The Things That Connect Us: Facebook launches its first ad

Facebook touched the 1 billion monthly active users (MAU) milestone recently, and it is celebrating this moment in a big way. If you logged in to Facebook today, chances are that you spotted its first major ad, titled 'The Things That Connect Us'. The new ad is all about things that connect people. By way of this advertisement, Facebook claims to be ‘honouring the tradition’ of connecting people. It explains how everyday objects such as chairs, doorbells, or those such as aeroplanes go about bringing people together. 

In an official post introducing its first ad, Facebook’s Zuckerberg writes, 

“Celebrating a billion people is very special to me. It's a moment to honor the people we serve.

For the first time in our history, we've made a brand video to express what our place is on this earth. 

We believe that the need to open up and connect is what makes us human. It's what brings us together. It's what brings meaning to our lives.

Facebook isn't the first thing people have made to help us connect. We belong to a rich tradition of people making things that bring us together.

Today, we honor this tradition. 

We honor the humanity of the people we serve.

We honor the everyday things people have always made to bring us together:

Chairs, doorbells, airplanes, bridges, games. These are all things that connect us.

And now Facebook is a part of this tradition of things that connect us too.

I hope you enjoy this video as much as we do.

Thanks for helping connect a billion people.”

Facebook releases its first ad

The social networking giant is now officially a billion users strong. There are now one billion active monthly users on Facebook, and the California-based company has stated in its fact sheet that it arrived at this milestone last month on September 14 at 12:45 p.m., Pacific Time. 

Facebook has presented some of its key metrics in its fact sheet. Facebook has registered over 1.13 trillion Likes, and made 140.3 billion friend connections. A whopping 219 billion photos have been uploaded on Facebook since its launch. The data for calculating this number was extracted on September 10, 2012 and takes into consideration the total number of photos that are on the site currently. It does not factor in deleted or removed photos. If it did, the estimates would go up considerably to 265 billion photos uploaded on Facebook ever. 

Since the introduction of geo-tagging on Facebook in August 2010, 17 billion location-tagged posts have been made, including check-ins. The statistics for this feature were considered from its launch date to September 10, this year.

A little trivia about Facebook's ad campaign - the ad will be translated into 12 different languages and the global campaign is aimed at its users in 13 countries, namely - Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Spain, UK, and the US.

The ad, 'The Things That Connect Us' is a minute and a half long. It has been produced by ad agency Wieden & Kennedy, and directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu.