With Facebook’s Beacon ad targeting debacle a distant memory for most, Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tried a soft sell on publishers and marketers at Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference.

The social net is bent on growth—it just reached 400 million users—and Kendall’s message is that small local advertisers should follow suit. Local marketers, who generally strive for a more personal relationship to their customers, should feel an obvious affinity for Facebook. The social net’s message is that it sees advertisers and users fairly equally: they’re all part of the same ecosystem. Plus, there’s the way Facebook features like status updates and fan pages blend concepts of personal and professional marketing messages. “From the beginning, we weren’t going to do an ad product in the traditional interruptive way,” Kendall said. “We were going to make them in the same way we’ve used other features. We can create ads that are indistinguishable from content.”