Yesterday, we reported that Mark Zuckerberg's long-time lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the company. Now, we know her replacement. 

Javier Olivan has been at Meta since 2007. He joined as originally the Head of International Growth for Facebook. Over the last 15 years, he's held a variety of different growth roles within Meta, most recently serving as Chief Growth Officer, responsible for the four main Meta apps, Instagram, Facebook Blue, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Today, I spoke with Dan McCormick from NotBoring.co about industry reaction:

What I think this promotion does is consolidate a lot of the power that he has within those apps with the operations and business side of Meta.

I think it is reflective of Meta wanting to refocus their investments and resources on making sure that revenue continues to grow over the the rates that we've seen over the past couple of years, but has started to slow in the face of Apple's ATT policy, TikTok's ramping growth — both from a engagement and revenue perspective — and just the general kind of churning of the original customer base that that Meta has seen over the last couple of years.

Ad Platform Priorities

I asked Dan what he thought the new COO would need to focus on in the ad side of the business.

The first one is figuring out ways to circumvent Apple's ATT privacy tracking policies. And the way they do that is by throwing a ton of AI and data science resources at the problem. While I don't think targeting will ever be what it was in the heyday of Facebook advertising, I do think this is a challenge that they can overcome with the right amount of investment and resources. Javier is known for being super data-driven, and he is going to figure this out. 

The second is taking on TikTok. Reels is the fastest growing piece of Meta's business. And they see that within TikTok, which was less affected by Apple's ATT policies, the targeting concerns are less impactful. So they're going to be looking to take down TikTok both from an engagement perspective, but also from a monetization perspective. 

The third thing is commerce. How can they tighten the funnel from ad impression to conversion? Right now there's about five to six steps that a user on Instagram is taking to conversion on a Shopify website, let's say, and if they can just tighten that with either Shops or a tighter integration within their partners. I think that is going to improve their efficiency [and] improve marketers efficiencies that they're seeing on the platform.

Incidentally, Meta today announced a reorgnization of its AI efforts that seems to move AI out of research silos and integrate it more with product teams.

Image – Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)