Feeding right story to right audience

Senior Writer·NZ Herald·

20 Nov, 2015 04:00 PM7 mins to read

Facebook's chief creative officer, Mark D'Arcy, takes a break during his visit to Auckland. Photo / Nick Reed

Curiosity finds creative ways to add to bottom line.

He calls himself "a big Irish potato head". He has only one good side, he warns the photographer. But Mark D'Arcy, the West Auckland-raised chief creative officer of Facebook is a mercurial potato head.

D'Arcy has one of the world's prime jobs, in perhaps the most iconic city. It's a role that could make buckets of dough for Facebook.

Before joining the company four years ago, he did a similar role for Time Warner and has lived in New York most of his adult life. His job is to develop Facebook's creative power to drive its bottom line.

It is a long way from his school holiday job at the venerable New Zealand Herald, where he was ticked off for jamming one of those vacuum-tube things used back then to whisk documents between floors. The highlight of the summer job that came courtesy of his late father, a newspaper ad salesman, was to wrap and deliver bottles of wine to Auckland's advertising agencies at a time when the industry was full of rock stars.

It was career defining. Instead of dropping the wine at reception, young D'Arcy asked to see the person the gift was for. "I just started saying, 'Mr Sullivan, thank you for your business, on behalf of the New Zealand Herald', and I'd shake their hand.

"I was so enamoured of ad agencies and what I realised years later was the reason I was so enamoured - the architecture was interesting and the people seemed exciting - was that it was the week before Christmas and they were coming back from lunch or going off to the beach. It had a lovely and relaxed energy. It just seemed that an ad agency was a very exciting place."

After sixth form he did an industry course at what is now called AUT, followed by "unglamourous" jobs, delivering proofs and making coffee for talented and patient one-man operators who didn't mind an 18-year-old's constant questions. His first creative job came soon after, a junior copywriter with agency Gestro Horne. It was intoxicating. "I could be wrong but it was like everything I wrote, I don't know how good it was, but it got sold and it got made. Real clients too. I named and launched this bank account, the Moneymaker, and it felt like I'd been there only a few months and it was on telly!"

In Auckland this week to speak to an Ad:Tech audience and visit Facebook's office, he described his young self as brash and insecure, a beneficiary of kind mentors.

By 21 he had joined the Auckland office of multinational advertising agency DMB&B, a year later got a try-out at the agency's New York office where he was welcomed to the fold. "DMB&B stands for D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. At 23 I was a vice-president/creative director in New York and everyone just assumed [wrongly] I was some vaguely illegitimate nephew of the founder."

He'd achieved his two youthful ambitions to work in advertising and live in New York. The latter appealed as much as anything for its copywriting style, "far brasher and in your face".

He was too busy to pinch himself. "I was probably so insecure and compensating for it with enthusiasm." The client list included Virgin Atlantic, Sony, and Super Bowl.

D'Arcy didn't pause until 2003 when he, wife Deborah and daughter Isabelle, 16, settled on Waiheke from where he worked part-time for an American client. "I was writing ads, that were running in America, out of my basement in Waiheke and flying up to LA and shooting them." It wasn't long before he was back in New York, working for Time Warner as chief creative officer of its global media group. After seven years, he joined Facebook to find more creative ways to drive ad revenue.

"Our business is the business of connecting businesses on Facebook. Businesses want to connect with their stories. We think of getting the right story, the right advertisement, the right message to the right person as a creative exercise. My team is a big part of that global sales and marketing function."

The historic model (best described as "We have A. We want you to watch B. B pays A to put B next to it. You will watch B to get A for free") isn't going away. D'Arcy's father would say if it wasn't for the newspaper classifieds the country would shut down because, pre-internet, that was the only way to buy a car or find a flat. Now information comes from everywhere and anywhere.

Personalisation and relevance are the buzzwords. D'Arcy grew up in a world of little choice or control. There were two television channels. Changing channel meant getting out of your chair. "We are now rapidly moving into a world as close as near to infinite choice and we have zero cost of movement between those choices.

"The burden of expectation from those on Facebook is that the things that I am shown have to be increasingly relevant to me." Especially ads. "We don't distinguish advertising from everything else on Facebook. Newsfeed [on your Facebook page] was conceived with the idea that it was like this personalised newspaper that would have brands that were relevant to you. Our goal is that the relevance and reward has to be great for you and the better that gets, the greater the value." If an ad or sponsored page (a Facebook profile that businesses pay Facebook to promote) annoys the person who sees it, either because it is not relevant or well done, everybody loses. The trick, he says, is to show the right product to the right audience, for example a running stroller to mothers who are triathletes.

What appears on each person's Facebook newsfeed comes from a rapid-fire automated online auction informed by the personal information the company has about its 1.5 billion users through what you share, cookies and other tracking devices.

The advertising world has become extraordinarily complex but D'Arcy believes is "unbelievably better".

"One of the mistakes that is easy to make is to think that the world is going mobile. The world is not going mobile, the world has gone mobile." That is just as true for the small operator as the big corporations, he says. "That's empowering because there is no cost of entry. You can start out literally with a really good idea and from anywhere in the world connect with almost anyone and get your story in front of them."

He sees huge relative advantage for New Zealand because it removes the problems of distance and the cost of traditional marketing.

Ask about future plans and D'Arcy tells you that career planners would despair of him. He doesn't do road maps. The Facebook job just happened, according to his telling. It took some explaining by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg before he understood how he, a not particularly tech-savvy person, could help.

Four years ago, his division, The Creative Shop, had two staff. It now employs 130 and there are creative shops in 29 of the dozens of offices Facebook has around the world. D'Arcy has hired each recruit. He looks for talent, curiosity and generosity, the latter because selfish egos can be a barrier to mucking in.

Curiosity had been his only career path. It is challenging and a bit terrifying to not quite understand why you have been hired. He recalls a cautionary quote. "A fish is a wonderful thing, but if you ask it to climb a tree it will look like an idiot." The message? Be brave but be careful.

He would advise his young self to "run into the new. Look at where things are going and to run into it. As Wayne Gretzky said, skate to where the puck is going to be. I didn't do that, I didn't run into the internet."

D'Arcy is running now, into the Facebook future.