Associate general counsel and director Peter O’Neill heads Facebook’s Ireland-based international commercial advertising team, which supports the Facebook’s sales business in all jurisdictions apart from the United States and Canada. Managing this – clearly integral – part of Facebook’s business model globally provides unique challenges for the team, and the added pressure inherent in this makes the team’s achievements all the more impressive. ‘All of the contract work we do drives ad revenue for Facebook in different ways, so we support the sales team directly’, O’Neill explains, alluding to the highly commercial nature of much of the team’s work. ‘We do a lot of high value deals with large advertisers which tend to be multimillion-dollar transactions, and have also put into place innovative partnership programs with different advertising partners,’ he goes on. The team is also adaptable and able to cope with emerging challenges. ‘The digital ads ecosystem has changed a lot in recent years, and we have – successfully –adjusted our contracting structures to this new reality’, he concludes.
