THE CHALLENGE
Facebook’s new business support area, Facebook Marketing Partners for Agency, were launching their newly developed support hub and online tools to the global market, and they wanted to ensure engagement with the newly developed program.
The challenge was to be able to attract and engage their target markets’ attention – these intermediary agencies were already time poor and heavily bombarded with content and training events from competing platforms. A soft pilot to test the market’s interest was needed before rolling out the FMPA Program globally.
LOCATIONS:
Australia (Sydney and Melbourne), UK (London and Cornwall), France (Paris), Spain (Tarifa), Italy (Venice and Milan), USA (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles), Japan (Tokyo), South Korea (Seoul), Brazil (Sao Paolo) and Cuba (Havana)
THE SOLUTION
Working for Jack Morton, my role was the Executive Producer, responsible for leading the team to develop a creative concept and then produce and execute the solution successfully. Our creative idea was to bring the Program from the computer to life in an expo style event.
The Expo, combined interactive kiosk areas for agencies to engage and understand each of the Program benefits, along with a series of workshops for the agencies to select their own self-directed learning. The Expo pilot, was tested in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia – a smaller market for Facebook, minimising any risk if the Program wasn’t embraced. After delivering events clearly demonstrated significant positive results in advocacy for Facebook, increased engagement and use of the FMPA Program, and an overwhelming appreciation by agencies for the rare opportunity to connect face-to-face in the physical live event space with Facebook experts, the next step was to align the Expo experience with the launch of the Program into their global markets – EMEA (London, Paris), NA (Toronto, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles), LATAM (Sao Paolo) and APAC (Tokyo and Seoul). To ensure consistency of delivery, Facebook’s project manager requested my ongoing involvement as project lead. With me at the helm, I worked alongside Jack Morton colleagues in each of the locations where available (EMEA and NA), or used my Australian team, working remotely and then travel to country (APAC and LATAM) for delivery. Each location presented its own challenges that were overcome. Not only recognising the obvious language issues for translation of content, but having in-country support teams that could interpret our needs. Through sourcing local in-country suppliers to deliver our specific requirements, I needed to navigate a number of foreign exchange and currency impacts, needed to adjust design specifications to allow for local stock and fabrication capabilities, and learnt quickly about international freight and import/export restrictions from country-to-country. One of our greatest learnings for both myself and Facebook, also highlighted the cultural nuances from market to market which we accommodated, without compromising the integrity of the Expos or Facebook brand. Our final challenge came with the delivery of our last APAC expos coinciding with the early outbreak of COVID-19 (Seoul 4th February 2020), having to implement a plan that included, additional communication, safety precautions and recording of all attendees.
OTHER INTERNATIONAL WORK: Contracted with Incentive Action, successfully delivering incentive reward tours for 200 customers to Cuba and Italy.
Also see Sport Events for work in UK and Spain.
