Global Partner Summit 2017 - Day 1

DAY 1

Global Partner Summit 2017 kicked off today at the Palace of Fine Arts and Exhibition Center in San Francisco. With more than 800 people in attendance, this is the biggest Partner event of the year. It’s where teams from Facebook, Instagram and Messenger share product roadmaps, explore opportunities for growth and talk about key trends and insights that will help the Partner community build boldly into the future.

Here’s what happened on day one.

Three Areas Of Opportunity For Partners

“The scale and growth on our platforms is unparalleled,” said Gene Alston, Facebook’s VP of Partnerships, who kicked off the event. “And if we’re asking you to Build Beyond, we want to give you insights about what you’re building on.”

Alston highlighted 3 areas that are shifting the landscape significantly and offer Partners some of the best opportunities for growth:

• Creative – Video continues to be increasingly important on our platforms. Many of our top campaigns run multiple iterations of creative that are personalized and mobile-focused.
• Measurement – We acknowledge that there are still challenges to getting to people-based measurement, and we need Partner’s help to combine systems and touchpoints to drive greater visibility for attribution.
• Medium and small businesses – The High Value segment is one of the key growth drivers for Facebook and deserves custom solutions that Partners can provide.

Key Trends That Shape Our Roadmaps

As Facebook’s Kelly Maclean explained , there is more content than ever, meaning the ability to win attention has never been more important. For Partners, this means there’s an ongoing opportunity to develop ad optimization and personalization solutions to help drive better outcomes for advertisers. Products like Audience Insights, which allows advertisers to learn more about what resonates with their audience, will become more important.

Maclean also talked about why it’s important for Partners to think vertically. Because campaigns with Lead Ads and Dynamic Ads tailored to specific verticals have delivered better results, we’re encouraging Partners to consider how vertical-specific solutions remain a key opportunity.

Lessons In Innovation

“Build Beyond”, the theme of this year’s summit, is a call for Partners to be bold in what they build and how they grow. Maria Smith from Facebook’s News Feed team provided context on this theme by talking about Facebook’s recent moves into video with Watch. The innovative platform for shows on Facebook was developed to capture the attention of people watching longer videos during “lean back” moments. It’s a bold step for the company, and it captures what we mean by “Build Beyond”. For Partners, it’s equally important to see opportunities for growth, and to build towards them boldly.

More to come…

On Day Two of Global Partner Summit 2017 we’ll continue to share product roadmaps and discuss new opportunities to serve small businesses. Be sure to check back tomorrow for more information.