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‘Zuckerberg has made it clear – his first loyalty is to shareholders’: Confessions of a media agency executive
By Ronan Shields • May 29, 2025 •
The recent reframing of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public image as an unabashed figure with more “masculine energy” has sparked controversy in recent years, primarily due to the associated political implications.
However, it was in an interview earlier this month that his comments to Stratechery, where he outlined his vision of Meta using AI to become a one-stop shop for advertisers, dubbed “infinite creative.”
The reaction among agency execs has been understandably distressed, with vocal detractors highlighting the pitfalls of advertisers signing up to such proposals.
In the latest installment of Digiday’s Confessions series, where sources are offered confidentiality in exchange for candor, a veteran media exec explains the thoughts most campaign planners should contemplate while continuing to invest billions on Facebook.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Meta provides scale, so the 25-year-old buyer relies on them to deliver on campaign results. It’s often said that ‘Facebook delivers,’ but does it really?
The conversations around Big Tech marking their own homework are nothing new, but we still need better measurement. Sometimes you’d think it’s 2010, not 2025. For example, why do we continue to measure [campaign success] in clicks, and not in actual sales data.
You do have companies out there starting to offer real-time data [on how ad campaigns are driving real-world results], but even they can struggle. This is, obviously, the case because there are vested interests out there, for example, look at Facebook Audience Network, lots of buyers out there think it’s garbage, but not many really talk about it.
Nobody is incentivized to speak out about it, and this hurts all of the industry.
Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that his first loyalty is to shareholders, not industry stakeholders. Once any one of these companies goes public, it’s all about one thing: when you’re behind the scenes, you really see how much IR [investor relations] really runs things.
He was tone-deaf, probably was trying to be like Elon Musk, and his PR people will probably try to make him walk it back, but he’s just saying what all the other CEOs, both from Big Tech and independent ad tech, are thinking.
However, what I, as somebody trying to do best for the client, want to know is why we’re spending so much on Facebook, other than, ‘It helps to fulfill campaign goals.’ Some people really have to ask themselves questions like what part of the Gen-Z demographic is still on Facebook?
What have your peers said in the weeks since that interview? Do most people seem to think the writing is on the wall?
Well, a lot of the people with the insights we’ve just discussed also know that Facebook isn’t infallible, just look at their screw-up bets like LiveRail, which it bought for hundreds of millions of dollars [only to close a year later], or Atlas, which was similarly closed. But then again, maybe it has learned from those mistakes that it’s better to push on an open door, the rise of AI in this case.
However, with the new systems, you have to wonder things like how they come up with their numbers, and more importantly, how do they police them internally?
Although you often find in this industry that when you put dashboards in front of executives, they stop thinking about people, and just look at how they can maximize margins.
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