I recently interviewed one of the world’s leading advertising experts. Over the course of his lifetime, he’s spent over $40 million on advertising, generated hundreds of millions for himself and his clients and is currently...
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Facebook gives its employees a lot of sweet perks.
But what makes Facebook a unique place to work isn’t its vibrant campuses or cushy salaries. It’s the sheer, insane scale of how many people use its product around the world.
That’s according to John Hegeman, director of engineering for advertising delivery, ecommerce, and analytics.
Hegeman is behind which ads you see when you’re scrolling through your Facebook News Feed, because he oversees the online auction that designates which brands pay what to get their content snuggled in amid the status updates and news links on the social network.
The system’s goal: To serve you relevant stories — ad and organic-wise — that you’ll actually be interested in, while preventing advertisers from gaming the system.
Hegeman first joined Facebook way back in 2007, right around when it first launched its self-service ad platform. And he’s been hustling on different ad systems almost ever since.
In 2013, Hegeman took a year-and-some change break from Facebook to work at the Q&A site Quora. Why’d he come back? In part, because he missed the scale of working for a ~$300 billion company with 1.6 billion monthly active users.
“You can step back and think, ‘We made this change, what’s the impact it has on the world?'” he tells Business Insider. “The number of people you’re affecting, the number of businesses, and the magnitude of that… it’s hard to match that anywhere that’s not Facebook.”
The other great part about working at the social network is the people and collaboration, he says.
“There are so many diversely talented people,” he says. “No matter what kind of problem you’re working on, there will be someone here who is one of the best people in the world at that thing.”
Tied to that, he noticed in the one year that he was gone that the ad team became much more connected with the rest of the company.
“I think that’s been a really positive change,” he says. “We’re partnering more closely with other teams. It manifests itself in the product because ads are more tightly integrated with the News Feeds, including where they actually show up on people’s mobile devices, and also in terms of relevance. Both on the product side and on the organizational side, there’s more cross-pollination.”
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This week, Amazon’s editors released a list of 100 leadership and success books to read in a lifetime.
“We chose books to help people plan for their futures and/or deal better with their present,” said Chris Schluep, senior books editor at Amazon.com. “The same book won’t work for every situation, or every person, so you’ll see titles sitting beside one another that might not normally share shelf space.”
In other words, while this list does include books by traditional business people, you’ll also find works by outspoken entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, and Hollywood producers.
What each of these authors shares is a desire to help people find out what they really want — and to make their dreams a reality.
Check out the full, ranked list below, and learn more about the top 25 here.
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This week, Amazon’s editors selected their 100 favorite books on leadership and success.
We’ve highlighted the top 25 below, including books by psychologists, economists, and competitive athletes. Each one offers a unique look …
Camilla Kemp was recently appointed chief operating officer of M&C Saatchi — one of London’s leading marketing agencies, which has worked with Google, Boots, HSBC, Natwest, and the UK Conservative Party. She started at the ad agency five years ago, but in her new role, Kemp has been given responsibility to oversee the 11 companies in the M&C Saatchi group.
When Business Insider interviewed Kemp, she provided four simple tips that helped her to quickly rise to the top of the ad industry.
And working hard is not one of them. “I think everyone works hard, don’t they?” Kemp said.
“Always thinking that you’ve done the vey best that you can do (is the secret to getting to the top.) Yeah, I think a bit of conscientiousness… I’ve probably got quite high standards as well.
“I don’t need huge amounts of sleep, I don’t think. I’ve sort of worked out that I’m actually ok without. I’m not a ten-hours-a-night kind of girl. Six — that’s alright. That’s ok. Yes I think I work hard, but it’s not about the number of hours you do. It’s about the difference you make in the hours that you’re making them. Your brand is created on the work that you do. Your reputation is about the excellence of what you deliver for your clients.”
“I think making sure you’re always working with people who are probably better than you and can help you answer the problems. I think it’s really important — particularly in a business where you’re using creativity to solve business problems — that you have different types of brains to do that. So, I’m a big believer in working together with a couple of other brains around me to solve something and you get there faster and it’s more exciting and it’s more fun to do it that way. I think that’s a big part of it.”
“I think there are sort of consistent values that you have when you have a strong sense of culture. So, for example, you know the agency was founded by some very entrepreneurial people and that entrepreneurial spirit is something that rings true and has been one of the key things for how the group has been formed. We don’t go in for just going in and buying an agency that already exists. We do it through organic growth and finding someone who’s super smart who wants to set up their own thing and we’ll back them up and the create a new unit within the group.”
“What’s interesting about marketing is that I feel that we’ve actually evolved quickly and adapted more to the changing landscape of technology (than other industries.) And, ultimately, the people in the real world — we’re going to call them consumers but they’re people — are happy to be entertained and they’re happy to be informed. So, if a brand is able to be able to provide those experiences, they’re happy to watch what the brand has put in front of them and they’ll opt into it. There are lots of examples of brands creating digital experiences and content platforms.”
Kemp also told Business Insider that’s it’s actually surprisingly simple to set up a rival to M&C Saatchi.
She said: “It’s actually very easy in a way to set up a marketing business. You just need some people and a laptop and some connections, you haven’t got to build a factory or invest in packaging, it’s about intellectual capital really and ideas and people who are smart and who have ideas. So there’s a phenomenal amount of competition from all sorts of people who think they can do what everyone else can do. And lots of people saying ‘Yes we can do that.'”
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