MENLO PARK, CA: The speed of change in digital is such that marketers have to be able to learn and adapt to new platforms and formats in just a few months, according to Facebook’s VP of ads and business platform.

“Marketers don’t have a year, two years, three years to slowly dip their toes in and learn to use something, to adapt to it very gradually,” Mark Rabkin told Ad Exchanger.

“To really compete, you need an organization that can learn and adapt to a new experience on a three-to-four-month time frame,” he suggested.

That means advertisers “figuring out which parts of their marketing are more suitable to testing, learning, rapid iteration – to a more agile marketing approach – and then figuring out which part of their business they can start with”.

An example comes from the use of video, where Rabkin highlighted consumers’ rapid take-up of Stories.

“Stories illustrates the operational challenges a lot of advertisers are having,” he explained. “This is a format that was quite tiny or basically didn’t exist two years ago, and it reached 100 million daily users in three months on Instagram with a ton of usage.”

Commenting on the recent changes Facebook has made in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations – including limiting the amount of data developers that can get through its APIs and ending third-party partner targeting – Rabkin claimed that advertisers and developers had been “very understanding” about the removal of these features.

“We have to recognize that as people’s expectations of the ad model increase, as people become more opinionated and more self-aware about data use and privacy, the whole industry has to do better,” he said. “And we’re trying to lead the way on that.

“I think what the world really wants to see from us is actions to show that we’re really protecting people’s data, actions to show that we really don’t want Cambridge Analytica or any other data situation like that to happen again.”

Sourced from Ad Exchanger; additional content by WARC staff