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Jayne Leung, Facebook's head of Greater China, at One Island East in Quarry Bay. (Photo: Bruce Yan/SCMP)

The changing face of advertising: What's not to "like" about Facebooking for a living?

When Jayne Leung started working for social media giant Facebook in Hong Kong, her office was the back of a taxi or a table at Starbucks. She tells George Chen how she managed to update her status to head of Greater China.

Facebook

Jayne Leung, a native of Hong Kong, has witnessed up-close the fast changes that the media and advertising industries have experienced over the past 15 years. She moved from traditional advertising to meet head-on the challenge of cyberspace, and is currently head of the Greater China region for Facebook.

When Leung joined Facebook about five years ago in Hong Kong, the internet start-up didn't even have an office in the city. But that didn't discourage Leung, a former regional executive at Google. She began her work for Facebook sitting in Starbucks outlets or in the back of taxis. Today, two-thirds of Hong Kong's 7 million people are active monthly users on Facebook.

It's important to know your strengths and how you can actually continue to build your strengths throughout your career. Whether two years is too long or too short, or five years is too long or too short, or in my case, I was with DoubleClick for almost nine years before I decided to switch. I think there's no definite answer for anyone, but I think when you think about your career path, always think about how you can leverage your strengths and build up experiences.

At Facebook, we actually talk a lot about leveraging strengths rather than overcoming your weaknesses. So we try to manage people by strengths, rather than trying to ask them to improve on their weaknesses, because you can always get more out of people by managing their strengths.

Both of them are great companies. Both are mission-led companies, so Google's mission is to organise the world's data. For Facebook our mission is to make the world more open and connected. So both companies have actually a very clear vision and drive towards that vision with their company strategies.

That's very similar. Both are very innovation-led and technology-led. We aim to find innovation, and push out innovation in the market in both companies. I think the uniqueness of Facebook is the "hacker culture", which … means that we actually move very fast, that we try to always push out solutions that might not be perfect but are actually something we will continue to iterate.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: AP)

If you walk around the office you'll see posters that ask you what would you do if you weren't afraid? That's also a very core part of the values - try to challenge everyone, not just the manager of the team but everyone - what would you do if you weren't afraid? Try to move fast, push out solutions, hack out things. That's very unique to Facebook. The other thing is the DNA is very social. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected, so that's … also very much about having the team very connected, having them sharing a lot and engaging a lot. That social DNA is very much part of the core culture of Facebook.

At Facebook we actually emphasise work-life integration. We actually try to let our employees know that they have full control and full flexibility in terms of how they want to manage their work and life. I don't believe in [a complete] work-life balance because it will never be 50-50, but it will actually be about work-life integration and allowing them to take that flexibility to work through what they care about and what matters to them at that particular point in time. I think everyone sort of has their own routine.

For me, my routine is that I'll scan through my emails every day, there are no unread emails. I'll quickly file "FYI" (for your information) ones into different folders, so those that do not require me to respond I'll file them, and I'll leave my inbox as my to-do list. At Facebook we also use other tools a lot, we use Facebook groups - almost every product, every office - and we have individual groups. We use Messenger a lot as well, when we want to just chat through stuff real-time and get some quick decisions made, instead of firing emails back and forth, you just get everyone on Messenger and have a quick chat.

Jayne Leung (Photo: Bruce Yan/SCMP)

If I look at how my career has progressed, I remember when I first joined the advertising agency; I was in a full-service 4A agency - print, TV, media planning, creative service. And then the market breaks down those agencies into different [parts]. So you have the creative agency, you have the media agency, the digital agency, the search agency. I've gone through that phase as well.

The last 10 years I've seen similar transformation in the market, the digital world. When we first started in the digital world, it was going onto portals to look for information, and then it became a search era. And now in the last few years it has become a discovery era, so it means that you don't necessarily go out and search for things, but you discover things. So I've seen that transformation happening in Hong Kong. Discovery is more related to social and more related to the feed-based digital experience, news feed, whether it's Twitter or whatnot. I think this transformation is universal across the board, whether it's in Hong Kong or in the US or even in China.

I use Facebook too much almost, I'm always on, to be honest, and I remember the first post that I made when I decided to join, it's hilarious. It was "Facebooking": "Facebooking is now legitimate at work." That was my first post when I decided to join Facebook. So you can see how much I use Facebook. I use all the functions quite a lot; I think I would distil it into two key things that give me the most value. It's the connection and discovery piece. When I Facebook, I actually discover a lot that I didn't know about. Whether it's new travel destinations or whether it's news … I find that I discover a lot through the news feed. So I think that's really a core value that we all get from Facebook.

The other part is connection. I actually manage to connect with a lot of my friends - a lot of my colleagues - around the world. I really enjoy the connection, knowing what is going on in their lives, and sharing with them what's going on in my life as well. So I think those two [functions] are the core values that I get from the platform.

[by Lori Nelson Spielman]. It's a novel about a young girl who wrote a wish list of 10 things and forgot about it. And fast forward, she's now in her late 20s, her mum just passed away and she's not allowed to inherit any of her mum's wealth unless she finishes all the 10 things on the wish list that she made when she was young.

I don't have an aim [for a number of books to read], but it varies depending on my schedule as well. In the last couple of weeks, I've read about two books. It's easy to read these types of [fiction] books; I can read on the weekend, spend a whole weekend reading them pretty quickly. I'm still traditional, I read paperbacks.

I think everything goes back to our mission - to make the world more open and connected and that means connecting everyone in the world, including China. We will continue to go forward with that mission whenever possible, wherever possible.

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Changing Faces: What's not to "like" about Facebooking for a living?
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