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Facebook snatches former Apple exec from Levi's to head global marketing

As it gears up for a high-profile initial public offering, Facebook has managed to lure Rebecca Van Dyck, Apple's former senior director of worldwide marketing and advertising, away from Levi's to serve as its head of global marketing.

Van Dyck is joining the social networking website to help it focus on consumer marketing, an area that the company admitted in its IPO filing that it has neglected, AdAge reported on Friday (via The Next Web). Though the news was originally reported by people familiar with the matter, a Facebook spokeswoman did confirm the hiring later in the day.

Apple hired Van Dyck away from the Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency in 2007, where she had served as the global account director on the Nike account for years. She then spent four years at Apple, first as the senior director of worldwide advertising and then as senior director of worldwide marketing communications and advertising.

Van Dyck revealed in an advertising conference keynote last year that her first day at Apple had left a deep impression on her, as it was the day that co-founder Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.

"[The iPhone] was something created from the outside in, by how it felt to the consumer and the user experience going through it," she said. "[Jobs] gave it to the engineers and said, 'Make it fit in there.' It was first and foremost about the user experience. And that's how I approach marketing, that theme of focusing on the user experience and what's important to the customer."

Former Apple product manager Bob Borchers recently said as much when he said in a lecture that Jobs had told the original iPhone team to create "the first phone that people would fall in love with."

After leaving Apple, Van Dyck served as chief marketing officer at Levi's, where she oversaw the company's "Go Forth" campaign.

Facebook revealed in this week's filing that it had spent $28 million on advertising last year. The company expects to raise $5 billion in its IPO and may attain a valuation as high as $100 billion.