In late 2015, the Factory, the in-house agency at Facebook started experimenting with new ways to reach our community, focusing on personalized video content.
What started with a viral video calling out friendships shared between some of the biggest content creators and people on the platform, morphed into a vast series of projects that focused on our community's relationship with each other and the platform.
Friendship is the most important thing to Facebook, without it, the site wouldn't exist, and for a lot of our community, their entire friendship is chronicled on the platform, from the day they added each other, to their first photo together, to similar interests - all of this shared and experienced together.
So on the anniversary of this special day, we wanted to give our members a little keepsake to celebrate and enjoy.
We broke down friendships, for example: how many photos shared, if they were siblings, or partners, what common interests they shared - all of these started to help us build custom narratives that would feel more personal and insightful than simply recognizing the day.
We used a modular approach to generating the videos, allowing a video to be as short as just 4 vignettes, or as long as 8. This meant we could create simple videos that would allow anyone on the platform regardless of how much content they had on the site to receive a Friendversary video, but would also allow us to reward users who had played out an entire friendship on the platform, with a really lovely and in depth experience. We shot with the magnificent Buck, trying to shoot as many of the vignettes as possible physically, in studio. You can see some of the BTS content below.
40-60 million videos a day generated, over 14 billion generated each year, all delivered directly to our community. Easily the largest single video production on the planet, ever.
Copywriters: Massaer Ndiaye & Jenna Livingston
Designer: Angela Chu
Producer: Jo