W+K Amsterdam Navigates the Delicate Personal Politics of Facebook

Are you confused by this new thing The Kids are using called Face Book?

You may have heard about some UX issues regarding the service that have arisen in recent months. Aside from “ethnic affinities” and ad targeting, many of the ‘book’s 1-point-something billion users have questions about how to get what they really want out of the network while avoiding any potential awkwardness.

Wieden + Kennedy’s Amsterdam office began working the the Zuckerberg company last year, and its new campaign is pretty straightforward. Turns out lots of Germans have some basic questions about how best to use Facebook, so W+K turned their concerns into a series of how-to videos.

There’s a running theme here, and it is “How do I avoid seeing crap that I don’t want to see?”

To start, what if you don’t want everyone and his raver cousin reading all your updates?

The video series, which is Facebook’s first cross-media marketing campaign in Germany, continues with each entry focusing on another aspect of the user experience.

What about the whole privacy thing? Dudes be kinda creepy.

Another always-relevant question: How do you ensure more in the way of quality control on your feed? (This is why we stopped using Facebook altogether, tbh.)

And OMFG, the over-posters. You know who they are.

It’s not all our “friends'” faults, though. Facebook has plenty of little features designed to annoy you while providing no real actionable information, my god we speak Marketing all the time now.

Listen to Not Quite Crazy cat lady!

So, if it weren’t obvious from the video quality, this work was constructed from hundreds of Germans’ responses to queries that seem to have been some variation on “What do you hate most about Facebook?”

“We knew straight from the beginning that we had to be very thoughtful how we portrait people’s opinions about Facebook,” said W+K Amsterdam creative directors Daniel Schaefer and Szymon Rose. “That’s why we chose to ask Germans all across the country to record the footage themselves. That way we could ensure to capture people’s feelings towards Facebook as unfiltered and as authentic as possible.”

It’s kind of refreshing to see Facebook own up to the fact that it can be very frustrating. We do have another question, though: What about all the sponsored posts that we never want to see and never click on?

Ohhhh, that’s how you’ve turned your little photo sharing service into a viable business, sucking up revenues that would otherwise go to publishers and ad agencies. Carry on then.

CREDITS