The social media giant’s first attempt at global branding unwittingly revealed its own hubris.
In the annals of big corporate marketing, there may be nothing like it. The ad starts with a red chair suspended in the air in a dark forest. Then images float by of an old Black man sitting a bus stop, a young Latino man reading a book on his porch rocking chair, and two young Black kids spinning one another on an old office chair in the middle of a residential street. While we see more images of a group of dancers on chairs, a smiling old Asian man resting on a bench, a girl putting her rag doll on a chair, a dinner party and a couple snuggling on a love seat, a woman narrator starts to speak:
“Chairs. Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair, and if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together. And tell jokes. Or make up stories. Or just listen. Chairs are for people. And that is why chairs are like…”
Wait for it.
No, this wasn’t an ad for Ikea. Or for Herman Miller.
It was an ad for Facebook, made by Oscar winning Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu (the director of Amores Perros), produced by Wieden + Kennedy and released in October 2012.
Yes, “Chairs are like Facebook.”
The ad goes on to explain why Facebook is also like doorbells, airplanes, bridges, dance floors and basketball, all “Things That Connect Us,” the ad’s portentous title.
This was Facebook’s first major ad, launched to mark its reaching one billion users. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and CEO, heralded its release, writing on the company’s news blog, “For the first time in our history, we’ve made a brand video to express what our place is on this earth.” He added, with due modesty, “Facebook isn’t the first thing people have made to help us connect. We belong to a rich tradition of people making things that bring us together.”
Zuckerberg probably imagined this brand video might be compared to other memorable marketing ads, like Apple’s “Think Different” and “1984” ads, but unlike those iconic commercials, no one remembers this one.
I’m indebted to Taina Bucher, a professor of media studies at the University of Oslo, for unearthing “The Things That Connect Us.” In her excellent new book, simply titled Facebook, she wrestles with the challenge of describing what Facebook actually is, ultimately deciding that it is a hyper-object. That’s a term coined by philosopher Timothy Morton for something that is bewilderingly huge and thus difficult to get our heads around. Bucher explores a great variety of ways of understanding Facebook — as a kind of infrastructure, like electricity, that you can’t do without (a framing Zuckerberg has also used); as a guidebook that orients people and their attention; as your personal newspaper (another Zuckerberg frame); as a global identity provider; as a media company; and of course as one of the world’s largest advertising companies.
When it comes to thinking of Facebook like a chair, Bucher writes that “much in the same way as chairs can be found everywhere from dining rooms and waiting rooms to cars, subways, cinemas, meeting rooms, schools and restaurants, Facebook furnishes everyday life too,” given how often people check it. But she points out, chairs aren’t as universal as Facebook imagines. Some places, like music venues or coffee shops, may omit them or make them uncomfortable in order to shape the kind of behavior wanted.
Of course, no one owns Chairs. The model for making one is completely open source. No one is pocketing billions a year from a Chair monopoly. If you sit in a chair, it doesn’t record anything about you.
More critically, chairs can be excluding or discriminatory. Citing the work of disability scholars, Bucher points out how the shape of a chair indicates the outline of the body meant to use it. And, “of the many chairs missing in the ad, the wheelchair was perhaps the most noticeable,” she adds. “While chairs are indeed ‘made so people can sit down and take a break’, as the ad tells us, some people do not have this choice but are more or less confined to a wheelchair.”
Thus Facebook’s first attempt at self-branding also reveals the same willful blindness to harm that has afflicted the company from its earliest days. No one at Facebook saw the exclusionary assumption baked into this ad, in the same way that the company failed to see how requiring real names for users would harm marginalized groups or how allowing “ethnic affinity” segmentation for ads would allow discrimination in housing or employment. High on their own mythology, surrounded by tech bros and geysering profits, the managers of Facebook’s image gave us an ad that perfectly sums up its hubris.
Finishing her tour-de-horizon, Bucher offers no easy answers. “Facebook is both poison and cure, and everything in between,” she concludes. Indeed, as I again discovered a few weeks ago during the Facebook Logout, which was joined by perhaps 50,000 people, a rounding error, a shiver of a blip among nearly 3 billion users, Facebook is indeed an essential piece of many people’s lives.
But its hubris may yet be its downfall. For failing to see and prevent its harms, Facebook is now one of the most distrusted companies in America and it is dogged by controversy worldwide. It couldn’t produce an ad like this one today. If it is still like chairs, it is a broken one.