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Five Things This Marketing Geek Is Hoping For At F8 Facebook Developer Conference

Video game producers have the Game Developers Conference. Hardware hackers have the Consumer Electronics Show. And Facebook Marketing Partners look forward to the F8 Facebook Developer Conference, held March 25 and March 26.

Although it’s an event for developers, I join the engineering leadership on my team to geek out about the new advertising and marketing capabilities. My team has been going to F8 since 2010, and the atmosphere has been absolutely infectious at every one we’ve attended.

Since I can’t think about much else this week, here’s a list of things I’m hoping to find wrapped up in shiny, blue wrapping paper this week -- listed as a countdown of things I’d be progressively more excited about:

5) More payments integration. Facebook announced peer-to-peer payments on Messenger, now operated by former PayPal President David Marcus, a week before F8. I have to think the company wanted the ecosystem to take a moment to wrap our heads around Messenger-based payments ahead of a bigger announcement in the same vein. My money is on a range of new payments services coming to Messenger -- maybe even some sort of SDK for developers to use to build payment-enabled apps on top of Messenger.

4) The multiproduct ad for video. There’s a discussion happening midday on Day 1 titled “What’s New With Facebook Video.”  At the end of last year, a new (static) Facebook ad unit called the “Multiproduct Ad,” appeared, drawing all kinds of increased engagement. Recently, Facebook started algorithmically optimizing the image selection and order for these ads. This is what ad innovation looked like in 2014, and I’m really hoping to see something similar announced for video ads, which are already a well-performing ad type.

3) Programmatic bidding on a mobile network. At this point,Bloomberg’s early-March prediction that Facebook would be unveiling a competitor to Twitter’s MoPub programmatic mobile ad network is pretty much viewed as gospel. But I’m wondering what this will really look like. I’d be surprised if this mobile ad network is a carbon-copy clone of MoPub. Facebook is an innovator, and if this announcement is coming this week, I expect the news to include some other differentiation beyond real-time bidding on a large mobile ad network.

2) An advertising API for Instagram. In January, The Pew Research Internet Project revealed that Instagram is now the fastest growing social network. Advertisers and marketers were already interested -- our kids, colleagues and friends were enough to pique everyone’s interest. Instagram has been slowly dipping its toes in the water. I’m hoping to hear the water’s just fine, and that we Facebook Marketing Partners will soon be able to jump in.

1) Lookalikes for DataSift audiences. I’ll go out on a limb on this one: If you have enough experience with Facebook advertising, you know that the anonymous Lookalike Audiences created inside Facebook are no joke. They accurately extend the unique audiences advertisers can create through email address lists or cookied website visitors. Facebook’s new partnership with DataSift supposedly  won’t let advertisers  directly target people talking about the trending topics DataSift can surface from Facebook’s data -- but that won't matter if you can target Lookalikes of those trending topic audiences.

Of course, I’m also looking to see something more about how Facebook plans to deploy Oculus Rift and what’s next for WhatsApp. I want to hear about these and other new toys that my developers will be able to start playing with. But for me, F8 is a chance to continue to learn about how Facebook is growing its advertising capabilities.

The power Facebook is already delivering to marketers in the form of at-scale precision targeting, creative variety and business-centric reporting has already revolutionized marketing. When I go to F8, I'm going for a glimpse into the future.

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