The general consensus in the Australian advertising market right now is that Meta and its Facebook and Instagram execs are adjusting to a new world where they are no longer entitled order takers from big brands for high-margin ad budgets.

The high-profile marketing and agency set whisked-off to San Francisco last month proves Meta still has plenty of allure but most say the heat is on Meta execs to deliver ambitious growth targets for 2023 when sentiment is turning more sober on social media’s golden goose. 

Meta’s circa $100bn ad business is under pressure and it blames Apple in part – the changes Apple brought in last year restrains Meta’s capabilities to track user activity across the open web and use that data for its own ad targeting inside its walled gardens. The changes are having a material impact on the business and Mark Zuckerberg’s magic has less stardust than even a year ago. 

This week, San Francisco-based The Information broke news of the mounting pressure on Meta – not only is its advertising business increasingly challenged, but Meta’s “dreams of making Facebook and Instagram into shopping destinations are in tatters”. In the two years since launching Shops on Facebook, sales have fallen short on a project Zuckerberg has personally and deeply been involved in developing. Meta is now hacking at the mega-shopping plan. 

The timing of Meta’s troubles couldn’t be better for Sue Fennessy’s ambitious $30 million project – which she could not get VC or bank funding for – to have brands spend some of the $100 billion-plus they pour into Facebook for an alternative social platform that pays users to watch ads in an environment obsessed with, well, being sociable and civic and saving the planet. Or in Fennessy’s words: “bring love and change the world”.   

WeAre8 is ambitious, lofty, idealistic – and needed. So far the early support from big brands and media in the UK and Australia – and coming soon to the US – is promising. On a recent visit to her hometown, Fennessy put the case to 20 CMOs in Melbourne at the Value Creators Forum in a lively debate on what it would take to re-engineer the underpinnings of a fractious world in social media.

“Is it possible through inspiration, humour and other mechanisms to keep people engaged?” Fennessy asked and answered in one sound bite. 

WeAre8 ultimately wants 80 million people globally signed up to the platform, spending eight minutes a day and two minutes on ads, for which they are paid. Fennessy says at that point her alternative social platform becomes “truly transformational”. 

Much of the debate and discussion at the Value Creators Forum was around how a social platform can keep the trolls and negativity at bay and achieve the “network effect” for user scale. 

Clearly big brands with all the noise around diversity and inclusion are inclined to experiment on the platform – Unilever, Heineken, Nando’s, ebay, BT, Nike, Budweiser, and Cadbury are global partners and in Australia the likes of Suncorp, Virgin, Telstra and Rexona signed up at launch. “Suncorp’s purpose is to build futures and protect what matters and the partners we choose to align and support are those who share our values and our ambition,” Suncorp CMO Mim Haysom said on the financial services group’s early foray into WeAre8. “I look forward to seeing more Australians embrace a more positive social media experience.”

And the latter point is really the trick. People say they want civics and to save the planet, which is at the heart of WeAre8's proposition, but will they really change their behaviour? People bitch about banks but don’t switch. Why will it be any different in social media?

Fennessy argues a small percentage of the global population will – one per cent is the magic number. She expects to hit a million users in the UK soon – the point in which media partners like the BBC and Channel 4 say it “becomes transformational”. Circa 400,000 users in Australia by early next year is the early target, which Fennessy says is conservative.

“I would really love to get to one per cent of the human population, 80 million people. That 80 million mark is a real milestone for me,” she says. “Ninety seven per cent of our DNA is the same as a chimpanzee, yet we’re more disconnected than ever.” 

WeAre8 uses high-touch human moderation to maintain civics and goodwill and the allure of paying people to watch two minutes of ads and the choice of passing those earnings on to charitable projects as part of its user acquisition magic. For advertisers, the carrot so far is a lower-risk, less-narky environment, the optics of supporting a less toxic social feed and extremely high user engagement rates. Click-throughs are circa 30 per cent – extremely high on any benchmark.

So for now it’s a waiting game. In a year’s time the US, UK and Australian markets and marketers will get a better fix on humans and their appetite for doing good online. And Sue Fennessy’s campaign for social, environmental and economic War and Peace, bankrolled by advertising, will be clearer.