Facebook (FB) Celebrates a Billion Users With a New Advertisement
Oct. 4, 2012 — -- "Chairs Are Like Facebook." That's just one of the tag lines in Facebook's new ad released today on the web to celebrate the company's milestone of hitting one billion users.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the major achievement on Facebook this morning. "This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month," Zuckerberg wrote in the blog post. "If you're reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you."
Facebook actually reached the billion-user record last month on Sept. 14. With that stat, Facebook is also pointing out that there have been over 1.13 trillion likes, 140.3 billion friend connections, 219 billion photos uploaded since the launch of the service in February 2009.
The 90-second ad, which you can view here, will appear on Facebook.com for now, but according to AllThingsD it might see some TV airtime and some placement on other websites in the future. It was created by Wieden+Kennedy, the the same agency responsible for Nike's ads. Alejandro González Iñárritu, who directed "Amores Perros," was the director, says Ad Age.
The ad and the milestone come as Facebook continues to face pressure from Wall Street and the public about its disappointing IPO (Mark Zuckerberg's adjective, not ours). When the company first sold stock on May 18, it offered a price of $38 per share, but the stock quickly fell about 50 percent. Yesterday, the stock closed at $21.83.
Earlier this week, Facebook's new advertising policies raised some privacy concerns. The new Custom Audiences advertising feature allows marketers to target their ad or sponsored story to a specific set of users using phone numbers or email addresses posted on the site.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg defended the new feature and stated that "we never sell user information, we don't make money when you share more, and we do not give your information to marketers."
She added: "People will on use Facebook if they trust us."
Whether each of its billion users trust Facebook is a story unto itself, but like chairs, Facebook is providing a place for people to sit and get together on the web.
