Expanding the Network

expanding the

network Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook’s new head of consumer marketing, has spent her career building global brands.

Now she’s tasked with building out the social network’s raison d’être for an international audience.

By Christine Birkner | Staff Writer

 cbirkner@ama.org

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ome marketers’ curricula vitae parallel the Fortune 500 list, populated with market-leading brands from a vast array of industries. Some executives jump from CPG to healthcare, from tech to telecom, building an enviable portfolio of accomplishments by remaining laser-focused on one objective: building brands that connect with customers.

Rebecca Van Dyck epitomizes that well-traveled approach quite literally, having traversed the global marketplace from retail to tech and back again. Throughout her career, Van Dyck has shaped the global marketing strategies of iconic brands including Nike, Apple and Levi’s. Now she has landed at the ultimate brand for establishing customer connections.

In February 2012, Van Dyck was appointed head of consumer marketing at Facebook, the first to hold the newly created position. She’s tasked with honing the Facebook brand, and working to connect Facebook’s offerings and messaging with an increasingly diverse target audience as the company expands its international reach. Good thing she has a world’s worth of brand-building experience to rely on.

A Global Mindset

Thinking in global terms in business—and in life—is de rigueur these days, but Van Dyck has always had a worldly perspective.

“I’ve always been curious about seeing the rest of the world firsthand,” she says. “I love looking at something that I thought I understood, an American concept, from a global angle and realizing it looks a little different from here. I constantly push myself to look at everything that way. … My family always traveled.

Travel was always a very important part of my education and my upbringing, and that stayed with me.”

While attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., she spent a semester abroad in Cairo. “I wanted to go to a place that was as unfamiliar as possible. I wanted to understand culture, history, language, issues on gender and politics that I’d never been exposed to. The experience was fabulous. I remember being in Jerusalem on spring break when it was Easter, Passover and Ramadan all at the same time. It was fascinating seeing the different histories and beliefs, the conflict and the celebration, all play out in one city at one time,” she says.

Van Dyck also was a college athlete, playing defense on Malacaster’s women’s soccer team. The sports-to-business transition of skills is an oft-quoted concept at this point, but Van Dyck learned particularly transferable team-building skills, she says. “I had an amazing coach in college who taught me so many things about business. If I couldn’t kick well with my left foot, he would say: ‘Kick with your right foot. Play to your strengths and that elevates the whole team.’ When you build a team, you put people where they’re best suited, where they can help the total team

more. I try to make sure everyone’s focused on the same goal. We all know where we’re going, but we also know what our strengths are and how we can help the overall team effort.”

Those business skills weren’t necessarily readily applicable to Van Dyck’s early career aspirations, but they soon came in handy.

When she graduated in 1991 with a double major in psychology and history, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work at the Smithsonian Museum of American History for a year. “I left college the way most of us do, wanting to make the world a better place. I moved to D.C. along with all of my friends and we were going to make a difference,” she says. “I was working on a project there that ended up being contemporary American history, more pop-culture-y, studying the advertising on trains. It was through that process that I became very curious about the art form of advertising and how advertising is a cultural historical text.”

“I had an amazing coach in college who taught me so many things about business. If I couldn’t kick well with my left foot, he would say: ‘Kick with your right foot. Play to your strengths and that elevates the whole team.’ ” Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook

That project sparked Van Dyck’s career ambitions in the marketing industry—although the spark wasn’t exactly instantaneous. “It was through that project that I met someone who worked for an agency and by accident, I ended up getting a job offer” at Chiat Day in New York. “I took the job thinking I was going to be doing more research for my project, just to learn how the other half lives, learn how it was to really be in advertising.

From there, I found I really enjoyed it,” she says.

After working for two years as an account executive at Chiat Day, Van Dyck joined Wieden + Kennedy in New York as global

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account director for Nike, a position that married her passions for sports and international travel—and that honed her brandbuilding acumen.

Her 12-year tenure there included a two-year stint in Melbourne leading up to a campaign for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and she also helmed Nike’s Global World Cup and Olympic campaigns across four continents. “It was a powerful 12 years. In that tenure, Nike went from an American brand that exported itself, its products and messaging around the world, to being a truly global brand and being of these cultures, of these different

“Becca’s got a really strong

business and marketing mind, and she’s mixed that mind with great creative taste and great creative judgment. That matchup is pretty endangered in most of corporate America, and it’s those skills that make her so damned unique and so valuable.”

Dave Luhr, Wieden + Kennedy

sports, recognizing that football is soccer and not an American sport,” for example, she says. “It was a time of great growth and with growth come great growing pains. People used to think of Nike as this underdog. Adidas and Reebok had been dominant, and then all of a sudden, the little guy became the Goliath. We had to really recognize that times had changed and our audience had changed, but aspirations and the role that sports played in their lives hadn’t.”

While working on the Nike brand, Van Dyck drew inspiration from one of her biggest professional influences, Wieden + Kennedy CEO Dan Wieden, who, as a copywriter, would write with a photo of a marathon runner on his typewriter. “He always knew who he was writing to; he always knew who his audience was. That’s something I think about a lot when I’m working on marketing—Who are we speaking to? Who’s our audience on this?—and making that real. He also taught me the importance

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Facebook’s international team. All photos courtesy of Facebook.

of a brand to find their voice and stick with it. If you know your audience, that’s one thing, but knowing yourself is almost more important.”

Van Dyck thrived at Wieden + Kennedy by being competitive, compassionate and smart, says Dave Luhr, global chief operating officer and partner at the agency. “Becca’s got a really strong business and marketing mind, and she’s mixed that mind with great creative taste and great creative judgment. That matchup is pretty endangered in most of corporate America, and it’s those skills that make her so damned unique and so valuable. People naturally rallied around her. She was very adept at building a team amongst different personalities and different perspectives, and jelling that team together to take it forward.”

The Fruits of Her Labor

In 2007, Van Dyck took her team-building skills to Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc., becoming the company’s senior director of worldwide marketing communications and advertising, and, in the process, she moved her husband and two young daughters, now 8 and 11, across the country from New York to California. “I was looking to maybe move international again with my husband and family, and Apple called. Going to work for a technology company in California felt so foreign to me that I think it satisfied my need to go overseas,” she says, laughing.

Van Dyck joined Apple at a seminal time for the brand, as it entered the iPhone, iPad and iTunes era, and she led the marketing efforts for all three. She ran TV, print and billboard campaigns that showcased the new products’ features, and was able to see the fruits of her labor almost immediately. From 2007

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to April 2011, when she left Apple, iPhone sales skyrocketed from 1.4 million to 34.9 million units.

“The day I started, Apple Computer Company quickly became Apple Inc., as if that wasn’t a signal that things were changing,” she says. “When you’re in the day-to-day work, you don’t notice it, but looking back, not only the iPhone was created, but touch technology and the whole notion of an app store. And Mac became the dominant [computer]. It wasn’t just a cute little toy that you kept at home. I felt fortunate to have that time there, and to have those four years when [CEO and founder] Steve [Jobs] was there. He was incredible. There’s so much that has been written about him that I can’t really say any more, but he was fantastic.”

Van Dyck’s former colleague Allison Johnson, who served as vice president of marketing communications at Apple and is now founder and CEO of West, a San Francisco-based ad agency, uses just as glowing terms about Van Dyck. “Rebecca has remarkable relationship management and mentoring skills. She’s a great sounding board and great listener,” Johnson says. “Working with some of the world’s best brands and helping to establish them as leaders is one of her core strengths.”

Trying the CMO Role on for Size

In 2011, Van Dyck was recruited as senior vice president and global chief marketing officer of San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. “The opportunity at Levi’s was so unique, I had to go check it out,” she says. The Levi’s gig featured more international travel—to Brussels, Hong Kong and India—and Van Dyck often took her family along for the adventure.

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“My husband doesn’t think it’s as much fun to travel for three days [and] not sleep, but I think it’s fun,” she says with a laugh.

“My girls and I have a running list of all the places we want to go and they, too, are very curious about the world. They’re fabulous and I probably learn more from them than they learn from me—but I bet most parents say that.”

Her tenure at Levi’s was brief—11 months—but productive.

Van Dyck created innovative campaigns geared towards women, such as one campaign for Levi’s Curve ID line that used the tagline, “All asses are not created equal,” and promoted the jeans with tours of college campuses around the United States. She also built a unified global marketing strategy for the brand, taking Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign—which emphasized the pioneering spirit of Levi’s customers and encouraged young people to volunteer in their communities—to 24 countries. Levi’s revenue rose by 12% during her tenure, according to Bloomberg.

“Levi’s, although understood as a global brand, wasn’t messaging itself specifically around the world. How Levi’s showed up in Japan versus how it showed up in Berlin or wherever was entirely different. Our audience wasn’t different. Our audience was global,” she says. “The fact that we were inconsistent raised questions for our audience. It was the first time that we got all of our teams together and said, ‘Instead of everyone having their own agency and having their own message, and making your own version of the 501, we’re going to behave … as a consistently global company.’ We worked together as a team and came up with a global message that spoke to the truth about who Levi’s was and is, and about who our audience was and what they were going through. It was exciting to see everyone come together and do this one global message, and it was really successful. Levi’s continues on that path today, which is great.”

According to Wieden + Kennedy’s Luhr: “Rebecca understands the global mindset. She understands and appreciates the differences in cultures around the world, and she’s very adept at getting those diverse cultures to rally around a cohesive brand voice.”

A Golden Opportunity

No matter how good you have it, most marketers would drop everything to go help define the brand strategy for one of the most powerful companies in the world, so even though Van Dyck was just hitting her stride at Levi’s and seeing her efforts come together, when Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook came calling, she answered.

“I was loving the work we were doing at Levi’s and we were just getting going, and I loved the team there, but then Facebook called with yet again another even greater challenge and new opportunity, so I had to come check this out, too,” she says.

In February 2012, she signed on as Facebook’s first head of consumer marketing. Her charge is multifaceted, of course, but it can pretty much be distilled down to honing the brand strategy as the company goes even more global than it already is. With 81% of the social network’s active users coming from outside

of the United States and Canada, Facebook fits right into Van Dyck’s global wheelhouse, but her view is that all marketing is global. “We’re a more global audience than we are an American audience or a French audience, or a Chinese audience,” she says.

“Technology has changed and messages travel fast, and ideas travel fast and concepts are shared constantly. It’s not possible to be just an American brand anymore and similarly, it’s not possible to be just an American consumer anymore. The push for global marketing, hopefully it’s not just a push, it’s a reality.”

So far, the social network’s marketing strategy has remained largely undefined, but Van Dyck drops a few hints about how it’s being developed. “The goals are really to begin this conversation,” she says. “Awareness isn’t a problem. People know what Facebook is and they know what it means to them. What they may not understand is what it means to us and why we built it. More than half of our users are on Facebook every day and they have an incredible experience with the product with their friends and their family. The challenge for marketing is, how do we not get

“Rebecca understands the global mindset. She understands and appreciates the differences in cultures around the world, and she’s very adept at getting those diverse cultures to rally around a cohesive brand voice.”

Dave Luhr, Wieden + Kennedy in the way of that? How can we amplify that experience and how can we let people understand who we are, why we exist, why we’re building this tool for them, so that their experience is even more enjoyable? Then the challenge will be to keep that theme consistent over time as we grow, as we introduce new products.”

Facebook celebrated its 1 billionth user in October 2012 with its first ad, “The Things That Connect Us,” created in partnership with Van Dyck’s old agency, Wieden + Kennedy, and directed by Academy Award-nominated director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

The commercial emphasizes everyday things that connect people, including chairs, doorbells, bridges and, of course, Facebook.

It targets Facebook users in 13 countries, covering Europe, Brazil, Japan, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, and will be translated into 12 languages.

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With Facebook’s focus on globalization, Van Dyck plans to gather inspiration from her travels through Zimbabwe and Rwanda as a board member of PSI, a global health organization dedicated to improving the health of people in the developing world. PSI’s causes include HIV/AIDS prevention and health threats to children under 5 years old, including malaria and malnutrition in Africa, Latin America, India and Southeast Asia.

“PSI is actually known for being one of the best social marketing organizations. They’ll take an issue and basically market it: raise awareness, then provide services and products to help mitigate that issue, and then measure their results and do it again. These are some of the attributes that we use in marketing. The irony is that PSI is made up of an amazing network of individuals who are sharing their ideas and connecting every day, and helping make the world a better place. There are so many parallels between that and what we do at Facebook.”

“Awareness isn’t a problem .

People know what Facebook is and they know what it means to them. What they may not understand is what it means to us and why we built it.”

Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook

While Facebook seeks world domination, the business has encountered some revenue hurdles. In May 2012, after much fanfare, the company’s initial public offering was disappointing following technical glitches at the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Facebook’s share price dropped steadily from $38 per share in May to $17 in September.

With her marketer’s optimism, Van Dyck thinks that Facebook can overcome such challenges by staying true to its brand voice. “Those challenges come and go, but what’s important is that through those challenging times, people have the foundational understanding of who you are and why you exist. That’s one role that marketing can play for any company: to provide that foundation, to provide that voice, to provide that consistency over time so that as issues come and go, you can address them within that context.”

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Woman to Watch

Van Dyck, who was named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” in 2012 by Fast Company and one of Ad Age’s “Women to Watch” in 2011, is leading an enviable career. She was one of the first marketing execs to take Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign around the world in the ’90s and early 2000s, joined Apple on the day that the iPhone was introduced, and transformed marketing for Levi’s in Europe, the United States and Asia. She worked under one of the 20th century’s top tech visionaries and now she’s charting a new course for marketing under one of the 21st century’s leading tech entrepreneurs. “[Facebook] is … a culture of taking risks

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Van Dyck meets with Tucker Bounds, manager of corporate communications at Facebook.

and being creative and collaborative. I’m loving it,” she says.

While Van Dyck’s career track has shifted throughout the years, from retail to technology and back again, her marketing philosophy hasn’t. “The art of focusing a message and understanding an audience remains the same no matter what the product is,” she says. “Who a brand is and who an audience is, it’s always made great marketing when you can find that sweet spot, that intersect. It becomes much more interesting when your audience is so much more diverse.

That’s what I’ve loved about all of these brands I’ve gotten to work on, when I get to focus on what the voice is—the truth is—about the brand and then juxtapose that with the context or the audience. When these opportunities came up, they would open up a door to a question I couldn’t resist. My desire to travel and stay curious got the best of me.” m

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