Meta is a marketing company

Meta has packaged its marketing and advertising services in different digital tools for brands to deliver differentiated content to the audience, ready to be converted into sales. The keyword is “personalization”, the deep individual knowledge of consumers through their personal data, under an umbrella called Discovery Commerce.

This toolbox is a better paved road than the metaverse it promotes Mark Zuckerbergfounder and owner of the company, and one more consistent with what Meta has achieved in almost 20 years of history: if you already have the audience of all demographic segments in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp y Messengerexploit what you know about it and put it on a platter for third parties.

It is not about reselling the personal data of users and the underlying inferences about their tastes and personalities, but about exploiting them exclusively. In the end, Meta’s learning with Discovery Commerce it is central to the metaverse, the universe of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence that promises a new relationship online.

“Discovery Commerce It is the way in which we have packaged the best practices of the platforms, the tools and what we understand of the new consumption habits and that will allow organizations to reduce time, maximize opportunity and make more efficient the resources they put into be able to monetize discovery trading strategies,” Marco Casarín Junco, CEO of Meta in Mexico, during a presentation for marketing professionals.

Discovery Commerce is based on:

1. the personalization of the advertising and the interactions to which the users are exposed by the brands;
2. the delivery of relevant, attractive and fluid content during your navigation for the conversion to sales, and
3. optimization and measurement of results, in a cycle of trial and error or constant improvement.

It is a paradigm shift driven by the emergence of social networks such as TikTok, whose innovation consists of offering content that is always relevant to the interests of users, instead of only showing content linked to their social relationships (friends and people they follow on the network). If I like skateboard videos, the platform prioritizes that content in my feed (the river of content that I am exposed to without looking for it, “discovering”). It is, in the words of Casarín, to “socialize through a common interest”.

For the system to work, intensive processing of personal data is essential. Meta he knows it: he has based his success on the knowledge of his consumers inside and outside his platforms.

The company works on “three bridges” in personalization:

1. discovery commerce, with personalized content that is displayed in the feed in a natural, “organic” way, which achieves sales with 6 out of 10 consumers in Mexico;
2. conversational commerce, “understanding that 9 out of 10 consumers in the world prefer to interact with a brand through platforms such as WhatsApp or Messenger”, over call centers, emails, phone calls or apps, and
3. the format of the content, mainly video (short and long, they all work). A step that YouTube has also taken.

The scandals of abuse and violations of Meta’s privacy are no secret to anyone. “The fact that you have respect for privacy at no time limits what you can understand and personalize the experience,” Casarín told me. “Today we are the leaders in how to do a customization right. Without those experiences, our evolution would have been slower, but since we have experience in how to do it, today we can offer the best platform”.

Discovery Commerce poses a Meta as a marketing company that also offers social networks and metaverses, all sectors based on the exploitation of personal data.