When Louise Clements was young, she remembers watching as her mother would sit down with other women from the neighbourhood for their morning cigarettes. As the women smoked, they would chat about the household products they were using in their homes, the restaurants they ate at the previous weekend and what recipes they planned to try that week. Those same coffee table conversations are now taking place online, and by tapping into social media sites such as Facebook, marketers can take advantage of that data, explains Ms. Clements, head of sales for Facebook Canada. In a recent interview with Financial Post technology reporter Matt Hartley, Ms. Clements, a former vice-president of digital properties with Rogers Media, explained how Canadian advertisers are buying into the marketing power of the world’s largest social network.

Q Different American technology companies come to Canada with different sorts of operations. How would you describe Facebook’s operations in Canada? Is this primarily a sales office?

A Yeah, and that’s what makes it really exciting. Our job is to enable marketers to leverage the Facebook platform. It’s an extension of our mission, which is to make the world more open and connected. That connected part means connecting brands with Canadian consumers.

Q Canadians spend more hours per capita using social media than just about any country in the world. So how does Canada fit into the overall Facebook strategy from an advertising perspective?

A Facebook is a truly international company. While our global headquarters are in Palo Alto, Calif., there is more audience outside the United States than inside. Facebook made a commitment to be active in the Canadian marketplace because it is an important market and because we were really the first place to tip after Facebook was opened up beyond students. So, you had Toronto being the city with the greatest number of users for a long time. Canada has been good to Facebook and Facebook wants to continue to be good to Canada by being actively engaged in the marketing community. The other thing that is important to note is that because we are a platform and we are a technology and engineering-driven company with close relationships in terms of listening and learning from our users, we can be close to Canada from a product perspective without having to be here. So, we have a growth person here and he spends a lot of time with the engineers ensuring that the product is right for the Canadian marketplace.

Q Canadians spend a ton of time online, but marketers still aren’t moving their advertising budgets to the Internet at the same rate. Now that Facebook has a dedicated office in Canada, what has been the response and the reaction from the Canadian marketing and advertising communities?

A The response has been very positive, but a lot of that is because Canadians are on Facebook, so the marketers who want to touch Facebook are on there personally. What has made the difference is the genuine physical presence of a Facebook person versus a third party. We’ve been able to get new clients started and we’ve been able to learn with them and from them, and a lot of them have done really well.

Q The interesting thing about social media and user-generated content in general is the ability to target people based on their interests. But at the same time, marketers aren’t always sure what sort of content their ads are going to show up beside. Have you experienced this and if so how do you explain to marketers the benefits of being on Facebook?

A Contextual relevance is what you’re talking about. It is a really important and valid thing. The great thing about an environment like Facebook is that because it is real and authentic, it’s a safer place to learn and iterate. It’s also one that’s really measurable. We can do testing; instead of cookies or assumptive data, we have real data to prove something. So, yes, we’re sensitive to it. We’re happy to say that we’ve had lots of experience with partners who have worked with us and learned with us and we are somewhat of a safer place because it’s an authentic environment where people say real things.

Q In your recent speech at Canadian Music Week in Toronto, you said that we’re in an era of authenticity when it comes to marketing. What is it that makes this new era of digital advertising and marketing about authenticity? Is it that users are more savvy now? Or that advertising that might have passed the smell test five years ago won’t anymore?

A I think consumers have always craved authenticity. Just like marketers have craved data. Now, technology enables you to have both. Before, consumers couldn’t engage in a dialogue. Now you can engage in a dialogue. I always tell the story about how, when I was growing up, my mom used to go down the block every morning and have a cigarette. There’d be a cloud of smoke over this group of women sharing stories. A lot of what they talked about was products. That now that is happening online. You could never measure that coffee table conversation, now you can. That’s what Facebook does.

Q Although Canadian marketers are starting to warm up to the Internet, the percentage of marketing budgets allocated for online advertising in Canada still trails the United States and the United Kingdom. What must happen to change that?

A I like to look at the world from a data-driven perspective. According to the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau], the percentage of [online advertising dollars] spent in 2008 in Canada was 10%; in the U.S. it is 11%. That puts us on par with the U.S. Last year, I think, was a significant tipping point where dollars moved. I would say that North America [still] trails the U.K. But I believe tools like the ones we provide with Pages, which offer really deep insights — I can show virality, I can show clickstream, I can show things that other people can’t — enables marketers to sit down and build real business cases and understand return on investment. That’s what people have been waiting for. Facebook isn’t the only place that can do that, but we can do that with a lot of certainty.

mhartley@nationalpost.com