Jonathan Labin has one of the most social jobs in the Middle East. The German-Venezuelan is managing director (Mena and Pakistan) of Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram. Mr Labin, 38, previously worked as strategy & business development director for Viacom in the US and London, and then as head of ad sales, emerging markets at MTV Networks, before moving to Dubai three and a half years ago to open Facebook’s Dubai office.
7am
It’s probably no surprise that the first thing I do is spend 20 minutes checking my Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds on my phone. I’m not the only one – we did a study not long ago that found that more than 60 per cent of people in this region check their phones early in the morning. I see what’s happening with friends and family, but also what’s happening in the world – I subscribe to The National on Facebook. Of course I use Facebook and Instagram more than Twitter, but I use other platforms too.
8am
I don’t own a car so I jump in a Careem from my home in JBR to the office in Dubai Media City, checking any overnight emails. My girlfriend lives in Abu Dhabi, so we see each other at weekends.
8.15am
I have a breakfast meeting at Café Bateel with a lady who runs an e-commerce start-up. We talk about her customer acquisition costs and a Facebook product she’s been using recently to drive the cost of customer acquisition down called dynamic product ads. A personal interest of mine is working closely with Wamda (a platform supporting entrepreneurs) and local start-ups. Facebook and Instagram can play a big role in starting up their businesses. There are a bunch of tools we can provide mobile apps – every start-up can use some of our tools for free.
9am
I spend 30 minutes planning outcomes and key tasks. This week, Ramadan is a big topic for us. We just did a study showing that people start talking about Ramadan four weeks before it starts. Cooking and fashion are key topics. That’s interesting for us from a user experience but also for our advertising partners, because they can tap into that knowledge and start planning their Ramadan campaigns early.
11am
We hold a business review meeting with our biggest partners analysing recent video campaigns they ran on Facebook. As well as looking at the obvious – how many video views – we also look at matrix like the effect on brand awareness, ad recall and purchase intent. We do measurement studies around the uplift from these campaigns. The results on this occasion were luckily very positive. Video plays a huge role for us now – it used to be 1 billion views a day just 18 months ago; now it’s more than 8 billion.
1pm
I eat lunch at my desk if I’m very busy, but we often do hour-long team lunches in our open kitchen and order food in. We send out a Facebook post every morning with meal choices that day, maybe Arabic or Indian, and people pick what they want. I like hummus and kebabs, but I need to watch my cholesterol. Every Sunday we do a video lunch to catch up with Mark’s (Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg) Q & A. He answers questions from any of Facebook’s 12,000 staff around the world. Since Facebook’s HQ in San Francisco has an 11-hour time difference, we send questions in advance and watch a recording rather than live.
2pm
I have a meeting with marketing, policy and community operations, and also the PR sides of the Mena business. We make sure we’re all staying in the loop. We now have over 120 million people every month using Facebook in the Mena, and most of them are coming back every single day – more than 100 million on mobile.
3pm
I have calls with colleagues in Europe in the video conference room to exchange practices. Instagram is on the agenda – it’s grown to more than 400 million people. We only launched Instagram advertising at the end of last year, and we already have more than 200,000 advertisers.
4pm
I sneak in a game of ping-pong or table football in our office – we have a competition between staff. I played ping-pong when I was a kid in Germany, so I’ve been doing well in our league table, but yesterday I lost dramatically. My staff don’t mind beating their boss.
5pm
I grab my laptop and go into the meeting room or on to the balcony to answer emails to get a bit of quiet thinking and writing done. I check my personal social media in the morning and evenings, but I’m also on Facebook at work because it’s a tool for communicating with colleagues.
7pm
I head to an evening client meeting or function or I play paddle tennis. It’s a mix between tennis and squash, pretty fast and you never quite know where the ball is going. We play doubles in Emirates Golf Club.
10pm
I get home, eat dinner and watch Netflix. I’m a bit of a night owl, so my newest trick is to set my alarm clock for 11:30pm to make sure I’m in bed. It’s worked so far.
business@thenational.ae
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