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created Feb 7th 2021, 04:54 by Keychornv4


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00:00
Thanks for taking my question. I have two. The first one, for either Mark or Sheryl, I appreciate the color on commerce. I was curious as for any encouraging, quantifiable signposts or learnings that you’ve seen so far in Instagram Shopping that sort of gives you confidence you’re making progress in building out this opportunity. And then the second one, Dave, I appreciate the comment on the forward outlook and the outlook commentary. I guess, the question is you sort of talked about this shift to consumer expenditure toward products away from services that could potentially be a headwind in the back half as it reverses. I think, last quarter, you mentioned you had 10 million advertisers. So, maybe talk to us about sort of some of the segments of advertisers you think that you’re missing, and what initiatives do you have in place to sort of broaden the advertiser base to bring more services on the platform. Thanks.
 
Sheryl Sandberg
 
I can take the first. With Instagram Shopping, we launched a new shop tab on Instagram in Q4, and this is built on other shopping efforts we’ve had. We see this as an overall part of our commerce effort. We’ve always been, I think, a great place for people to discover new products and services, but we are very interested in taking people all the way down that funnel from discovery to purchase to finding products and services to checking out as well. And, our shopping efforts are part of that. We’re seeing nice uptick. It’s still really early days, but we think businesses are having a good experience and people are having a good experience. And as always, with our ad products and with our commerce products, we want to make sure we provide a great experience to the end user, so that they can find the things they’re looking for.
 
Dave Wehner
 
Hey Brian, it’s Dave. Yes, the data that we’ve looked at there really is that when you look at the data from the U.S. BEA, it basically showed that in Q3, while the services consumer spend was still down year over year spending on goods actually surged to record levels or the highest in like 15 years. We don’t have the results for Q4, but we expect that sort of trend continued. If you look at the balance of our business, it tends to skew more towards products relative to the overall GDP -- or the overall consumer spend in, for instance, the U.S. So, we just think we’re overall exposed a little bit more to products. We continue to invest to improve our exposure and travel -- sorry, in service areas like travel. But, our expectation would be in 2021, we’ll continue to have a similar skew towards products as we’ve had in the past. So, we’ll continue to make investments to make our ad products more relevant for services as well.
 
Operator
 
Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth from JP Morgan.
 
Doug Anmuth
 
For Dave and Sheryl, we know you mentioned significant ad targeting headwinds, but has your view on IDFA changed at all over the past few months? Just curious how you’re thinking about Facebook’s ability now to offset some of the impact just through things like limited login mode and new APIs and other conversion tools and data. And then, if you could just talk a little bit more about how you’re thinking about the impact across fan and then the core products. Thanks.
 
Dave Wehner
 
Doug, I’ll take that. So, I don’t think our outlook has changed in any significant way on iOS 14. We continue to believe that that will be a headwind in the ads business. It’s in our view, not just limited to IDFA, but broader than that is we’re going to have to be providing a prompt asking people for permission to use third-party data to deliver personalized ads. So, that’s going to be true whether you’re using IDFA or not, and we do expect there to be high opt out rates related to that, and that’s factored into our outlook. We expect that to roll out sometime -- we expect later in Q1. But, the timing is uncertain, and Apple hasn’t given clarity on that at this point. And we do expect that will have increasing impact through the year as more users adopt iOS 14 and go through those permissions.
 
When you think about what the mitigations might be, obviously there is going to be mitigation of the impact on us to some extent just because this is a platform-wide change, and so it will impact everyone. And so, that’s going to mitigate it to some extent. And in addition, over time, we hope to help businesses by providing more on-site conversion opportunities through initiatives like shops and also click to messaging ads.
 
As it relates to specifically the audience network products, obviously that’s going to have a significant impact on audience network on iOS as we have explained in the past. But, it’s -- but the broader impact, given the size of that business is really to our -- to the core advertising business on iOS.
 
Operator
 
Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan from UBS.
 
Eric Sheridan
 
Maybe two, if I can. Mark, just coming back to your comments, what do you see as some of the key investments either on the hardware side or the content and application side to unlock the opportunity based on what you recently saw with the success of Oculus in the holiday period, where there’s a piece of hardware obviously that’s sold through quite well. And how do you think about aligning investments against the opportunity in the coming years? And then, maybe -- I don’t know if it’s for Sheryl or Dave, but maybe I could just follow up a little bit on Doug’s question. When you think out to the language you’re using about the back half of the year, is there any sense you can give us quantitatively about how to think about some of the tougher comps you’ll see as we move through ‘21 versus identifying the degree or the severity of different outcomes from some of the headwinds?
 
Mark Zuckerberg
 
I can take the first one. So, when we started working on virtual and augmented reality, we basically laid out a path where we knew that virtual reality would be practical to build first. And we view that that -- that it’s kind of all part of one continuous ecosystem for spatial, immersive, computing and presence. So, the key things that we’re trying to do with VR now, I do believe that Quest 2 is the first mainstream virtual reality product that is doing quite well, and I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do there. The goal there is, we keep on shipping content and titles and working with developers and shipping new capabilities to the device. Like last year, we shipped the ability to do now hand tracking, which no one expected to be possible yet, but the team working on that did some really great work. And it just made the device better and increased the value.
 
So, we’re continuing to work on new hardware as well. The new hardware will kind of fit the same platform. So, the content that works on Quest 2 should be forward compatible. And so that way we’re going to build one kind of larger installed base around the virtual reality headsets that we have. And at the same time, we’re building towards a future with some of this -- the fundamental technology investments that we’re making to be able to provide augmented reality glasses that hopefully will be able to support a lot of the same content in this ecosystem over time and take advantage of a lot of these foundational investments that we’ve made. So, this continues to be a long-term investment. I think, it’s very important, both for the vision of what we want to do, like I said in my script before -- earlier, it’s just -- some of the things that we’re going to be able to build with VR and AR are the types of social experiences that I wanted to build since I was a kid, and I’m excited to be able to unlock that. And I also think strategically, it’s important for us to have a little more control of our own destiny in terms of the operating systems and platforms that all of our services operate on. So, continue to be very-focused on this and optimistic about what we’re seeing.
 
Dave Wehner
 
Yes. Eric, it’s Dave. Just coming back to your question. I think, the context is, we have this -- we’ve had a tremendously strong quarter, Q4 of this year. A number of factors we talked about driving that. A couple of are pandemic related, which is just the shift to online commerce as well as the ongoing -- the shift to more spend on products versus services. In Q4, we also saw strength with sort of our full range of advertisers. We have seen sort of small and medium-sized businesses come back and start getting strength in Q2 and Q3 or Q3 specifically, and then, Q4, we also saw strength from some of our largest advertisers as well.
 
So, as you look out in 2021, I think, we’re just going to be facing tougher comps in the back half of the year. Some of those things related to the pandemic had the potential to revert, whether it’s more consumer expenditure shifting towards services away from products. So, that will make it a little bit of a tougher comp. And then, you layer on top of that headwind to growth related to privacy-related headwinds. The biggest factor there is iOS 14. So, we certainly anticipate growth, but we’re just looking at tougher comps as we hit the back half of the year, given really, most importantly, the strength that we saw this year. And then, on top of that the headwinds that we’re seeing from some of the privacy changes.
 
 

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