Meta's CMO's playbook for digital marketers

Summary

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MarTech Podcast™: Meta's CMO's Playbook for Digital Marketers

Date: September 29, 2025
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Alex Schultz, CMO & VP of Analytics at Meta

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between host Benjamin Shapiro and Alex Schultz, CMO and VP of Analytics at Meta. They discuss Alex’s remarkable career trajectory from eBay to leading global marketing at Meta, the evolving blend of creativity and analytics in digital advertising—especially in an AI-first world—and major themes from Alex’s new book, The Art and Science of Digital Advertising. The episode is packed with real-life insights, philosophies, and practical strategies for digital marketers navigating today’s rapidly changing landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Alex Schultz’s Career Journey

• eBay as a Launchpad:
  • Schultz credits eBay as his “training ground,” learning about various marketing channels and the importance of integrating teams for business growth.

    “eBay was a huge part of how I got where I am today because you just learn so much…” (02:55)

• Joining Facebook/Meta:
  • Schultz joined Facebook in 2007, initially focusing on paid search and direct response marketing, expanding into broader roles over time.
  • Emphasized bringing organizational learnings from eBay to improve operations at Meta/Facebook.

2. Guiding Principles & Leadership Philosophy

• Incrementality is Everything:
  • Schultz highlights the necessity of demonstrating measurable impact, rather than just occupying an important role.

    “Incrementality is everything... The number one thing I focused on is having an impact that I can prove it mattered, that I did my job.” (05:12)

• People Management & Team Development:
  • As Meta's CMO, his focus is 90% on people management: setting strategy, cascading information, developing talent, and empowering his team.

    “My job is to make people more successful. My job is to manage people. My job is to develop people. My job is to help people succeed.” (07:06)

3. Staying Engaged with Marketing Practice

• Schultz stays hands-on by personally engaging in emerging channels like influencer marketing, participating in campaign reviews, and directly advising on tactics and measurement.
• Example: The launch of Ray Ban Meta glasses involved leveraging both major influencers and analyzing performance data.

  “I work with my team and we're buying ads with influencers for direct response... It's about how we select creators, the metrics, the overlap with demographics.” (09:02)

4. Why Write a Book Now?

• Thought Leadership for Practitioners:
  • Schultz explains there’s a need for a practitioner’s book—grounded, readable, and focused on actual marketing practice rather than just thought leadership.
• Championing Online Marketing:
  • Aims to counteract negative public discourse and highlight the positive economic impact of digital marketing.

    “I am sick and tired of there being no positive thing about online marketing in a lot of the general kind of conversation...” (10:40) “Someone needs to be out there saying that growth is good. Marketing drives growth... Our profession is great at driving growth.” (11:24)

5. Marketing Methodology: The North Star Goal

• Schultz discusses the necessity of a clear, overarching goal (“North Star”) to guide all marketing efforts—contrasting eBay’s ambiguity with Meta’s clarity.

  “At Meta... it was super clear. Our goal is connect the world online...” (13:19) “Having a North Star goal... is game changing for moving fast, making decisions and knowing what to do and what not to do.” (14:05)

• Differentiating Goals vs. Metrics:
  • Warns against conflating metrics with goals, referencing Goodhart’s Law.

    “A metric is not a goal. A metric is something that you use to try and describe a goal, make it measurable... when you turn a metric into a goal... you lose something.” (15:25)

6. AI-First Marketing: Opportunities and Challenges

• The Human Edge:
  • Creativity becomes the unique human value as AI handles repeatable tasks.

    “AI isn't going to take your job... Somebody else using AI is going to take your job. So where is the human value? The human value isn't in rote, repeatable tasks, the human value is in creativity.” (18:01)

• Channel-Specific Adaptations:
  • Draws parallels between old and new channels (e.g., direct mail and chatbot marketing) and emphasizes the enduring principles that apply across technologies.

    “The challenging thing... chatting with a chatbot... has a lot more in common with sending a postcard through direct mail than you would originally think.” (19:40)

• AI, Automation, and Avoiding Stagnation:
  • Warns of the risks of letting automated ad campaigns become stagnant (“local minima”), emphasizing the need for active management and ongoing experimentation.

    “Be active in managing it. Don't just sit back and be completely passive. Be engaged.” (23:48)

7. Lessons from Early Internet Marketing

• Shared a memorable eBay case study about uncovering an affiliate fraud scheme, illustrating his hands-on curiosity and technical investigative approach.

  “I remember I was the person who back engineered how it was done... I built something that did the exact same thing on my cocktail site and showed it to them...” (24:51)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Alex Schultz on Incrementality:

  “So many people take a seat on the rocket ship and don't actually try and do anything... Incrementality is everything.”
  (05:12)

• Alex Schultz on The Book’s Purpose:

  “I just want to say marketing is good and online marketing is good... Someone needs to be out there saying that growth is good.”
  (11:24)

• Alex Schultz on AI and Human Value:

  “AI isn't going to take your job... Somebody else using AI is going to take your job. So where is the human value? The human value isn't in rote, repeatable tasks, the human value is in creativity.”
  (18:01)

• Alex Schultz on Avoiding Automation Pitfalls:

  “If you are continually tweaking and trying things... you will actually find out, ‘Oh, is that really, really good or have I actually fallen into a local minima?’”
  (23:48)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:15] - Meta’s generative AI tools & episode set-up
• [02:55] - Schultz’s career arc from eBay to Meta
• [05:12] - Guiding principles: impact & incrementality
• [06:37] - Schultz’s day-to-day as CMO: people management focus
• [08:21] - Staying hands-on with emerging marketing tactics
• [10:40] - Why write a marketing book now?
• [13:08] - The North Star goal philosophy
• [15:25] - Goals vs. Metrics; Goodhart’s Law in marketing
• [17:46] - AI-first era: implications for marketers
• [19:40] - Channel thinking: AI, chatbots, and enduring principles
• [21:36] - Risks and best practices with automated campaigns
• [24:43] - Intellectual curiosity and the affiliate fraud case at eBay

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a rare behind-the-scenes perspective on the merging of art and science in marketing from one of the industry’s most influential CMOs. Schultz’s advice—encompassing leadership, technical experimentation, and navigating the AI era—is invaluable for marketers seeking to drive growth while embracing change.

Key Takeaway:
Even in a world of automation and AI, success in marketing hinges on clarity of purpose, measurable impact, creativity, and relentless curiosity.

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Transcript

[Podcast Network Announcer]

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[Benjamin Shapiro]

From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.

[Podcast Network Announcer]

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

2 million. Nearly 2 million advertisers are using Meta's generative AI ad creation tools. That's the fastest adoption of any ad tech in the company's history. In this new AI led world, where even our creative production is becoming increasingly scientific, we need a new playbook to understand how to blend the art and science of marketing. So how can you balance creative intuition with data driven precision? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Alex Schultz, who is the CMO and VP of analytics at Meta. Alex oversees global marketing, analytics and internationalization for the company's 3.4 billion daily users and was named one of Forbes most influential CMOs in the world. And today he's going to talk to us about his new book, the Art and Science of Digital Advertising, which is a deep dive into how creativity and analytics work together to drive growth in an AI first world. All right. Welcome Alex Schultz to the Martech podcast. Alex, welcome.

[Alex Schultz]

Thank you very much. It's good to see you.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It has been a minute, my friend. We kind of grew up together in Internet history. We worked at ebay, what feels like a bazillion years ago.

[Alex Schultz]

Even if you just say 2020's a lot.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Let's not go into numbers. Why do we have to put a name on it? It's been a minute, my friend. We pups in our 20s. 20 years ago.

[Alex Schultz]

Yep.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Working at ebay. And fast forward, you are now the CMO of Meta. First off, bro. Holy shit. Second off, how did that happen? Give us the career arc. How did you get from point ebay to where you are today?

[Alex Schultz]

I mean, ebay's such a good training ground. Like the people we worked with, the stuff they've done, the things they taught us. So to start with, ebay is a huge part of how I got where I am today because you just learn so much at ebay, with affiliates, with direct mail, with on site merchandising, all of the things paid search, affiliates and paid search interplay. So ebay was a huge part. I applied at Facebook as it was via the careers link at the bottom. I chased it down and I'm one of the few people from that time I know who used the careers link. I got an interview, I got a job, and then I didn't have a green card, so I had to wait a year to actually join Facebook. Joined in 2007 and then, yeah, inside Facebook, what I did to start with was paid search for the company to acquire advertisers and Facebook ads for the company to acquire advertisers. And there were so many basic things they weren't doing, like basic tracking, good management of agencies to do direct response marketing. And so I put that in place. Then I convinced them to do a bunch of stuff with on site merchandising to get more businesses active. From that point onwards, I just started doing more and more things. Like I helped my friend Naomi do SEO at first. That got me into user growth beyond businesses, built a bunch of stuff and learned so much from what we did at ebay, where we integrated the teams that did direct mail with the engineering notifications teams, whereas at ebay they were totally separate and they got into fights with each other. So we did all the stuff that I thought we could have done even better at ebay for the next generation of company, and that honestly carried me pretty much all the way.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

You have something in common with Katy Perry. You have both found a seat on a rocket ship and blasted towards the moon. And you were at Facebook when it was a hot, hot startup. Let's not kid ourselves about how exciting it was at Facebook 18 years ago. To be more precise, a long time ago. But the company has obviously evolved over the years from being this social networking startup to the conglomerate that it is today. What are some of the guiding principles that led you through from hey, I'm a guy doing affiliates and SEO at an early stage startup, to I'm a global CMO of a publicly traded massive trillion dollar company.

[Alex Schultz]

I mean, I think the single most important thing, I think it sounds so nerdy, is that incrementality is everything throughout. Everything I've done The number one thing I focused on is having an impact that I can prove it mattered, that I did my job. And that sounds so simple, but so many people take a seat on the rocket ship and don't actually try and do anything. And when you're trying to hire team members and you hire out of ebay, back when we joined ebay, but maybe not two years in, or Facebook, before Meta, these companies didn't go through big downturns at that point. They'd just like been on this rocket ship and you couldn't really tell who was awesome and who had just had a seat. And it just, it really mattered to me. I wasn't the guy who took a seat on the rocket ship. So incrementality is everything I needed to actually do things. It needed to matter. I turned up to work and it needed to make a difference. And I think that was the single most important thing throughout the whole journey.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It's hard for me to get my head around that sort of astronomic career trajectory. I understand working at a large company and going from large company to large company, but going from what was a relatively small company and being with it the entire time as it has grown, requires you to first off, wear so many hats in the early stage, but change hats so many different times. Tell me about what your role is like on the day to day. How do you think about managing marketing when it is at such a wide scope?

[Alex Schultz]

Yeah, I mean, that's what rubbed off all the hair. So many hats. My job is to manage teams. I mean, that is more than anything. It's like set strategy, manage teams. That's my job. So on my day to day, I would say 90% of my work is people management. I think it's really important that I gather all the information from our senior leadership, what Zuck's thinking about today. I had a bunch of meetings with members of the board and then summarize all that stuff up and make sure it's getting to the people who need the information. Meet with my peers on the leadership team, get that information to my team and help make sure that people are doing their best work and then sort of coach and develop them on how to work together. On my directs. I have four of my six directs have worked for me for over a decade. Actually, four of the six I think have been with me for 15 years or more. And we've grown up together in the company. And the two other folks, well, those are divisions I brought into the team actually less than five years ago. So my job is to make people more successful. My job is to manage people. My job is to develop people. My job is to help people succeed.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I hear you and I understand the executive track of like, look, I just give the people the strategy and then coach them on how to manage their teams. Logical. But you're a brilliant marketer. You've always been a brilliant marketer from back in the day. There was the Paper Airplane website that you started pre ebay, before people were building their own sites. You had created one and sort of picked a niche. Are you still doing that today?

[Alex Schultz]

I still have the Paper Airplane website.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I love it.

[Alex Schultz]

It now has all the correct cookie banners.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Good, good. I'm glad you fixed the one bug. You've always been a wonderful tactician. So how do you stay involved, not necessarily in the operations, but in the understanding of the practice of marketing while you are so managing such a large organization?

[Alex Schultz]

So let's talk about something that's going on at the moment. A big developing area is influencer marketing. Right. It's gone 0 to 100 in four years, I'd say. So I'm spending a lot of time with the team. So I spent a bunch of time at Cannes, meeting with our clients, asking them what they wanted from us for influencer marketing. We have these partnership ads. They're going really, really well, but what else do people need? And there was a lot of stuff they said about data. There was a lot of stuff they said about performance, results, measurement, all these things. Things and data and measurement in order to select the right creators and influencers to work with. And then I work with my team and we're buying ads with influencers for direct response. We are working with influencers like we launched the Ray Ban meta glasses. We launched these with mbappe, who's a little aggressive to call one of the top football players on earth an influencer, but we're working with influencers and creators ourselves. And so I actually merged together. And when I'm talking to themes and doing the review of. Okay, how are we scaling up the marketing of these glasses from the launch of the special one off with Mbappe to we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these, hopefully to sell. Okay, which creators are we selecting to go broader? How are we looking at what their metrics are, what their reach is, what their impressions are, how those overlap with our target demographic, with people who visited meta.com and looked like they were buying all of these kind of details. How do we do that? How do we analyze that? So when I'm coaching the Folks, I'm like, okay, you want to do influencer marketing, you need to convince our CFO that we should be paying this influencer a huge amount of money or this set of influencers a huge amount of money. Let's talk through how you would actually explain that to the cfo, how I'd explain it. And that sort of keeps me current because I'm working on each new thing and I'm even on, like, Direct Response Marketing Quarterly. I do a really massive deep dive with my direct response marketing teams, and it's awesome. It keeps me super up to date on the detail of, like, how are automated ad campaigns going? I'm really excited by this thing YouTube and Google have launched where you can optimize YouTube campaigns to increase brand searches. I think that's brilliant. I think absolutely brilliant. I'm really excited about it. And so staying in the details when I'm reviewing with the teams and coaching people, the reviewing and coaching is about the details and how do you succeed.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So you're now 18 years into your career at Meta. You've risen to the C level suite, and you decided to write a book. Why are you writing the book about marketing now?

[Alex Schultz]

There's two answers to that. One answer is there's a gap in the market. People are always asking me for the book. My team's asked me to do thought leadership because I do run business marketing and I market to marketers. So they want me to go off and talk about marketing to marketers. And I don't really feel comfortable doing that kind of thought leadership. But a semi kind of academic treatise that hopefully is very readable and has been edited to the place of very readable, that actually talks about the practice of marketing feels like a very authentic form of thought leadership to me. So it made me feel very comfortable to do that thing that we need as a company. The second, and I think the deeper answer to me is I am sick and tired of there being no positive thing about online marketing in a lot of the general kind of conversation.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Thank you.

[Alex Schultz]

Yeah, it's surveillance capitalism. Oh. It's privacy. It's like there's all these things. And of course, we're follow all the privacy regulations to the letter of the law and beyond. We're very clear about, like, making sure we do the right thing. And you can argue how much of that's the FTC consent decree and how much is the company. But the company has changed and we go a long way on privacy. But I just want to say marketing is good and online marketing is Good. And it is a good thing that people get personalized ads. It is a good thing that people get ads for slightly more relevant trainers to them. And in my opinion, someone needs to be out there saying that growth is good. Marketing drives growth. Actually, online marketing is brilliant at driving growth. Our profession is great at driving growth. Growth grows the economy, growth gets taxes paid, growth gets people employed. And marketing is a huge thing for driving growth. And we should be proud of it. And someone needs to be saying that. And I was getting frustrated of no one doing it, so I did it.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I appreciate you standing up for the marketers and I do think that they're is and has been plenty of criticism of Meta. And you mentioned the privacy concerns. And what I think is ignored is how many people are reliant on the platform to build their businesses and feed their families. And it's easy to point at the things that haven't gone well. It's also easy to ignore the things that are important to marketers and to businesses that Meta provides. I want to turn the page a little bit to what's actually in the book. I understand the rationale, stand up for us marketers. Thank you, Alex. But you've got a methodology for marketing. And one of the things that you mentioned is the North Star goal. Talk to me a little bit about your marketing philosophy, how it's communicated in this book. And how do you think about the North Star goal as the alignment for marketing?

[Alex Schultz]

Well, given we both worked at ebay, I felt that ebay didn't have clarity on the North Star goal it was trying to achieve to me.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

You mean buying Skype wasn't a logical thing at the time.

[Alex Schultz]

The power of three. And it was just very challenging to me. Like was our North Star increase market cap of the company, was our North Star accelerate commerce online. What was our North Star? And that meant we had all of these kind of strategia conversations that went in loops. And it was very hard to make a decision without going up to make Whitman at Meta. When I joined Meta, it was such a drastic difference. And this is the first time I've ever described it like this because talking to you, it's so relevant because of our time together at ebay. At Meta, I joined Meta and it was super clear. Our goal is connect the world online and that meant connect it through Facebook. And so it was very clear what our goal was. Our goal wasn't maximize market cap. It wasn't profitability. It wasn't number of pictures uploaded or number of comments or number of likes it was connect the world online, put.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Everybody in the same network so they could talk.

[Alex Schultz]

And that provided a razor that made every decision simpler. We could move faster, we could make decisions without going up to zuck. And that made such a big difference. So for me, the clarity of having a North Star goal, in our case connect the world online, is game changing for moving fast, making decisions and knowing what to do and what not to do. And it was a big juxtaposition to me for Facebook versus eBay. And I wonder if ebay had been absolutely clear that it was going to transform the world through online commerce or bring all of commerce online or something like that, that it might have actually executed better. I don't know.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It's interesting to think about that lack of clarity in terms of what we were trying to accomplish. And I do think that the goals have changed. Speaking to specifically at ebay, it was build the largest online trading platform and then once it was, then all of a sudden it needed to expand and it got into payments and it got into communications and it became very messy and unclear at the time that we were both there. You did mention something that sticks out to me of there was a very clear goal at Meta or North Star at Meta, but you also said that the goal is not number of photos online or whatever the other metrics are. How do you think about the difference between goals and metrics? Obviously you have to be data driven. You want that one North Star. But there's lots of other things that we all pay attention to in marketing. How do you make sure those are aligned?

[Alex Schultz]

The job as head of analytics is actually my bigger job at Meta. It's the thing that Mark values the most. For me, the thing you always have to remember is a metric is not a goal. A metric is something that you use to try and describe a goal, make it measurable and put it into numbers. And the famous one is Goodart's law, which you've probably heard a load of times, which is any measure that is used as a goal ceases to be a useful measure. I don't think that's quite true. But when you turn a metric into a goal and you conflate the two, you lose something because the metric never perfectly describes the goal. And so for me, that's the separation. You have a goal and then you have something you try and describe it with. For us, connect the world online through Facebook Monthly, active users of Facebook. And then you need to actually have some guardrail metrics associated with it. For example, if I sent a bunch of emails that people clicked on once resurrected for Facebook and then went away after two seconds. I could move up the MAU metric, but that would be a really bad way to do it. So we have percent weekly active and percent daily active so that we're not bringing minimally active users as the Twitter folks used to say about us. Ebay did this with confirmed registered users and activated confirmed registered users. And we started it was all CRUs confirmed registered users. They brought in activated cruise as being the actual metric, which made a lot more sense for acquisition where the north. That bit of the company, the North Star was acquire a bunch of users, but it was active users and it brought so many things out of the woodwork. It changed the landing page, it changed the affiliate models that were viable. It changed so many things because it was the right metric.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I haven't heard the term acru in a really long time.

[Alex Schultz]

Oh, I think about it every week still. Like ebay comes up all the time at work. The stuff we learned is so timeless.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Yeah. And it's not only a timeless sort of case study for business. The alumni network of ebay is kind of an astounding thing. And we were there at a really interesting time and it felt like a transitional time in sort of web history. Right. We were there at the end of 1.0 and the beginning of 2 maybe. And it seems like we're going into. I don't know whether it's v4 or v5 or, you know, web dot, whatever, it's the AI era. How do you think about the changes for marketers now that we're getting into this AI first? Everything is generated for us type of marketing.

[Alex Schultz]

I mean, in that world. I think the thing to remember is first two questions. One is, how weird is it going to get? Which is one of my favorite questions at the moment. Is it going to be all the way to the gentle singularity, or is Our Max doom AI 2027 going to happen?

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Which science fiction movie are you leaning towards exactly?

[Alex Schultz]

Exactly. I'm hoping for the Culture Good Ian Banks the Culture series.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I hope we just end at her and then move on.

[Alex Schultz]

I'm afraid I don't think we will. So the first one is you definitely have to think, how weird's it going to get? But putting it to one side, you've heard this before. I'm sure you believe it. AI isn't going to take your job in the near term. Somebody else using AI is going to take your job. So where is the human value? The human value isn't in rote, repeatable tasks, the human value is in creativity. And a lot of times creativity gets limited to, oh, pretty pixels. That's the only thing that's creativity. It isn't. Creativity is across all parts of marketing. You can be creative in how you think about data, what data you feed through to auto optimizing AI ad campaigns. The creativity of the idea that Yorkshire Tea came up with, where it's tea done proper and then they do Muzak done proper and they have a very famous band playing the Muzak in the elevator. Onboarding talk's done proper and it's Sean Bean doing the onboarding talk for Yorkshire Tea. And that creative idea that's not going to come from AI. And you've got those kind of ideas with data for what data you feed through. You've got those kind of ideas for creative where what is the creative concept? And so the value is, I think, going to accrue up the stack into the more creative levels of the work and less into the. I'm doing 57 executions of this banner ad.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It seems like I don't want you to have to give away the entire book, but I do want to understand what you covered. Do you get into the changes of the marketing landscape based on AI in the book and if you do, how do you frame it?

[Alex Schultz]

I think it matters to think about it by channel. The challenging thing I would say to you is actually chatting with a chatbot like AI chat has a lot more in common with sending a postcard through direct mail than you would originally think. It has the same questions on do you have the right token? Do you have the right deliverability? Will someone actually click and interact? Will someone convert? It is messages that people are doing back and forth. The only thing that's happening is it's happening quicker and you're able to like automate it and make that much more interactive. So a lot of what I do in the book is I say, okay, well what principles are true about direct mail over the post? That then makes sense when email comes along. That then makes sense when SMS comes along. Push notifications, AI chatbots over WhatsApp. What makes sense the whole way through search? Search is going to change. You're already seeing it. You've got these fully summarized Gemini units at the top of search. It's very clear on Google, you've also got this very clear thing which when people use ChatGPT, they seem to reduce their search volume. At the moment, the Gemini and Google adding units is increasing search, it seems more than the chatgpt users decreasing search and so Google's netting out ahead. That's cool. They're in an interesting innovator's dilemma. Whatever happens though, if there are ads next to it and there is some form of ad supported AI type search, you're going to have something query related that you need to buy against. It's going to need to be conceptually very similar to what you learned about in search in the past. And so yes, I talk about each channel and I do mention how I think AI could or could not change it. I definitely note Arthur C. Clarke's book Profiles of the Future and how anyone who predicts is going to be embarrassed. And then I sum it up at the end to talk through what I think AI can do. But the biggest thing I try and do is what are the timeless principles that will actually transcend the next platform transformation? Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but that is what I've really tried to do and I've used the history of marketing to get me there.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So I alluded to this in our intro, which is we have the access to these tools which is making even the creative portion of marketing more scientific. I can go onto GPT, I can create a banner ad, I can go into meta. It'll create and optimize the entire campaign for me. Creation, targeting, flighting, optimization. It seems to me like one of the concerns is where we talk about the foundation of marketing and understanding the principles and the goals. An alignment is there, but we also are using these tools that are making so many decisions for us. How do we avoid getting into some sort of reinforcing bias setting caps on ourself? Because we are not involved in the process of the actual campaign. Creation, targeting, optimization. We're just like go get me customers and put it into the box.

[Alex Schultz]

This is funny because I literally have a section in the book, not specifically about creative component, but about automated ad campaigns and how sometimes they can behave weirdly. You can sometimes get into sort of local minima and avoid the global maxima and what you should do to bust out of that. And it's like new data, take down the old account, build a new account, bust it out. The minima. So there's a how there? How would you bust out the minimum? The hard thing is how do you spot that you have got yourself into a local minima and you're avoiding the global maxima. 2 thoughts on that one. I think that's always been true. You've got a great ad campaign. You keep using it for Five years. How do you know there isn't a better ad campaign that you haven't tried? How do you know it hasn't got too tired? So I don't even know that this is a new problem with AI. I think it's a problem with marketing in general. And then to how do you do this? You really focus on the details. You actually look into it. You try things. If you're in there and you just let it run and you don't try anything, you don't turn it on and turn it off, you don't try a different campaign on a different system, you don't launch another account every now and then and see if there's something else interesting that happens, then you are doomed to end up in doom loops for sure. But if you are continually tweaking and trying things and looking at the new stuff and trying new accounts and trying all that stuff, you will actually find out, oh, is that really, really good or have I actually fallen into a local minima? So I think the biggest piece is be active in managing it. Don't just sit back and be completely passive. Be engaged.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It's interesting what I'm hearing from you, going back to the conversation about AI is like creativity matters, the thought matters. And thinking back to your career arc and how you've gone from, hey, we were sitting on the same floor at ebay to CMO of a global enterprise. There was something that was consistent that I think everybody recognized very early on, which was your intellectual curiosity and understanding. Not just what to do to sort of get ahead, but how does it work, why does it work, what is happening and questioning and consistently testing and pushing and iterating. And honestly, when we were younger, I didn't quite understand. I thought you were just messing with stuff and getting pushy and grabby. And now I'm like, no, we're older. That is the best trait you can have as a marketer is consistently testing and trying and understanding why and figuring out how the machine works. And so I'm a excited to read your book and be not surprised that you have landed where you have.

[Alex Schultz]

Oh, thank you. One of my favorite moments at ebay, although it was very sad as well, was when we had that big affiliate fraud case. Do you remember that?

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Yeah, sure.

[Alex Schultz]

And I remember I was the person who back engineered how it was done. Like the engineers were sitting there going, I don't know how they're dropping the cookie, this makes no sense. And I went up to my desk and I built something that did the exact same thing on my cocktail site. And I came downstairs and showed it to them and they were like, no.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

For anybody that isn't familiar with the story, ebay had a multimillion dollar affiliate fraud case where people were fraudulently dropping cookies. And I won't do it justice by describing how it was done, but basically cookie stuffing, taking credit for transactions that they weren't involved in, just dropping cookies at the last minute.

[Alex Schultz]

I go into it in the book, like, if you want to hear that, I write the case up in the book.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It ended up being like an FBI case. And the feds were like, at ebay, taking people's laptops. It was a whole big thing. And we both have some friends that were really nervous about what they were being questioned about and whether they were going to get in trouble or not.

[Alex Schultz]

It was my first deposition. It was terrifying. And I remember one time I was on the back of a boat in Boston Harbor. The affiliate in question was in the boat. Matt Ackley, the head of Internet marketing, was on one backside of the deck because Google had just bussed a bunch of people away from Meg's keynote, and we were turning off all of our ads on Google, and I was on the other side of the deck talking to the FBI agent managing the case. And I'm like, this is crazy.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I appreciate that it was your first deposition. I'm sure you've gone through some other fun exercises being where you are, but I won't get into that. All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Alex Schultz, the CMO and VP of Analyt. If you'd like to contact Alex, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, and of course, you could visit his company's website, which is meta.com and his book launches in early October, so go ahead and get a copy. We'll have a link in our show notes for that as well. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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