BE chats with Facebook Creative Shop’s Juhi Kalia

Loknath Das

BE chats with Facebook Creative Shop's Juhi Kalia

For those of us who have kinda sorta heard about Facebook’s Creative Shop but are unaware of what it really does, BE breaks it down:

FB’s Creative Shop is essentially a creative body that helps major brands develop Facebook-specific content and gathers information about how people are consuming ads, and how that data can be used to propel better advertising. The media lab strives to keep a growingly fickle generation engaged for longer with its creative devices by working with creative agencies like Ogilvy and Publicis to create content.

They pride themselves on creating interactive content. Well, they insist on it and that’s what sets them apart from their competitors. For instance, take this Facebook exclusive as conceptualised and created for MJ BALE called Unsuitable Journey:

Watch the ad here

Before joining Facebook in 2016, Juhi Kalia’s career in advertising spanned over 20 years. On the penultimate day of Goafest 2017, she hit the ‘Knowledge Seminars’ stage to talk about how sometimes it’s important to divorce ‘social’ from ‘media’, how Creative Shop is invested in hyper-personalisation of ads, working alongside agencies to create content while avoiding competition and much more.

BE caught up with the head of Creative Shop, India and Indonesia at Facebook to talk about the creative body, understand what sets it apart from a traditional advertising/digital agency and whether it’s time for Facebook to take ownership of content:

Why did you make the transition from working for an ad agency to Facebook Creative Shop? How different is it?

I love advertising and creative work beyond words.

Over the years, I’ve been around many agencies like Ogilvy, McCann, Lowe, JWT- in different countries as well. I just wanted to do something I’d never done before; something that was scary and I’m glad I did, because the journey has been amazing.

What I’ve learned in the last one year has just been insane. In terms of a learning curve, to do something different is exciting. And yet it is similar because it’s familiar and it’s what I do. So, there are differences, but only in the sense of there being a lot of new learnings on behaviour and the science behind it. For instance, now a client may start a brief with data as opposed to just insight. Clients actually say “Hey, let’s look at the data and then cull an insight out of this”. So, there are differences but the storytelling, good ideas, beautiful craft stays.

Do you think Creative Shop is more than just a creative entity at this point? Is this a core business from which you’ll be able to offer other services in the future?

Hmm, not so far. Our intention right now is to enable, guide, co-create for, inspire and sometimes create independently for brands. And sometimes it’s easier to just do it and show it as opposed to talking about it. But at the same time, I don’t really envision us becoming an agency with that kind of scale and workforce. We’re a bunch of four guys and that’s why we have to be very conscious of our bandwidth.

Facebook has always maintained it has no ambitions to be an advertising agency. And yet it has hired some prominent creatives for Creative Shop. What does that indicate?

That there is a need for it! There are so many talented and creative people in the industry and a lot of their time and energy understandably goes into their big TV commercials or big launches- and I get it, that’s the business.

So, you need an engine to keep pushing on ideas and constantly keep educating and experimenting with them. A lot of digital agencies know a lot more but stuff but things change so fast in terms of innovation- there are new updates every week, every day! Or a new format and you go

“Whoo! Cool, what do we do with that now?” So to stay on top of that, is what we’re here for.

Which is the most recent ad agency to approach Facebook Creative Shop in this region?

We have been working quite frequently and quite well with Ogilvy and Vodafone. So, we did something called WPP Creative Ambassadors. It’s a program that we did for a whole day where not just me, but we have someone coming in and talking about media, content, entertainment, digital marketing, branding. So, we dedicated the day to WPP agencies and from that day we focussed on Ogilvy since they leant in as well. We’ve subsequently worked on a few brands with them specifically, Vodafone

[Source:-etbrandequity]