Speech by Zuckerberg? No thanks, I prefer Facebook Home, says new ad

Facebook has released yet another advertisement for its newest iteration, Facebook Home. Quite like the previous “Airplane” advertisement, this one shows news stories from Facebook feeds come to life, this time inside the Facebook office. 

The minute long advertisement shows Mark Zuckerberg announcing the launch of Facebook Home to his employees, talking about the product and its qualities. We all have that one person we know who has his nose buried inside his phone, even in the most important situations. Zuckerberg has one such employee on his hands.

Even as Zuckeberg is droning on, the employee, Jerry, is busy bringing to life scenarios from his Facebook Home enabled phone to life. There is a goat bleating hilariously at Zuckerberg and dirt-bikes roaring past him. 

There is also a guy in extremely tiny tennis shorts who wants Jerry to come out and play with him. Turns out, it was an IM he received on the Messenger and Jerry replies back to him by clicking on the chat-head that he’s almost done. He then goes on to nod his head and show that he's been paying attention when Zuckerberg asks him for his opinion. "You know it, Mark," he massages Zuck's ego. Kinds of rude to be paying attention to your phone when your CEO is addressing you, but let’s face it, most of us do that in office anyway, even if we do it slyly.

And “rude” is the theme that seems to be running throughout this Facebook Home campaign, whether we like it or not. The “Airplane” TV commercial released on the day of the launch has the rude vibe going for it too.


The ad doesn’t seem keen on telling you about the various aspects of Facebook Home. We see a guy boarding a flight and flipping through Facebook Home's news feed on an HTC One. Each time he looks at a post, friends and content from that Facebook post are shown to present around him inside the aircraft. The overhead luggage compartments have a couple of his friends lying around looking like they’re sunbathing on a beach, while a couple of singers sing when he looks at a post of a video. We also see a kid's party, people dancing in a club and, of course, cats inside the flight. The guy can't seem to take his hands off the phone when inside the flight, even when the airhostess asks him to switch it off.

The ads do kind of stump us with the message it is trying to send across. Should we not put our phones away in a flight when asked to? Should we risk our jobs going through our feeds even as our CEO is talking to us? Are we supposed to be so addicted to Facebook Home that we can’t stop going through our feed? Facebook Home’s first batch of commercials simply makes us go “huh?”