According to report from telegraph.co.uk; Like many senior executives with the term "EMEA" in their title, British-born Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook's vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, leads a hectic lifestyle. In the social network’s new London office near Euston, her calendar is covered in post-it notes and colour-coded to indicate the different regions of the world she is visiting.
"I plan a year ahead, to make sure I visit all the markets and see what’s going on. I pay particular attention to different areas that might need me at different times," she explained. "It means I’m on the road every single week, but I absolutely love it. I get to spend time with extraordinary people in the most incredible places, and Facebook can help their businesses."
This may seem like an unlikely lifestyle choice for a woman in her forties with four children. Throughout her 20 years in advertising agencies Mendelsohn insisted on working four days a week, so that she could spend more time with her family. However, when she joined Facebook around two years ago she decided to go full-time "because I didn't think I would be able to do the job well on that amount of time, and the kids were older".
Enabling women to return to high-powered business positions after having children is a subject close to Mendelsohn's heart. Like Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, she champions diversity in the workplace and recently hosted a breakfast event for around 200 female leaders to celebrate International Women’s Day.
"I think it is the job of chief executives and managing directors to more actively go out and sponsor women within their organisations, because where we’re losing women is in the middle management," she said. "There’s a lot that coincides with childbirth and maternity leave, but there’s also a lot who leave because nobody said, 'you can do this, let me show you, let me sponsor you'."
During Mendelsohn's two years working at Facebook, the social network has changed dramatically. When she first joined the company in 2012, it had only just acquired Instagram, it hadn’t bought WhatsApp, it hadn’t bought Oculus, and it hadn't yet separated out Messenger from the the main Facebook app on mobile.
Mendelsohn said that, since 2012, there has been a rapid acceleration in the number of people accessing the social network via mobile devices. In the UK alone, 27m people visit Facebook every day, and 24m of these are coming back on mobile every day. On average, she said, people check Facebook on their mobiles an average of 14 times a day.
Video has also exploded on Facebook. The company is now seeing 3bn video views every day, up from 1bn six months ago. This has forced advertisers to completely rethink the way they target customers. There are now 2 million active advertisers on Facebook, up from 1.5 million roughly half a year ago and 1 million a year-and-a-half ago.
“There has been a shift change in the way that people communicate with each other, and advertising has always reflected the society of the day. What we see now is that people are embracing the new ways of storytelling on the platform,” she said. “Part of the reason is because it allows very personal, very relevant messaging to people that was impossible to do before – but still to do it at a scale.”
Facebook’s targeted advertising has been heavily criticised by rivals and privacy advocates, who warn that people are sacrificing their personal information in exchange for free online services. In an open letter published by Apple in September 2014, chief executive Tim Cook wrote: “A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realise that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You're the product.”
However, there is no question that Facebook’s advertising model has been extremely successful – particularly on mobile. During its last financial results in January 2015, Facebook revealed that mobile ads accounted for 69pc advertising revenue in the fourth quarter, or $2.48bn. The company is now attempting to replicate the model on Instagram.
Mendelsohn said that, rather than discouraging people from using the social network, Facebook’s targeted advertising has helped to build trust in the service and confidence among users, because it helps them to find the products they want rather than being bombarding with useless information.
“We want the platform to be a place for discovery, a place for users to be connected to the things, the people, the businesses that they care about,” she said. “People actually love it when they see things that remind them of something they need, or inspire them to find out more about something – it’s a fantastic opportunity.”
For Facebook, the next frontier is conquering the developing world. The company’s Internet.org project, which launched in 2013, has the stated aim of making internet access available to the two-thirds of the world that are not yet connected, and is already providing free basic internet services across India, Zambia and Colombia.
Across Africa, there are now 100 million people coming to Facebook every month, and more than 80pc of these people are accessing the social network via a mobile device. For many of these people Facebook is their first experience of the internet, and many don’t even realise that they are going online. While some claim that this distorts people's understanding of the internet, Mendelsohn believes it is a good thing.
“If you say to people ‘do you want to connect to the internet?’, and they’ve never used the internet, it doesn’t mean anything. But if you say to people, ‘do you want to be connected to your friends and family who maybe live in a different city or a different town?’, they understand that and they can see the benefit,” she said.
“Facebook is a platform to then go to lots of different places. You can go and look at a link to an education site, or go to a link to look for jobs, or go to a link to find out what the weather is. Then they start to use the internet and then they have the education of what the internet can give to them that empowers them to then go off and be confident using other things.”
Last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that advertising to Internet.org users was not an immediate priority, claiming that the ad market was still small in many developing countries. However, Mendelsohn is already working with some businesses to help them deliver ads to people in South Africa, Kenya and Turkey via the company’s Creative Accelerator programme.
Facebook also offers tools for advertisers to target these users, such as Missed Call which allows a person to place a ‘missed call’ in return for unique content such as music or cricket scores alongside a brand message from the advertiser, and Bandwidth Targeting, which enables advertisers to reach people based on the type of network connection they usually use when accessing the Internet.
“One of the things that we do is work with agencies and marketers to show what best practice looks like and how they can target people in the right way that can deliver return on their business for them,” said Mendelsohn. “That’s the thing that we care about – we care about what is the return we can give to marketers and business by using the platform.”
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