- 2 days ago
Meta’s Ime Archibong, once Mark Zuckerberg’s jogging partner, makes the case for why creators should prioritize Facebook.
Speaking to Writer-at-Large Peter Kiefer at THR’s Creators A-List Dinner at Beverly Hills hotspot Matsuhisa, presented by Facebook and sponsored by Gersh and Blacklane, Archibong highlighted the platform’s massive global reach, monetization opportunities, and new AI tools like automatic video translation that help creators connect with audiences worldwide.
Speaking to Writer-at-Large Peter Kiefer at THR’s Creators A-List Dinner at Beverly Hills hotspot Matsuhisa, presented by Facebook and sponsored by Gersh and Blacklane, Archibong highlighted the platform’s massive global reach, monetization opportunities, and new AI tools like automatic video translation that help creators connect with audiences worldwide.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00I just want to start by just sharing one small fact. I am a member of Generation X.
00:06And I say that only to share that we were the last generation that knew what life was like before the internet.
00:13So when I graduated from college, I went through all the things that we had to do, you know,
00:19internships, assistant jobs, working in mail rooms if you wanted to get into the media or the entertainment space.
00:25Those are the things that were available to you with the hope of maybe making it to sort of middle management.
00:31So first, I want to congratulate all of you guys for making it into the Hollywood Reporter list.
00:37And I want to congratulate you even more, and I mean this sincerely, for never having to get a real job.
00:42It's incredible.
00:45Tell them that your job is real. It's very real.
00:48No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Let me put my glasses on here.
00:51So, I am interviewing Ime Archibong.
00:56He is vice president of product at Meta.
00:59He oversees social and generative AI experiences for Facebook and Messenger.
01:06He's a fascinating guy.
01:08I've learned a lot about him. I'm just doing research about his life.
01:11One fun fact is that he, for many years, was Mark Zuckerberg's jogging partner.
01:17And they were like the Forrest Gump's of Silicon Valley.
01:21They've like literally jogged everywhere.
01:23Can you share the most exotic place that you have jogged with, Mark?
01:26Of all the things to intro somebody with, this is probably, it's actually probably my closest stint to a creator.
01:32Because we did post a bunch.
01:36Great Wall of China.
01:37There you go.
01:38There you go.
01:38Anyways, have you done MMA with Mark Zuckerberg?
01:44I will not answer that question.
01:46I just want to make sure I don't end up in a clinch if this thing goes off the rails.
01:50So, that's the first serious question here.
01:54I, and maybe it's a function of my age, but when I think of like creator economy, I think of the first platforms that come to mind are, you know, Facebook.
02:03I mean, sorry, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
02:06I'm wondering, where do you guys see Facebook fitting into the ecosystem?
02:11What lane have you guys carved out for yourselves now and moving into the future?
02:17Yeah, I mean, one, thanks for inviting me to as well.
02:20It's been a pretty fascinating couple of minutes or hour or so chatting with so many of you.
02:24I'm really inspired by the crew that's here.
02:26We do have a lane.
02:27I mean, this is don't sleep on Facebook.
02:30Who here has a global audience?
02:33Right?
02:35I get to stare at a dashboard every single day of the products that reach 3 billion people on a monthly basis.
02:40It's pretty insane.
02:42Who here likes to engage with their audience in an authentic and a real and almost community-driven way?
02:48Right?
02:49One of the things that is fairly distinct and it was what made Facebook authentic and unique and differentiated in the early days, 21 years ago, was real names, real identities.
02:58So, you have real authentic connections there.
03:00And I think one of the things that we are seeing is creators who are using all the other different platforms.
03:04They absolutely should.
03:06When they come to Facebook, there's an engagement that they have with real authentic people that I think that anyone who is a community leader, for lack of a better word, in addition to a creator, is really finding value in.
03:15And then, last but not least, y'all are getting paid.
03:18Or some people are getting paid.
03:20Like, we've worked really, really hard.
03:23It's a real job, right?
03:25It's money, right?
03:26But, yeah, we've worked really, really hard over the course of the last couple years to ensure that the people who are spending their time and their energy and their talent in coming to our platform are seeing and capturing the value of that.
03:38And we have some kind of pretty unique ways and tools that we've done to make it a little bit more differentiated.
03:43I mean, if people who are here and you're using video, there's a number of different platforms you can go for video.
03:49But if how you actually want to monetize is through text or even photos, Facebook, I think, is probably one of the places right now where you can get paid for all those different formats and media types.
04:02How do you guys figure out, like, internally the tools that you want to build for the creators?
04:08What kind of an exchange do you have with the community?
04:10Do you, like, what efforts do you make to figure out what this group of people want and need to spend more time and to use your platform?
04:18Yeah, there's a couple other product people and engineering people here, so they know this quite well, which is at the end of the day, like, we're trying to solve people's needs.
04:25Like, oftentimes you will hear product people talk about, oh, how we're trying to solve creator problems or we're trying to solve people problems.
04:32And that is true, but I'm one that's always said, like, if you walk around the world looking for problems, you're only going to think everything is bad and everything is broken.
04:38But there's also just ways to bring more delight and more opportunity and actually satisfy people's needs.
04:44So we spend time with folks.
04:45We have an awesome partnerships team who is sprinkled around here, and I'm sure many of you also know, internally, because, of course, some of the product people and engineering folks can't talk to every single one of you.
04:55They are our mouthpiece and also our ears and eyes as to where the needs are.
05:00We take that back and we try to prioritize, and it's a simple prioritization exercise.
05:05Like, what is the top need or the top opportunity that we see?
05:08And we start there and then work down the list.
05:10The beautiful thing about when you are building products for human beings, when you're building products for creators, is that list is never ending.
05:16As soon as you guys are excited and adopt one particular tool, then the question becomes, like, well, how do I do this better?
05:23How do I do that better?
05:24And that makes my job and the job of anyone who's building products for creators and for people writ large pretty exciting.
05:29It's an infinite game.
05:31I'm just curious.
05:32I mean, obviously, a sister company is Instagram.
05:35How do you guys internally think about building products, knowing that you have this other company that services a similar community?
05:42Like, what do you, what's, what are those, do you guys, are you in dialogues with them?
05:46Or I'm just, I'm just wondering, like, is there any communication or collaboration between Instagram and Facebook when it comes to sort of the things that you want to offer to this group of people?
05:53Always.
05:54Yeah.
05:55We were chatting a little bit earlier, so you know I'm a sports person.
05:59And I like to lose this analogy.
06:01Any basketball fans here?
06:04All right.
06:04Okay.
06:05All right.
06:05We won't, we won't start talking about teams, L.A. versus Bay Area or anything along those lines.
06:10Go Knicks.
06:12But if you were a point guard, say the point guard's the creator, and you were blessed to have on your team, Clay Thompson and Steph Curry, two of the top 10 three-point shooters on the planet who have ever played the game, to your left and to your right.
06:29And every single time down the court, you get the opportunity to pass to one of them or pass to both of them.
06:34That is a great position to be in.
06:36And when I think about what Instagram represents and what Facebook represents, you have, again, global reach, two platforms that touch over three billion people every single month.
06:46You have different, interesting, and differentiated opportunities.
06:49Clay is like a runoff, a pick, catch and shoot really quickly.
06:53Steph, give him the ball.
06:54Wherever he is, he's going to dribble, get his own shot, and get that open.
06:57So there's going to be some differences between Facebook and Instagram.
07:00Many of you are using both platforms right now, and the question is, can you activate one when you think the time is right with whatever you're trying to achieve and what your goals are trying to achieve?
07:08So we talk a lot internally.
07:11We share a lot of the best practices and what's working for creators.
07:13At the end of the day, we're both out there trying to satisfy your guys' agenda, and that's pretty important to us.
07:19But then we also talk about where the unique areas and places and spaces that we can lean in.
07:23And like I say on Facebook, there's something very, very special about the authentic people and the real people that exist on our platform and your ability to build community around that.
07:30Are there particular niches for creators that work particularly well on Facebook that you would flag?
07:41And is there some organizing principles?
07:43I mean, Facebook's so huge.
07:45I'm just wondering how, if you have a smaller niche, like, I don't know, motorcycle maintenance or like, I don't know, some form of obscure cooking or something along those lines.
07:53Like, how does it, can you just walk me, just from my edification, I'm curious, like, what niches work?
08:00And if you were providing guidance to people who wanted to get into this economy and space, you know, how would you, like, what kind of advice would you give them?
08:08Yeah, it's going to sound somewhat like whatever, but I'll say it, which is like what niches don't work when you have a platform that reaches 3 billion people around the world.
08:17And sometimes I do this math, which is like how many people are on the planet, 8 billion, how many have access to the internet.
08:22It's like close to like 5 billion, depending on what stats you believe right now.
08:25How many then are in countries where they don't allow a Facebook or an Instagram and some other internet tools that are built here in the United States.
08:32And like, you keep ticking down, you keep ticking down that list.
08:36There's, it's almost pure saturation of the people who are online right now.
08:40And that's pretty powerful.
08:40So it really is, it's like what niche doesn't work.
08:43If I was to flip open my phone right now and I was to scroll through, you're going to see a bunch of folks that are of my age, vintage.
08:52Making jokes about what it's like to be a former basketball player who is now, your body's catching up with them and letting you know.
08:58You're going to see a lot of parenting content that does quite well on the Facebook platform.
09:02I have a four-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old.
09:04And the reels that my wife and I share back and forth oftentimes are just like, oh, we just went through this or we just did this.
09:13Food content.
09:15You know, shout out Jeff, who I've been chatting with for the last hour and a half or so.
09:19But the food content clearly in our ecosystem does quite well.
09:21But I could go on and on and on and on.
09:24I'm sure all of you have different niches that are pretty unique to your identity and the content that you desire and that you probably want likely is on the platform just given the size and the scale.
09:34And the, you know, the creator community.
09:35It's the creator community on Facebook right now totals in the millions.
09:39Right.
09:39You also specialize inside Facebook on coming up with new products that are sort of AI focused.
09:48And I'm wondering if you could share just what tools could you expect or we could expect or they could expect to see that would be of use to them that you guys are either working on now or dreaming up for the short-term or long-term future.
10:02It's exciting time to be a builder.
10:03I am old enough to remember the transition from desktop to mobile and how exciting of time that was in the industry to be a builder.
10:10And we're going through a similar transformation right now that probably is even bigger.
10:15In these transformations, I would say that the thing that really guides us in addition to trying to understand, like, what were the needs or the opportunities that we couldn't build for before that these new technologies enable us to do?
10:27There also is just this, like, spirit of fun and play.
10:30I'm sure many of you guys like to have fun and like to play.
10:34And oftentimes, you probably create your best content when you're in that zone.
10:37So I'm really excited about some of the things that we are doing that we're talking about.
10:41Quick question.
10:42How many of you have global audiences right now?
10:44Great.
10:46How many of you are, your audience is English, but your audience is also in Mexico or a Spanish-speaking country?
10:55Keep your hands up.
10:56How many of you speak Spanish?
10:57You saw more than half the hands went down.
11:02AI is allowing you to upload content as of, what, two weeks ago on both Facebook and Instagram and automatically translate those videos from English into Spanish.
11:13And because of AI, it'll look like your mouth is saying the right pronunciations and everything along those lines.
11:20So when you talk about connecting and really reaching your audience, that is one of the most powerful things I'm hoping that creators will see from this brand new capability, these brand new tools that are pretty profound.
11:32The thing that we just did, English to Spanish, you can also now do Hindi.
11:37So how many of you have a community or an audience that's based in India, which is massive for Facebook?
11:43Portuguese, how many of you have?
11:45Yep.
11:45Okay.
11:45Right.
11:46So same thing, shoot the video, shoot the video in English, automatically translate it to Portuguese.
11:53And my hope is that that is just, everybody knows you like to receive content in your native tongue and everything.
11:59Yeah.
12:00Just one more hour, maybe a couple more on AI.
12:03You know, Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how much he's willing to invest in AI.
12:07He seems to be really going for it now.
12:11And as somebody who's involved in some of these really high, the high level conversations about AI, I mean, I guess there's this point of view that AI can usher in this era of unprecedented human advancement.
12:24You know, there's this view that like all the mundanities of life will wash away and we can just focus on the things that we want to do.
12:29That's one version.
12:30And then there's the darker version about what could happen with AI.
12:33I'm wondering from your vantage point, how secure are you that this is going to end up the former and not the latter?
12:40And I'm wondering if you feel the protections are in place for the advancement of this technology that will work for the betterment of all of us as opposed to, you know, just for a few.
12:52I love the question.
12:53I'm fairly confident that you're talking to someone who's like a techno pragmatist slash optimist.
13:03But the like more abstract hot take is there are 8 billion people on this planet and life is pretty good for a large majority of that.
13:11And it continues and it has only gotten better over the course of human history.
13:14There's a bunch of different stats that you can point towards to suggest that's the case.
13:18It's gotten safer.
13:18There are more people, infant mortality rates have dropped precipitously over the course of the last 200 years.
13:25But as human beings, we are tool builders, first and foremost.
13:29And we've continued to use our ability to build tools, in particular technology, to continue to do right by humanity.
13:37If we didn't, there would be chaos in this planet.
13:40If I actually do believe that we as humans constantly are pushing in the right direction.
13:44I do think that with this particular wave, there has been enough of a conversation and attention around AI right now that you are seeing, whether it's the biggest of big companies,
13:57Metas, the Microsofts, the Amazons, the Googles out there of the world, all the way to the smallest of the small entrepreneurs who are trying to tinker with this technology,
14:06who are thinking and designing with safety at the center of it.
14:10We spend an enormous amount of energy.
14:13You talked about the time and probably the capital that we're spending on infrastructure and fiber and GPUs and all that stuff.
14:20There's also a pretty big bill that's putting into safety.
14:24We call it red teaming.
14:26So people testing these models and making sure that they're ultimately doing right and doing the things that we want to build and put out in the world.
14:32There's no promise that there won't be unintended consequences here and there.
14:35But I feel like there's such a collective attention right now on that, that if and when we find that, we stamp it out pretty quickly and are able to pivot.
14:42So, yeah, you're talking to an optimist, someone who believes pretty deeply in the good of humanity for better or worse.
14:48And I think that we'll continue in the same way, like when we discovered fire, to put it to the best use.
14:53And almost done here, I got to ask, you spend a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg, who I find to be a pretty fascinating figure.
15:03If you were to use one word to describe his management style, what would it be?
15:12One word.
15:12Can I do two words or can I, can I call, um, the, the things that, like, I want to say intensely curious.
15:27There's fewer people.
15:28I've had the opportunity to work with Mark for about 15 years now at this point.
15:31Um, I get the opportunity, I sit on a board of directors with another founder who's a phenomenal founder, Rich Fairbanks, and, like, the, the, the, the innate ability that these founders have.
15:45And then Mark in particular is just, like, insanely intensely curious about what we can be doing to, our mission is to further and build the future of human connection.
15:55And it's asking questions about AI, it's asking questions about hardware, it's asking questions about the research that's out there.
16:05And if he doesn't know something, he's going to go learn it.
16:07Um, you know, there's the, you, you alluded to the year of running that him and I did together, uh, and a bunch of other people over the course of, uh, 12 months many years ago.
16:16But, like, many years ago where he was like, I'm going to go learn Chinese.
16:19And just learn how to speak Mandarin over the course of, like, 12 months.
16:23And I, I constantly see that from a management perspective.
16:26He's going to be the person to ask the hardest questions, the most curious questions.
16:30He's going to know where the gaps are even in his knowledge.
16:32But I guarantee he's going to be also the person that six months later or three months later has closed that gap because he's so intensely curious about some things.
16:40And, um, last one for you.
16:42Um, he has famously built this sort of, um, uh, end of times bunker.
16:47Um, you, you say you're close with Mark.
16:51But if things really go south, will he allow you into the bunker to join him and his family?
16:59I live in Oakland, California.
17:01And I get prepared.
17:03I have my earthquake kit.
17:05That's all I need.
17:05That's all I'm saying.
17:06That's all I need.
17:08Emei, thank you so much for being here.
17:09And thank you guys.
17:10Congratulations again to everybody.
17:11Congratulations to everybody, yeah.
Be the first to comment