As the Director of Ads Engineering, Andrew Bosworth (known universally inside Facebook as ‘Boz’) is responsible for all of Facebook’s Ads and Pages products, including tools, infrastructure, delivery, optimization, data partnerships, insights and analytics. In short, Boz and his team of engineers are the people that help make Facebook advertising run.

For Boz, the mission began in October 2006 when he launched News Feed. Back then, “Ads was not a huge challenge for us,” he admits. But in recent years the emphasis has shifted. “In order to keep growing and make Facebook more valuable for the people that use it, we’ve had to adapt and invest differently — and that’s really what the last two years has been about.”

We sat down with Boz to dig into the details behind that shift, and find out more about what lies ahead for Facebook ads.

There’s been a great deal of focus on Facebook becoming a mobile-first company since 2012, and what that took. We used to have a separate mobile team, which was really a bad thing because we’d be developing products without any instinct for mobile. To fix that, we integrated mobile into every product team.

Now we’re doing the same thing with ads, where every team has to own its ads strategy. So the Feed team owns Feed ads; the Platform team owns app ads; the Instagram team owns Instagram ads. And that’s a big shift. Ads went from being a second-class citizen to something that everybody considers as they’re developing their products.

As a team, we’re very happy that ads help provide the revenue to run and grow Facebook, but we also have our own ambitions. Facebook’s overall mission is to make the world more open and connected, but the connections we’ve historically focused on are the ones you already know about — friends or products or businesses you already know. But some of the connections you make will be with things you’ve never heard of before, and ads are a tremendously valuable tool for making that kind of connection. The mission of the ads team, as it connects to the global mission, is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses.

It’s simple to describe but hard to execute. On one side there is demand generation. You can’t possibly hope to provide a meaningful experience to people on Facebook unless you offer enough experiences to choose from. If someone comes to Facebook and only has one ad targeted to them, they’re not going to get a tremendously meaningful experience. So we’ve got to continue to build tools that marketers love and have them constantly coming back to the platform.

On the flip side is relevance. You really have to understand the consumer — what they want, what they care about, what are they interacting with, what are they likely to appreciate or not appreciate. We want to make sure people are having a great experience because that’s good for advertisers, too. So we have to really make sure that when we have a great supply of advertisements to choose from we’re able to pick the right one. I think we’re pretty good at it today but that’s an endless stream of work — there’s unlimited depth there.

“The mission of the ads team, as it connects to the global mission, is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses.” — Andrew Bosworth, Director of Ads Engineering, Facebook

One nice thing about Facebook advertising is that the tools are relatively universal — whether you’re an agency, a brand advertiser or a small business — and we really try to look after all of them.

One of the things that small businesses are doing well today is thinking about the Page as a presence, and the tools that we’ve built out for that — like the Pages Management app on mobile devices — have had a huge impact. We now offer quite a few tools for small businesses through Pages. Some of those are publishing tools, some are advertising tools and some are insights tools that help businesses understand what’s working and what’s not working for them.

There’s always a balance between keeping things simple and offering more robust tools. Obviously people who are running a business don’t have a lot of time to be messing with their advertising; they really just need the tools to work. On the flip side, more advanced tools — for instance, things that can help businesses make their spend more efficient or find new audiences — are valuable too, and businesses should be aware of those as well.

Right now all these interfaces are quite separate and there’s not a tremendous graduation from one to the next as you grow in sophistication. That’s something we’re looking at quite seriously.

I think tools to manage advertising from mobile devices are exciting, especially for SMBs and people who don’t have a lot of time. Business people are generally inclined to focus on their mobile device, which is all they’ve got time for, you know, five minutes between customers. There are tools we can build right now to make managing advertising more successful on mobile devices, even at a larger scale.

No matter how fast you think mobile is happening, it’s happening faster than you think. The changes happening now are huge. Think about when TV came on the scene in the 1950s and ’60s: it took decades before global TV spend surpassed global newspaper spend. Today that strikes us as crazy — of course TV should be a bigger spend than newspaper; it’s sight, sound and motion.

Well mobile is sight, sound, motion and interaction.

It’s everything that everybody needs in one device. It’s targeted, it’s relevant, it’s amazing. And it’s where everyone is spending their time worldwide. It’s the most universal platform we’ve ever found.

“No matter how fast you think mobile is happening, it’s happening faster than you think. It’s everything that everybody needs in one device. And it’s where everyone is spending their time worldwide. It’s the most universal platform we’ve ever found.” — Andrew Bosworth, Director of Ads Engineering, Facebook

Facebook alternates between being in intense focus mode executing on something and then coming up for air and checking in with partners to see how things are going and to gather information. I’d really like to shorten that cycle time.

With Mark, it’s really a great story over the last two years. If you think about the model I described earlier where you’ve got demand and relevance and how those are intimately linked, as we’ve grown the business what Mark has noticed is that the quality of advertising has gone up tremendously. That makes perfect sense because you have more to choose from and it also drives competition, which creates incentives for advertisers to improve the quality of what they’re producing.

And so there’s a tremendous upward momentum here. The more the business grows, the better people’s experiences get. So we’ve really had an easy time over the last two years because the work we’re doing is having success, not just in terms of the business but in terms of people’s overall experience.