures
where the company is going and also the future that
we want to help to build. But it's not I
want to be really clear about turning away from our past,
because our mission hasn't changed. It is about now helping
(03:15):
to build the metaverse and letting people to be able
to connect, find communities, and grow businesses. So that's the
same things we've always been doing, but we're going to
have new and more immersive ways of actually being able
to do that as we go down the road, I
think if it's also fair to say there was some confusion,
and there was confusion by having a company name sharing
(03:36):
a name with our biggest app, and and that was fine,
you know when we first started as Facebook as a
single app work nearly twenty years ago. But today are
our company is more than just one brand and one product.
So you know, very much from a brand architectural perspective,
actually makes sense to be able to separate out our
company from our largest app and bring all of our apps,
(03:57):
all our technologies under one new company ran Matter. And
then the final area is really about, you know, reflecting
on the future that we're building towards, which is you know,
in plicit in the name Matter is about going beyond.
And it's really about going beyond what digital connection is
today to where it's going to be in the future,
and really signaling what we think the vision of the
(04:20):
company is going to be going forwards. And and Nicola,
you have an educational challenge, and I don't mean necessarily
for you, although we all do. And you and I
talked about, uh, you know, going back to school together
potentially on on some uh on some basis, because we
all have to learn. You know, I liken this to
twenty years ago when I started media Link a little
(04:41):
less than twenty years ago, but we were coming off
dot Com and I had had an eighteen month period
in my life where I was in a covenant not
to compete, and I used that time to steep myself
in all things dot Com. Different period, and because I
wanted to be more conversant than just at a cocktail party.
And you know, I didn't want to be somebody who
had previously run a large media agency, so that my
(05:03):
calling card was I ran a large media agency. I
wanted to be somebody that was current. And if you're
somebody that desires to be current today, you need to
have an education on what the metaverse means. You know,
I know that I don't know enough, so I'm going
about learning. You know that with your partners, and you
don't look at at the people you do business with
(05:25):
as clients. I know this because it's ingrained in you.
In fact, I think your previous title had partner in it.
I mean, you know you you look at the folks
you work with as partners, whether it's s MB or
large multinational advertisers. People need to be educated. Can you
give us a start and kind of talk about what
(05:46):
does that mean the metaverse? What are we what are
we talking about when we say it so that we
level set. Is that a fair and open ended question.
It certainly is, and it also speaks to why I
absolutely love the job that I do because for the
last d eight and a half years at this company,
I have learned something new every single day, and now
(06:06):
my learning is in another kind of massive hockey stick
of learning. Because what is the metaverse? I'm thinking of
it as a set of digital spaces, and that includes
immersive three D experiences and they're all interconnected so you're
able to easily move between them, and it lets you
do things in the physical world with people that you
can't physically be with. And it's going to feel, I think,
(06:29):
like a hybrid of today's online social experiences sometimes that
they'll be expanded into three dimensions or you know, projected
into the physical world, but then seamlessly stitched together so
that you can easily jump from one thing to another.
It really is the next evolution in social technologies and
also the successor to the mobile internet. You know, the
(06:51):
metaverse is really about letting us feel that we're experiencing
moments when we're not together and actually sharing a space together.
And that's going to be the next big shift that
we're all going to lay a parton. And when you
say that, you know the solitude that we all experienced
during the pandemic when we weren't interacting, and we've all
(07:11):
heard what the impact has been on children that you
know most acutely that you know the lack of social
interaction and the lack of being in class and engaging
with friends. We're veterans. We missed it, but we adjusted.
When you think about the impact it's had and what
psychologists are saying the impact has been on children, are
(07:33):
we as we enter the metaverse? Is that taking the
place of I R L? Is that taking the place
of in real life? Definitely not No, nothing beats being
together in person, but look, there is a reality. We
do spend time in front of screens, different types of screens,
and when we can't be together in person, what the
metaverse does is get us together even closer to feeling
(07:56):
that we've got that in person connection. And it's a
quite a hard thing to this gribe if you haven't
actually tried it. So some of the things that I've
been doing, I'm making sure that in my leadership meetings
that I'm actually spending time in one of our products,
Horizon workrooms every week, so we're coming together. My current
setup has my my kind of conference room has the
(08:17):
looks like the Alps and a beautiful lake altogether, because
that's kind of gives me pleasure to be able to
look and I keep changing the art because you can
keep changing the art by clicking your fingers and having
some fun with it. But the wonderful thing is is
that when you're sat around this virtual table, albeit as
avatars today, and there's the opportunity for people that don't
have the headsets to be able to come in on,
(08:39):
you know, through video conferencing. It feels so much different
than just doing it across the screen. Why because where
the sound takes you to where the conversation is exactly
like it does in real life. It's amazing, and so
you do feel closer. You can brainstorm, you can white
board together in the way that's really hard to do
when you're just looking at somebody else through a flat screen.
(09:01):
Did you participate. When we did the version of can
Lions and we had that that metaverse like event where um,
you know, within the context of it, you would follow
the people and you could actually go have conversations. You
could actually be in the room when we were all
(09:23):
virtual and we were all on in the metaverse. I mean,
you know, if I saw you on the screen, I
could say, Nicola, meet me over here, and you and
I actually engaged in a conversation. And it was where
I first experienced it, and it really worked. It really
people were like, whoa, I'm actually in the room with Nicola.
(09:45):
I'm actually in the room with Sally or Bobby or
Billy or you know, Mary, and and yet I'm not.
I'm in California, You're in London, You're in Cleveland. I mean,
you know, it actually does work as you does, and
that technology is already eighteen months ago, and so it's
already moved on. But you also are something around about children,
(10:07):
and actually the metaverse offers the most extraordinary opportunities when
it comes to learning and to education and to bring
it to life in a completely different way. Now, I
don't know about you, but when when I was a kid,
I was I was pretty obsessed with with ancient Rome,
but also with the ancient Egyptians. And you know, of
course you can go and visit and see the ruins today,
but in the metaverse, you can actually kind of walk
(10:29):
down the streets and imagine what it would have been
like a couple of thousand years ago and really experience
that vibrancy. I think it takes education to a whole
new level of engagement for young people. So I'm excited
about how that's going to play out as well. Well,
you know, it is that moment, and it's an inflection
point for all of us as we are getting back
(10:49):
to somewhat of a as you said, normal or a
new normal. I'm not sure what that means anymore, you know,
because lots of what we experienced we're not going to
experience any longer, and we're going to experience new and
different things. You know, if you look around the corner,
it's exciting for me. So I want to go back,
you know, Nicola, eleven years ago, now almost twelve years ago,
(11:12):
we lad, as you might recall, you weren't at Meta
at that time, but media Link led one of the
early digital journeys and we did that for Uni Leaver,
and it became quite famous and we were very honored
to be part of it. Now, others had made the
pilgrimage to Silicon Valley before, but it had never been
done quite the way we did it. And that the
(11:33):
test case for us was Unilever, and you know, in
those days, they were and still considered one of the
more inventive and aggressive and forward thinking marketers, understanding what
digital meant. And I'm using the word digital, which of
course is meaningless today, but then it wasn't. And we
called it the Digital Journey, and we took them out
(11:53):
to California, and we took the forty you know, senior leaders.
We spent time with all the tech companies. We went
up to Seattle to visit the few that we're up there,
and the two then in Seattle that mattered to us
were Amazon and Microsoft. And coming back to the Valley
where we spent three days. I believe, and I could
(12:15):
be wrong, it was Mark Zuckerberg's first real meeting with advertisers,
which happened in May of two thousand and ten. Now
I'm sure that's not true that it was his first meeting,
but it was his first real meeting at that level
with an advertiser on the scale and scope of Unilever,
and Chris Cox and Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg came
in and entertained the whole Unilever crew. And you know,
(12:37):
Facebook then was looking at advertising as a necessary evil,
not the exciting part. That was how it felt. I
think that was part of the transition to where Mark
Zuckerberg and the leadership at Facebook embraced advertising and advertisers
in a different way. And it's been a journey, god knows.
(13:00):
You know, back then it was probably single digit millions
of dollars of advertising. Today it's you know, dollars of
advertising or some crazy number, not crazy, a wonderful number.
That's been a journey, and there's been some speed bumps
along the way, Let's be honest. There's been issues that
have come up in the in the conversations. But as
(13:22):
you have now transitioned into your new role, what are
you hearing from the marketers? What would you draw as
the conversation on the one hand, from the small and
medium sized businesses and on the other hand from the
large multinational advertisers, because both are critically important to meta
and to you fast and foremost, I want you to
(13:42):
know that the people that partner with us matter disproportionately
to us, and what we want to help to do
is to help to be a place for him to
connect with that customers, help them to grow, help them
to transform. That's the business we're in, and that's the
business that we care about. And you know, there's there's
a lot of conversations that that I'm having, and you know,
(14:04):
it's the best bit of my job is when I
get to be out with with with our partners, whether
they're the smallest businesses on the planet or the largest businesses.
I think there's a few themes that are coming through,
and I'll leave kind of the far future in the
metaverse to the end, but what's on top of people's
minds at the moment is very much the area of commerce.
There's a bit of a step change that's happening now
and I think that's really been ignited through the pandemic
(14:27):
in terms of people buying online and what people are
comfortable buying online as well. You know, if you go back,
you you talked ten years ago, I don't think people
could have imagined buying clothes or big household items or
even cars online that that all those barriers are gone,
and what people now want to look for is, you know,
what's the best way of doing that? What's the most
friction less way that a business can engage with a customer.
(14:51):
That brings us onto so many new innovations in terms
of how we're working closely with partners to be able
to make that happen, things like now that we're doing
like live shopping, how brands can partner with creators. And
we're putting a big investment, you know, billions of dollars
into the crater economy in the crater universe is really
important for us messaging. We've all run out of patients, right.
(15:14):
We want things instantaneously. We want service to be fantastic.
We don't want to sit on telephones anymore. I interrupt
just to tell you the mantra. You know, I'm in
l A today as we're doing this. You know the
mantra in l A is instant gratification isn't quick enough?
So you can steal that absolutely well, But it's true,
(15:35):
isn't it. You don't want to be dialing one dialing
to for a different extension. I know what I want.
I want to know where it is, if the products coming,
when is it going to get to me? And bringing
all that together on on on, on Messenger or in
what's happ in different countries around the world just makes
it so much easier. And so that's what we're in
the business of trying to do, which is to help
(15:55):
the partners that we have to be able to grow
reach new audiences in different ways. And that brings me
then to the future and the metaverse, which the people
that I'm talking to, the CEOs, the cmos, are unbelievably
excited about this opportunity. Why because it's not just meta
that's going to be building the metaverse. The metaverse is
going to be built by so many like the Internet was,
(16:17):
by so many different companies, organizations, charities, all entrepreneurs all
coming together to create it. And I think that that
is very, very exciting, and there's going to be lots
of opportunities for brands. There's going to be lots of
opportunities for people as well. And so one of the
things that people are saying to me, well, what does
the roadmap look like? What what do I need to
(16:39):
be doing today? You stole my next question, So I'm
going to switch chairs with you. That's good exactly. Well,
that's what the way you know what they're they're talking
to you as well and looking to you for advice
as to what to be doing here. And the vision
that Mark's talking about here is probably some five to
ten years off, so we know where that's going to be.
(17:01):
So it's about utilizing the tools that we have today
to get comfortable. What do I mean by that? We
already have a R filters. We're already seeing businesses out
there that are actually selling using them. So whether it's RayBan,
RayBan has got a whole a R shop on its
Instagram page where you can go on, try on the
different you know, glasses and then click and by how
(17:24):
wonderful and exciting is there. We're seeing the makeup brands
like Charlotte Tilbury Sephora where you can go on and
actually see what the different eyeshadows, what the lipsticks look
like on you. Home improvements we've seen the likes of Ikea.
We've seen the likes of Walmart running ads where they've
actually got the products in that you can take a picture,
and those products are selling out because once it's in
(17:47):
people's homes. Then actually you can see exactly what. It
lets your imagination run wild, but it fills in the
blanks for you obvious exactly. So there's so many things
that people can be doing to get involved, even today
in that journey towards building the metavas that we're talking
about Nicola. Last year, a lot of focus was on
the the the privacy issues and the change that happened
(18:11):
with Apple and the operating system and the impact it
had on small and medium sized businesses more than the
large multinationals because the large multinationals have so much first
party data. And I know some of our listeners are
going to probably glaze over on this, but these are
such important issues that we're facing. And you know where
(18:31):
I've seen the small and medium size or the smb
s who literally relied on Meta as their lifeblood, and
some of those changes have made it more difficult, you know,
when targeting and other things. That was was the promise
and the delivery of Facebook now Meta to the small
(18:52):
medium sized businesses because what you allowed them to do
the democratization was to level the playing field and play
as smart as the big people, you know, as the
big guys and the change has had impact on small
and medium sized businesses. How is that? How is how
is that wrinkle getting ironed out? Because I've heard not
(19:13):
as much recently, but in the earlier part, in the
you know, kind of third quarter of last year, second quarter,
third quarter, some of the small and medium sized businesses
were really squealing because it was having massive impact on
their ability to market their their goods and services. Yeah,
I mean, you're you're absolutely right, Michael, And we were
very clear that we felt that, you know, the impact
(19:35):
would be felt in particular by all those small businesses
around the world. So one of the things that we've
been doing, and we've been very clear and setting out
the road map, is around the fact that we believe
in personalized advertising. We think it's a good thing, we
think consumers love it, we know that businesses around the
world love it as well, and so we've been working
to make sure that we're developing new technologies, privously enhanced
(19:58):
technologies in order to address you know, some of the
some of the changes that we saw. But I think
it also speaks to um, you know, when we're thinking
about the creation of the metaverse and some of the
guard rails that go that go into this as well,
and the fact that we absolutely do need to build
in the principles of privacy and you know, safety and
(20:20):
security as well. Those things need to be built in
right from the beginning, right from the start, because if
we get the principles right, then I think that as
a society that will be better at tackling the new
challenges with the technologies as their eyes, to learn the
lessons from what has happened in the past and to
go forwards. And so one of the things that we've
done from a meta perspective is that we announced a
(20:43):
two year global investment of fifty million dollars in programs
and also in external research in order that we can
go about being able to build the metaverse responsibly. And
we want to work here with and we are doing
with people across the industry, civil rights groups, governments, nonprofits,
academic institutions and others to determine how these sorts of
(21:07):
technologies should be built from the get go. But it's
so important because we all have have become so reliant
on technology. As much as people say I don't want
to do it. I was at a breakfast this morning
with somebody and and I said, well, you're aware of
this or that, and the person said, no, no, no,
I come to meetings without searching online at all. I
(21:31):
like to form my own opinions. I don't want, you know,
a third party search engine telling me what I should expect.
When I meet Michael Casson, I said, well, thank god,
because had you done that, you might have canceled the breakfast. No,
but but but but seriously, but I'm not kidding. You know,
there is that moment where you go, do we have
too much information? Not? Not me, because I'm I'm starved
(21:54):
for information. I'm a you know, I've described my management style.
I stole this from a mutual friend of ours name
Wendy Clark, but I just sort of gribed my management
style and as Wendy taught me as a micro nowhere,
not a micro manager. So I like to know stuff,
and you know, then I try to let people make
their own decisions. But I like to know, so I
(22:16):
understand the levers and why people are making decisions and management.
But but that knowledge that thirst number one and number two. Look,
I'm speaking personally here as we always do. The gift
of Facebook for me, the most important gift of Facebook
for me was what I think Mark's original vision was
(22:37):
was connecting people. I mean, my entire life now is
connected my youth and my old Okay like that, you
know the people that I'm in touch with again that
I had lost track of in my life, And I'm
sure there are billions of stories like that. Literally, it
was a great gift for me. It connected my entire
(23:00):
your life. So I'm a happy meta user from that perspective.
But I want to go back to advertising. You know,
we've all grown up in this era on trying to
search for the right device, the right time, the right message,
the right context, the right person, and all of that
is a wonderful thing to shoot for if you're a
(23:22):
marketer and you want to make sure if you're an
auto manufacturer, you want to get that person when they're
in market for the car, when you're in whatever, you
want to make sure that if it's financial services, you
want to make sure you're getting the person when they
need a loan to buy a house or whatever it
may be, or for their business. But I've been a
big believer there is still that moment and that desire
(23:44):
for surprise and delight. Sometimes you think you're reaching the
right person at the right time, on the right device
and the right context, with the right message. And sometimes
you want to surprise somebody who wasn't actually thinking about
buying a new car, or buying a new dress, or
buying a new something, and you get an AD in
front of them and they go, WHOA, I actually maybe
(24:06):
do want to look at a new car. You talked
about the creator economy, and we're at a moment where
content and commerce are so inextricably linked. That's exciting to me.
And what you can do with content as you drive commerce,
as you know the other things that come off of that.
The importance of content hasn't gotten lost, right, I mean,
(24:28):
you know, talk about that for a moment in terms
of how you look at that marriage of content and commerce. Oh,
so many exciting things to share. And you're right. The
early days of the Internet was very much there was
no serendipity. It was very much I'm looking for this
and then you were served an add up for that.
We are now in a whole world that that I'm
thinking of as discovery commerce where it's like I didn't
(24:50):
know I needed that, No, No, exactly, it's fantastic and
I think you know, so many of the people I think,
you know, the vast majority of people that are on
Instagram have born something as a result of an ad
that they've seen on Instagram or because something that they've
seen with a with a creator on on Instagram. So
it's definitely there that serendipity. But that's when you can
(25:10):
hone it in more and you can make it feel
more personalized and get rid of the noise in the
background that wouldn't work. I think of like my feed
versus my Sun's feed. It's completely different experiences. All the
stories that you know that we're seeing, but we're also
seeing that the ways in which people tell stories is
very different. So we're seeing a big shift, you know.
(25:31):
You know, we've been going backwards and forwards, haven't With
the early days of Facebook, we're very text based, and
then we moved to imagery and now we're in videos
and augmented reality. But reels is something that we're seeing
that's really really exciting, and so we're making a big
investment here in video and reels is really it's the
largest contributor now to engagement growth on Instagram. What it
(25:54):
means we're making it easier for people to make and
also watch great videos across all of our platform And
these are some really significant changes that we're making on
both Instagram and Facebook as well, in order to empower
this greater economy, in order to help brands tell their stories,
in order to help consumers to be able to get
those messages. So all of this coming together is very dynamic,
(26:17):
it's very fast moving, and it's exciting right because we're
meeting people where they are. Remember, Michael, we always build,
We always build for people first. Well, it's a great
place to start. Nicola, I want to say two things.
As you said, I didn't need I didn't know I
needed in this product. But our audience unfortunately can't see
that very very cool microphone you have. So I have
(26:39):
microphone envy. Now I need one of those. I mean,
you know, I didn't think I did. I got a
lot of microphones here, but not as cool as that one.
I feel. I feel microphone envy. I just want our
our listeners to know that, Nicola, you and I could
and we will chat for hours. Nicola, I want to
thank you for taking the time today and and even
(27:00):
in this short period of time you've you've shined a
light on so many things that are so critical to
our audience. And look, I think our industry and particularly
now with you over here, is the beneficiary of more
of Nicola Mendelsson. And I'm excited. I know you've got
(27:22):
a lot in front of you as you've taken on
this this much larger remit and um, I just want
to say thank you for bringing a fresh view. Your
damn British accent makes it sound so so good. Um.
You know, I used to get around with our mutual
friend Rob Norman, who everyone thought was so funny. I
(27:44):
used to say, Rob, You're not that funny. It's just
your British accent. It makes you sound funny. In your case,
it just makes you sound smart. But the good news
as you are, so you know, the promise and the reality.
You know, the fantasy and the reality have matched up
well with Nicola Mendelsson. So, um, look, I want you
to promise me you're going to come back and do
(28:05):
pot do of good company because there's so much more
I wanted to ask, and I know we'll have the
opportunity to do that. But I want to thank you, Nicola,
Oh Michael, thank you, thank you for a giving me
the time, and if people are listening, the thing that
I would say is, I'm here. I'm new in America.
I am here to listen. I'm here to learn. But
(28:25):
also I want to be the bridge towards all these
new different ideas that I am, my teams that are
working at matter. I want to be able to hear
for all of them. So where to help you grow,
to help inspire, and to build the metaverse together. Doesn't
get more exciting than that, right, And and to have
a few laughs on the way, Nicola, Oh definitely, I'm
going to hold you to that when I see you, Nicola,
(28:48):
Thank you, thank you. I'm Michael Casson. Thanks for listening
to Good Company. Good Company is a production. I heart IDEA.
Special thanks to Lena Peterson, chief Brand Officer and Managing
Director of Medially for her vision I'm Good Company, and
to Jen Seely, Vice President Marketing Communications Immediately for programming
(29:10):
amazing talent and contentm
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