#97: Meta CMO & VP of Analytics Alex Schultz | Measuring the Unmeasurable

Summary

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Soul & Science: Fast Forward Your Marketing Mind

Episode #97 – "Measuring the Unmeasurable" with Meta CMO & VP of Analytics Alex Schultz
Date: September 15, 2025
Host: Jason Harris

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jason Harris sits down with Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics at Meta and author of "Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising" (out October 2025). Together, they explore the interplay between data-driven decision making and creative intuition in building iconic brands, dissect how to balance the "soul and science" of marketing, and discuss the challenges of measuring brand love, cultural relevance, and the unmeasurable impacts in marketing.

Key themes include Schultz's unconventional path to digital marketing, the logic of iconic rebrands (including Facebook's transformation to Meta), the imperative of a North Star in decision making, how to know when to give up on a product, and the future of AI in marketing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Alex Schultz’s Origin Story and Early Marketing Lessons

• Academic Roots: Started in experimental and theoretical physics at Cambridge, with a Master’s thesis in terahertz imaging.
  • "I wanted to be an archeologist, then I wanted to be a physicist. So it was a long and windy road for sure." (02:37)
• Internet Experimentation: Built a top-ranking paper airplane website as a teen, then moved on to a cocktail website, both paid for via ads.
  • "The passion was paper airplanes. And then over time, the passion became learning how to do SEO and online marketing." (04:37)
• Self-Taught Marketer: Early fascination with SEO, site ranking, and the global nature of web traffic.

Translating Complex Data Simply

• Schultz’s standout skill is in "explaining complex things simply" (05:57), and identifying the “one clear insight among all the information.”
• COVID Preparedness Example: Brought critical Lombardy usage data to Meta’s leadership before COVID lockdowns—showcasing the value of actionable insight.
  • "Usage is going to go up a lot. Look at Lombardy." (07:33)

Why Facebook Became the Place to Build His Career

• Data-Driven Decision: Saw Facebook’s growth metrics and the opportunity to revolutionize marketing measurement (incrementality and lift studies), which search and affiliates couldn’t provide at the time.
• Incrementality Obsession: "So much marketing...no incrementality measurement." (09:30)
• Every major move — including joining Meta — was inspired by access to cutting-edge data and the potential to change how marketing is measured.

The Power of a North Star

• Internal Alignment: Credits Mark Zuckerberg for setting a clear, simply-phrased mission, making internal prioritization and decision-making easier and faster.
• Evolving North Star:
  • Then: "Connect the world online through Facebook"
  • Now: "Build the future of human connection and the technology that enables it." (13:01, 29:57)
• Impact on Marketing: North Star guides both internal choices and external messaging.
• A North Star enables delegate decisions (e.g., not using homepage takeovers like Myspace did):
  • "It gave us a priority order." (10:51)

When to Double Down or Walk Away from Products

• Science: Focus on retention as the main metric for product-market fit.
  • "For a consumer product, retention is the one metric you need to look at as to whether this thing has product market fit." (14:19)
• Soul: Sometimes conviction trumps numbers (e.g., continuing glasses development despite poor numbers, which paid off later):
  • "We kept trying...there was another try in there," even when data said otherwise. (15:35)

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Art vs. Science

• Balance: The science is knowing what you can measure, and doing it well; the art is having conviction and logic for unmeasurable, culture-driven leaps.
• Marketing Example:
  • Science: "Direct response marketing via social media...you should A/B test that." (17:11)
  • Art: "Closing Fifth Avenue and having Lewis Hamilton do donuts to make people in the US think about WhatsApp—you’re not going to be able to measure that." (17:11)
• Permission to Play: "Use what you can measure well to get permission to do the things that require intuitive, culture-driven thinking." (18:27)

Measuring Cultural Relevance and Brand Love

• It’s possible to measure aspects of cultural relevance via surveys, but impact of one-off stunts is impossible to attribute cleanly.
• Netflix Narcos Billboard Case Study: "They broke through into culture and you can measure that that billboard worked...it's the unusual stunt where you can measure it." (20:03)

The Threads Launch: An Example of Art & Science

• Combined a "golden ticket" invite, culturally relevant creators, and paid marketing for Threads’ launch. The interplay was essential.
  • "I cannot tell you how valuable each of the individual pillars was because I don't think...the direct response marketing would have had anywhere near the effect." (21:39)
• Timing, culture, and leadership-driven calls were decisive: "That was not my judgment call...that was the product leadership." (22:06)

Goals vs. Metrics: Why the Difference Matters

• Distinction:
  • "A goal is the thing you want to achieve." (24:16)
  • "A metric is how you judge whether you achieved the goal."
• Common Pitfalls:
  • Conflating metrics and goals leads to chasing the wrong things.
  • "You forget about your goal and you just optimize for the metric." (25:55)
• Metrics Overwhelm: Cautions against drowning in too many metrics—use the ship’s captain analogy: lots of instrumentation, but one mission. (27:17)

The Meta Rebrand: Measuring and Managing Change

• Decision: The "decision to change the brand was science. Everything else was art." (29:05)
• Maintaining Secrecy: No testing was done in advance; the change was driven by internal conviction and strategic need, not traditional marketing metrics. (29:20)
• Aftermath: "It's always hated at first, then it just becomes what it is—if you get it right." (29:49)
• Why It Worked: The rebrand was a forward-looking move, in sync with company mission and leadership’s vision. (31:36)

Mastering the Creative Brief

• Learning Curve: Schultz did not initially appreciate the importance of the creative brief, but now calls it "the core of every campaign." (32:09)
• Super Bowl Commercial Example: A simple, focused brief led to a “Hey Meta” call-to-action ad, which increased sales by 50%. (34:43)
• Creative’s Power: Briefs help frame the creative process so teams can "find creative ways to push the edge." (33:01)

The Future of AI in Marketing

• Three Waves:
  1. Make existing things more efficient (e.g., content moderation).
  2. Enable new things that were too expensive before (e.g., AI chatbots).
  3. Create totally new categories (e.g., TikTok-style recommendations using semantic AI). (36:10)
• Speed of Change: Progress often seems slow until a threshold is crossed, "then suddenly you feel a massive change." (40:23)

Schultz’s Agency Philosophy

• Meta heavily relies on agencies for best practices and scale: "I love my agencies." (41:37)
• Agencies are essential for cross-platform expertise and fresh perspectives.

Schultz’s Takeaways and Advice for Marketers

• Who the Book Is For: Both marketers and non-marketers (e.g., finance and business partners), written and tested with a broad audience in mind. (42:55)
• Main Hope: That the book bridges understanding between marketing and other business functions: "A really good way to show to your colleagues what we do." (42:23)
• Business Challenge: Right now, matching supply and demand for Meta's AI Glasses is his top focus (44:32).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Data and Marketing Insight
  "Explaining complex things simply." (05:57, Alex Schultz)
• On New Product Success
  "For a consumer product, retention is the one metric you need to look at as to whether this thing has product market fit." (14:19, Alex Schultz)
• On Art vs. Science
  "Measure what you can and measure it well...then use that to get your permission to go out and do the things that are much more passion based..." (18:27, Alex Schultz)
• On Rebranding to Meta
  "The decision to change the brand was science. Everything else was art." (29:05, Alex Schultz)
• On Leadership's Role in Vision
  "It was genuine to the company mission, genuine to the direction of the CEO. It wasn't running away from anything...it was running towards something." (31:21, Alex Schultz)
• On the Creative Brief
  "Wow, this is the core of every campaign is the creative brief." (32:09, Alex Schultz)
• On AI’s Coming Impact
  "You’re not going to get replaced by AI...but you’re going to be replaced by somebody using AI." (36:29, Alex Schultz)
• On Incrementality
  "Incrementality is everything. Like, it matters that what I did made a difference." (45:32, Alex Schultz)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Alex Schultz’s Early Days & Websites: 02:37 – 05:34
• The Skill of Explaining Data Simply: 05:57 – 07:46
• Why Join Facebook/Meta: 08:11 – 10:15
• North Star Mission and Its Importance: 10:51 – 13:01
• Retention as Key Metric: 14:19 – 15:35
• Art & Science in Product Decisions: 15:35 – 18:27
• Measuring Culture, Brand Love: 19:11 – 20:39
• Art & Science in Brand Launches (Threads): 21:39 – 22:31
• Goals vs. Metrics – Crucial Distinctions: 24:16 – 28:47
• Meta Rebrand – Decision and Secrecy: 29:05 – 31:36
• The Value of Creative Briefs: 32:09 – 34:43
• AI’s Future in Marketing: 36:10 – 40:23
• Working with Agencies: 41:37 – 42:03
• Book’s Audience and Takeaways: 42:23 – 44:09
• Current Business Challenge: 44:32 – 45:03
• Personal Mantras: 45:13 – 46:07

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Conclusion

This episode offers a candid, practical, and visionary look into how one of the world’s most data-driven brands blends analytics with instinct and creativity. Schultz’s views provide both a masterclass in marketing measurement and a gentle reminder of the deep value of intuition, experimentation, and cultural attunement. Marketers at all levels will benefit from his wisdom on navigating metrics, crafting clear creative briefs, and maintaining a holistic, “soul and science” approach to making brands matter.

Transcript

[A]

Doing the brand change to Meta. How much was art versus science?

[B]

The decision to change the brand was science. Everything else was art.

[A]

How much testing went on?

[B]

None.

[A]

That's unbelievable.

[B]

We needed to keep it secret. I mean, look at our company.

[A]

How uncomfortable was that internally?

[B]

Very. I had some really uncomfortable board meetings.

[A]

It's always hated at first. Then it just becomes what it is.

[B]

If you get it right.

[A]

In today's world, how does a brand break through the noise and become iconic? Join me, Jason Harris, as I speak with the world's leading marketing experts about how they use soul and science to build an iconic brand. Think of it as EQ meeting iq. So let's lock in and together. Fast forward our marketing minds on the Soul and Science podcast. Welcome to another edition of the Soul and Science podcast. On this episode of Soul and Science, I am joined by Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of analytics at Meta and the author of a brand new book that's coming out in October called Click Here, the Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising. So we're going to get into his book today and a bit about his career. But Alex has almost close to two decades at Meta. He's helped scale Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Obviously, we know the numbers are in the billions and he's led some of the company's most iconic product launches and even helped steer the bold rebrand from Facebook to Meta, which we will talk about today as well. Today we're diving into the art and science of measuring the unmeasurable, how to navigate the gray areas of marketing, make smart bets without perfect data, which you never really have, despite what people tell you, and how to build brand love that numbers alone can't capture. Welcome to the podcast, Alex.

[B]

It's awesome to be here. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on board. And thanks for mentioning the book in the opening. That's perfect.

[A]

Yeah. You know you got a pump book. I know what it's like. So, Alex, tell me before we get into the book and maybe your current position, tell me your origin story, what you studied, what you got into, how did you get into marketing? Obviously, our audience is in the marketing world, but how you got into your current career and was that something that you, you always thought about or did you kind of, was it a long and windy road to lead you here?

[B]

I mean, I, I wanted to be an archeologist, then I wanted to be a physicist. So it was a long and windy road for sure. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I studied physics at college. I did in the UK I did natural sciences specializing in experimental and theoretical physics. At Cambridge I did a real masters as well as getting my fake one because Cambridge gives everyone an MA after seven years from matriculation. So I did my real masters in terahertz imaging, focusing on spatial and spectral understanding of the terahertz area of the electromagnetic spectrum. Particularly useful for detecting either caries in dry teeth, which makes it actually not that useful for dental practice, or conceptually finding landmines in very dry places. So it was funded by the US Department of Defense. Anyway, that's probably boring, but that was my, that was what I did at college. I paid for it with a paper airplane website I started at college. My dad was now a nautical engineer. I had a geocities site. I had lots of sections on it, like fun science experiments, paper airplanes, Formula One. And the paper airplanes bit did well in AltaVista because I got one random link and that really taught me a lot about SEO and that really got me started in having websites and learning about online marketing. When I got to college, even in the physics department, the paper airplane site wasn't cool. So I started a cocktail site and I ended up having the number one paper airplane site on Earth and the number one cocktail site in the uk. And then I started showing ads on them which helped me pay for college. Everything around my studies and that, that was the thing that got me into online marketing.

[A]

Why did you want to make a paper airplane website?

[B]

Because my dad showed me how to make paper airplanes and I was 12 or something and they were really cool and I love my dad and I just wanted to do something on the Internet with paper airplanes.

[A]

It wasn't to build something that you could run ads on to make money?

[B]

No, no. It was definitely the passion was paper airplanes. And then over time the passion became learning how to do SEO and online marketing.

[A]

You're self taught?

[B]

Yes, definitely on that. Yeah.

[A]

And then tell me about your second website. Why did you start that?

[B]

I still at that stage I just wanted to do cool stuff on the Internet.

[A]

And how old are you at this point?

[B]

About 19? Yep, just got to college and so I built this website and I wanted to learn databases and so I created a database with all the ingredients. I created a database with recipes, I created database search that people could use and I loved SEO, loved ranking in search engines. I just thought it was so cool to see all the countries you got visitors from. So I did it both to have a cool website that I could show my friends and we could have cocktail Parties and whatever. And also because I found just ranking for things on the Internet really interesting and fun. And so for those two reasons I.

[A]

Created it and what made it different. What did the. How did the Cocktail website stand out?

[B]

Honestly, I don't think it was that different. I just think I was.

[A]

You just, you just were good at tinkering and getting results and that's why it did well. Okay. What do you think you're particularly good at, Alex? That maybe other people aren't as good at.

[B]

Explaining complex things simply.

[A]

Okay. Do you find yourself in your field doing that quite a bit?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it's a huge part. So I've got this marketing job and I also run data science and data engineering for Meta. You can imagine Meta is a very data driven company to say data inspired and so understanding the trends. What's going on? I remember this one time when we were just at the start of COVID where we had the data on what was happening in Lombardy, because Lombardy was the first place to shut down where we operated and the whole usage of Italy had gone up fourfold. The usage of, the usage of group messaging had gone up something like 1000x. I mean, it was really interesting how things had shifted and I brought that data in to our senior management team before any lockdowns had happened in the US or the UK or anything, and said, if this happens on the west coast of America and Brazil at the same time, our site's going to go down.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And you know, that was very early on, but like, because of what was happening in Lombardy, you could simply predict this is what's going to happen in the rest of the world. It actually played out that way and it got us ahead in terms of, in my understanding, from some of my friends in Infra, we went out and we actually bought ahead of the curve because we guessed this was going to happen. And it also helped the leadership team prepare for the changes. So look, there's loads and loads of data. There's lots of fear, uncertainty and doubt. What's the one thing we need to know? Usage is going to go up a lot. Look at Lombardy. And these are the specific things where usage will go up a lot. And we can extrapolate that globally. So that would be a. That would be an example.

[A]

That's a good example. So the skill is not just explaining it in terms that people can understand, it's also finding the one clear insight amongst all the information.

[B]

That's what I hope I deliver.

[A]

And when you got in your career, when you got to Facebook Meta. How did you know? Because you obviously had a lot of analytic roles, growth roles, before the VP of analytics and CMO role. How did you know that this was the company you wanted to sort of build your career at and stay?

[B]

I mean, it was data. Well, it was two things. So it was actually two things. But I'd separate them out, build my career and stay at two different conversations. But, but on the way in I saw the numbers. I was working at ebay, I, I did international, a lot of international direct response marketing at ebay and I saw the numbers that were happening with Facebook Growth. We were dabbling with Facebook flyers at the time as a marketing channel and I just thought, this thing's going to be massive. And then the second thing that really made me want to come to Facebook, which actually weirdly enough ties in with the book, is I thought Facebook was going to revolutionize online marketing because it was going to allow you instead of with search. I was hugely frustrated that I couldn't do incrementality testing on the marketing, like because I couldn't, couldn't do lift studies. And I was like, well, Facebook has all the user IDs logged in. They're going to stay logged in via that same user ID between sessions. They only show ads logged in. So I can do proper incrementality analysis. This is going to revolutionize online marketing. And genuinely, those were the two reasons I applied to work at Facebook was those two reasons. It was data I was seeing from being a marketer and using flyers and knowing this thing would really work. And then I really thought it would revolutionize online marketing by doing incrementality and lift analysis.

[A]

Right? It was the best way to get your hands on the data.

[B]

It was the best way to be part of something that was really cool and really mattered and I thought was going to be a big thing in the world. And I wanted to, I really wanted to help change online marketing to show incrementality. It was so. It sounds, it sounds kind of weird, maybe this is the right podcast to say it on, but it's like it was like I really cared about because I just felt so much marketing. Affiliates was huge back then. Remember affiliate massive channel, no incrementality measurement. Like paid search massive channel, no incrementality measurement. Best you can do is like pre post AB test matched market testing. And so I just, I thought this would change everything. And I believe it has actually.

[A]

And now your book, click here. You do talk about marketers also needing a clear North Star and how a North Star can help when maybe the data is murky or hard to measure. So first of all, I love hearing that as a, as a brand guy, as a brand building guy, how did you come to that idea? Because so much of your work is about growth and analytics and the data and now you're cmo. Tell me a little bit about that North Star need and maybe you've seen that in the data and the results.

[B]

I think the North Star thing came without trying to be a sycophant, but I guess if I've worked here 20 odd years, I probably like the guy. I think it comes from Mark like he was. When I came in. The company had a very simple guide which is our goal is to connect the world online. Right? That was our goal and obviously we wanted to connect them through Facebook online and that simplified a ton of conversations because it gave us a priority order. And in some cases you can have a great metric that describes the goal and you can actually test against it. For us, that was monthly active users of Facebook and you could do an A B test and you could see if you hurt monthly active users. But for a bunch of other ones, you know the favorite one we keep talking about and have talked about for years is we never did homepage takeovers. Remember my space had those homepage takeovers. The classic was Hulk smashing through the homepage of MySpace Jump. Everything about, yeah, we didn't do that, never. And that wasn't an escalation to senior leadership because we were like, there's a trade off here. If you do a massive takeover the homepage, you're hurting user experience, you're hurting people's ability to ramp up as new users. We didn't need to use a metric. We knew that that would happen and so we didn't do it. And there were loads of decisions that could be made way below the CEO and allowed teams to run and move fast. Because of that, clarifying North Star of our mission and our goal as a company is to connect the world online through Facebook.

[A]

Right?

[B]

You describe with metrics, you give targets, but you can't measure everything. The logic really helps.

[A]

And do you find that that North Star, the way you're talking about it is maybe more internal guidance, but do you feel like that also is how you think about marketing to the world or to the consumer?

[B]

So at that stage, yes, marketing to the consumer, back then it was all about like, this is the way you connect with your friends online. And so it was the guiding North Star for what co marketing we put out with Telcos all of that work and what decisions we made internally, does.

[A]

That still ring true today?

[B]

So today our mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that enables it. And so it's a slightly different North Star we're looking at. So for example, we think people are going to be connecting with AI through wearables. We think that's going to be a huge part of the future. I think everyone thinks that at this stage. Sure, yeah, we think that there will be a lot of different form factors, but glasses are a really, really good form factor for this. And so now it's less like, oh, what is the monthly active users of Facebook? It's what is the usage of all of our products? Because we think social media is the future of human connection. We think like the Metaverse will be, we think augmented reality glasses will be as part of that and we think communicating with AI will be. So it's looking at, it is still looking at monthly active users as a metric, but it's looking at really pushing the future of human connection and getting to these cutting edge products and making sure they're adopted without forgetting, like, what is our bread and butter to how.

[A]

Do you know when to stop betting on a product? How do you know when you know if there's new technology, new wearables? You mentioned, you know, Metaverse, et cetera. When internally do you guys think, okay, this isn't going to happen or this is going to be a much slower burn than we thought?

[B]

Well, this gets back to your, the name of your podcast Soul and science. Yeah. From the science perspective, what I can tell you is for a consumer product retention is the one metric you need to look at as to whether this thing has product market fit.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like if someone starts using it and a month, let's say 100 people start using it and a month later 90% of them have stopped using it. And you're not a very, very high value product. You don't have a business and you do not have something that's compellingly product market fit for the majority of people.

[A]

There's no stickiness to it.

[B]

That's the science. Is genuinely the science. And the previous version of these glasses actually had half the retention rate of these glasses that we have today. These from from about two months in. Well, actually, honestly from two weeks in, but from definitely from two months in, we could show you that the retention curves on these meant we had doubled the retention of these glasses with the initial release of the Ray Ban metas over the Ray Ban stories the previous Generation, we were like, wow, we have a hit on our hand and we weren't even expecting it.

[A]

Oh, that's interesting. Was it the evolution of the tech or was it the visual look of the product?

[B]

So it was the tech. The visual look was pretty close to.

[A]

Identity, Pretty much the same. Okay, yeah.

[B]

So that's the, that's the science. And so we know, hey, this is the thing to pour fuel on based on retention, or, you know, this is the thing that isn't there based on retention. But then you get to the soul and that's the bit where it's actually, I think, much more down to conviction and belief. So, you know, we could. After Ray Ban stories were not particularly successful as a device, we could have stopped. But the product team and Mark, they decided they were going to keep trying and that there was another try in there and they could see how they could make it significantly better. And they felt they saw a path to make it way better and then they did it. A lot of people were skeptical, including me, that that would land, but once they did it, it was a massively better product. And it's only because we kept trying that that happened. And so. So there is this real interesting balance of, like, we believe in this thing as a product leadership that isn't down to numbers. Sometimes it is because we've seen someone else do it, but in this case, it was not even slightly down to numbers. It was a true belief that worked out and then the numbers backed up that it was worth staying on for another couple of years with this product.

[A]

I think it's good, a good segue into how your book blends art and science and it defines the balance between the two. How do you think about balancing the art and the science? It's a big question, I know, but how do you think about those two components in making decisions?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest piece for me is knowing when the science ends. And I do think that's where I have a huge advantage as a CMO because of my background in analytics and direct response marketing and all this data. So I think, I think like for me, the things like direct response marketing via social media to get people to install your app, you should a B test that you should do lift studies. You should use a lot of science for that. Things like, I'm going to close fifth Avenue and have Lewis Hamilton do donuts to make people in the US think about WhatsApp. I'm not going to be able to measure that. I can tell you how many media impressions I Got, you can't measure that.

[A]

When it happens or you can't predict how well it's going to do. There's no predictive intelligence for it. Or even when it's done, you can't measure it.

[B]

I mean, when it's done. What I can tell you is it got seen this many times, there was this much of a spike in people downloading the app.

[A]

You don't know if sentiment's changed or.

[B]

And also is that one stunt going to change sentiment in the entire United States? Probably not. Now is that combined with everything else going to help?

[A]

Yes, it's a cumulative. Yeah, you don't know.

[B]

A really big thing is measure what you can and measure it well, do what you can with data and do it well and then use that to get your permission to go out and do the things that are much more passion based about being in culture, about building that brand. And the one thing that joins these two together is have an explainable logic for why you're doing it. You can, you can be interpretable to the rest of the company. So get trusted that you can measure by doing the measurable things well. But don't be silly and cut off things that can't be measured well but still matter about being in culture, which matters so much, companies and brands. And it really, really matters because it's not measurable. So does that help?

[A]

Can you measure cultural relevance?

[B]

You can measure cultural relevance. You can definitely get out through different survey constructs. You 100% can. But can you measure the impact on cultural relevance on one single stunt?

[A]

No, there's no way you can.

[B]

Netflix did one stunt, which I think I mentioned in the book. I'm going to butcher this because I don't speak Spanish, but it was something like a big billboard that said Blanco Navidad and it was right opposite the President's palace. When the President of Colombia came to visit Spain and it caused so much discussion in culture because obviously cocaine narcos was what it was. It was presenting narcos with El Blanco Navidad. It was brilliant.

[A]

That's crazy.

[B]

So they broke through into culture and you can measure that. That billboard worked. But it is the unusual stunt where you can measure it now a consistent brand campaign. You should be able to measure uplift, you should be able to do lift study on the specific sentiment metric.

[A]

But your, your sort of take on it is be really good at what is measurable and in your control. But to be culturally relevant, you still have to take swings from the gut that are timely and on cultural Relevant trends. You have to do those without all the data 100%.

[B]

Another really good example is how we launched Threads. Threads has been a tremendous Success. Just crossed 400 million monthly active users. The thing is growing incredibly fast, especially in places like Japan, text first countries. It's doing so well. When we launched Threads, the go to market was a combination of this golden ticket that you had a golden ticket to get in to be one of the first people to access Threads. Having the right culturally relevant creators on Threads done by our partnerships team. Golden ticket was product culturally relevant creators was our partnerships team and having a really good bunch of direct response marketing in like social media advertising. We, we were on our own platform doing it both in product and through ads. And we had all three pillars and I would, I cannot tell you how valuable each of the individual pillars was because I don't think with pillars one and two, the direct response marketing we did would have had anywhere near the effect that it had.

[A]

Right. You explained something complicated very simply. That does make sense actually. But you also had like a fourth thing going on which was what was happening in culture around technology at the time and different platforms which made that platform sort of more welcoming or a good place to be because you needed an alternative. And that's something. You had no idea that that would happen at the time.

[B]

Well, and you know what? That was not my judgment call. I was supportive, but that wasn't, that wasn't actually my idea. That was, that was Adam Masseri and Zuck and I think Chris Cox, like that was the product leadership said let's, let's sprint to bring this out now because there's such a cycle going.

[A]

Timing's right. Yeah.

[B]

And that was, yeah, you're right. That was a, that was a product and business led decision that I was very supportive of. But wasn't my idea, wasn't marketing came up with it.

[A]

Right. Do you ever freak out that there's so many products, there's so many new technologies yet to be developed, there's so many things you can be doing. Like it's kind of maddening. Right?

[B]

I don't get excited. I totally get excited. I'm like, this is a great time to be in our industry. Like marketing always changes for sure. You know, 40 years ago versus 20 years ago versus 10 years ago versus now. But then you go 100 years ago and you read sort of Claude C. Hopkins. TV didn't exist, radio didn't exist. Those were just, they changed the world. When soap operas came along and they became soap operas because of us like all of the 30 second slot didn't exist at that stage. So marketing has like reinvented itself so many times. Agencies have reinvented themselves so many times. Like 20 years ago you made all your money in creative, now you make your money in media. Who knows what in 20 years from now. So I love this. It's actually really exciting for me. I love like being in the cut and thrust of new technology. It's, I mean it makes the days stressful and hard.

[A]

But you know, there's a thing though that there's always in the back of your mind there's something you're not doing. You know what I mean? And I guess you love, I guess you feed off that.

[B]

Yeah, I mean you're never going to be perfect, you're never going to do everything. So you make the best judgment. Cause you can about the things that you've chosen to do and then you go with them and yeah, reevaluate it periodically. I love taking a holiday when I.

[A]

Just think, I love that from your book. How do you define the difference between goals and metrics? And why does it matter?

[B]

So I think this is incredibly important and is done terribly wrong across marketing and across lots of different fields actually. But marketing does it poorly. A goal is the thing you want to achieve. So the example we just used, connect the world online through Facebook. A metric is how you judge whether you achieved the goal. So that's like monthly active users of Facebook. But it's important to understand that a metric can never perfectly describe a goal. So for example, have we really connected someone online if they clicked on one email and they logged in for 10 seconds? Probably not. And so metrics tend to be in this place where there's this thing called Goodhart's Law. Once a metric becomes a measure, it ceases to be a useful metric. I think that's too extreme. You need to use guardrails. You need to actually be honest about your usage of it. But you need to understand metrics are great for describing goals, but they are never perfect and they always have a lot of hair on them. So you have to separate the two. And the second you say this metric is my goal. I think you end up making a huge mistake and having lots of space for things to go wrong.

[A]

And do you think that you make mistakes or you end up chasing the wrong thing?

[B]

Well, I think you end up with two things that happen. One, well, meaning actions that chase the wrong thing, which I describe as mistakes. And two, actually, like in a large organization you'll get some people who game the metric to try and hit their performance evaluation.

[A]

Right, yeah, that's true. But you can, you can chase the metric, but that doesn't mean that you're serving the goal. Right. And so that's sort of where your point is. And oftentimes we will start with a goal, then we'll determine the metric, and then we'll forget about the goal and the metric will just lead everything. Yes, I think that happens in every organization across the board, which is why I think that's, you know, in your book. That's really an interesting topic on, on Qlik here, because that doesn't. That's. That's not just happening at, at Meta. That's happening in every organization, you know, in every boardroom, across every company. And everything is becoming more focused on metrics than ever before.

[B]

There's an analogy I use in the book that I think is really important because I think there's two ways things go wrong with metrics. One way is you conflate your metric with your goal. You forget about your goal, and you just optimize for the metric with all the. That comes to that. The other way is you have too many metrics. Right. Like, I'm swimming and I'm drowning in metrics. And the analogy I like to use is a captain of a ship. I'm on the board of a cruise line. Highly recommend it. National Geographic Expeditions. Very fun.

[A]

Oh, fun.

[B]

The captain of a ship's goal is basically to deliver their passengers safely to their destination. That's the goal of the captain of the ship. And the metric to measure it is essentially a 1 or 0. Did you do that or did you not do that? But a captain of a ship, when you're on the bridge of a ship, they've got radar, they've got sonar, they've got a water monitoring system, they have a fire suppression system, they have engine fuel levels, they have sewer systems that are actually on the bridge of the ship because they have to measure how the toilets are working. They have so many different systems over which they have monitoring and metrics, but they don't go, oh, my God, I'm overwhelmed with metrics. They're like, every metric has its job. If the sewage system breaks down, you know, passengers are going to get ill. If the engine breaks down, overheats, or we run out of fuel, we won't be able to get to our destination, and we may even be swept to ground. Like, if we don't actually sail where the right depth is, we will run aground. So they know what each of those guardrail systems is for. I think what we often forget with, with the huge number of metrics we've got is there's one goal and there's one metric by which you measure your progress against the goal. But then there's a ton of associated things that say, for example, reach of your ad campaign. If only a hundred thousand people saw the WhatsApp ads. And I want to get everyone in the US to know WhatsApp exists. I'm clearly going to fail. So it just helps me understand why I failed in my goal to make everyone in the US know WhatsApp exists. And you have a series of metrics to help you understand what is meaning that you hit your goal or not.

[A]

That makes a lot of sense. When you were thinking of with the team doing the brand change to Meta, how much of that was art versus science?

[B]

I would say the decision to change the brand was science. Everything else was art.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Everything else was art.

[A]

How much testing went on?

[B]

None.

[A]

That's unbelievable.

[B]

We needed to keep it secret. I mean, look at our company.

[A]

Um, how uncomfortable was that internally?

[B]

Very. I had some really uncomfortable board meetings. Yeah, I mean like multiple years on now. I think broadly people see this as a success. It's a well known brand.

[A]

I mean it. That's what happens with when you do brand changes. It's always hated at first and then, then it just becomes what it is.

[B]

If you get it right.

[A]

If you get it right. That's true. And how did you know? At what point were you like, this is going to work?

[B]

Well, for me, I really felt it before it went live. So that may make me naive. I just felt it defined what Mark was running towards. So meta means. In my opinion, meta stands for two things. Number one, it means beyond. Well, the mission of the company today is we want to build the future of human connection and the technologies that enable it. I'm paraphrasing slightly and like, it is clear that we are going beyond the systems of today. And a brand like Meta for a technology company that says we are going beyond I think is really strong. And then the second thing that I think it really stood for is Mark believes in the metaverse. His description of the metaverse is it includes augmented, virtual and mixed reality. That is his belief and that is what he is putting out there. We have this brilliant demo video that explains this and he's running towards that like, we're invested in glasses. We're invested in glasses with clever wave guides in them. So you can actually have The Orion glasses that we announced last year so you can see things while you're, you know, actually sitting at a computer. We're investing in virtual reality headsets. We're invested in AI so you can be talking to an assistant the whole time and have that with you at the whole time. Like, it is the future he's running towards. And so it really. I. The reason I thought it would work is it was genuine to the company, mission genuine to the direction of the CEO. It wasn't running away from anything. We even made it blue to point out it was still Facebook. It was running towards something. And that. That was what made me feel it could work. Because you. You have to be running towards something. If you're doing a brand, it has to be something that you're, like, going towards, and it has to, like, reveal the truth about your company.

[A]

I feel like that's a good example of North Star that we talked about earlier. Right. Clear North Star. And it's wrapped up in the name. In your book, you talk about mastering the creative brief and how a great creative brief can help in a lot of areas, like cultural connection, like the insight or the soul. Right. Tell me about how you think about mastering the creative brief. And then maybe if you have an example of something that came from a great creative brief.

[B]

So I didn't get this. I didn't get this when I became cmo. It really is one of those things. Everyone talked about the brief. There's a lot of words I also didn't use. I never used the word timeless. Now, with under my belt, I say timeless a lot.

[A]

That's so funny. We love our jargon, man.

[B]

I say zeitgeist more than I'd like to.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the gestalt. Um, so. So the creative brief didn't. It didn't make sense to me. And then as I got deeper into the field, I realized, wow, this is the core of every campaign is the creative brief. Like, you need to be in the place where you can explain succinctly, ideally, brief on a page, what the campaign is supposed to achieve and what the boxes that the creative team need to work within, which then, if they're a good creative team, they'll find creative ways to push the edge of it and make you go, oh, you were right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so, I mean, it took me a long time to actually get to a place where I really understood it, and now I understand it. It's something that I'm pretty militant on a really good example of where something came out of the creative brief was the brief we did for the super bowl commercial we did this year. We wanted people in the United States to be aware of the Meta AI Glasses, right? So Ray Ban meta was the only type at the time. Now we've got the Oakleys as well.

[A]

Which you are wearing very fashionable.

[B]

These are great. And I'm a big Oakley fan, so I'm so happy we have Oakley's. But the brief that we put out there was like quite simple. It's kind of cool people wearing cool glasses to make people aware. And it just needs to really make people aware of meta glasses and Metro AI on the meta glasses. And so what you got out of that was an ad where people said hey, meta. As the core of the joke through the entire ad. Like that was what you got out of it. Of course, I've glasses, so I'm turning them off. But you got people to say hey, meta. Throughout the entire ad as the punchline of the jokes through the ad, which meant you got hey, meta. Hey, meta. Hey, meta. Hey, meta. Which I didn't even think of as the way the ad could work. And that for me was like a brilliant move because that ad really worked. I can tell you for a fact. It moved up sales in the glasses by 50%. We did a whole surround sound with it. There was influencers, there was a lot of online, there was out of home. It wasn't just the slots. And we used that creative for a long while after the, after the Super Bowl. But that insight of like, you can just say hey meta a lot when you're talking to the glasses as part of the ad was incredible.

[A]

I think you also did something else that you love doing, which is it was very cultural, it was very culturally relevant. It put your product right in the zeitgeist.

[B]

In the zeitgeist. Yeah, we really grabbed the gestalt.

[A]

You really did talk about meta and how you guys think about this is a super simple question. How you think about AI in the future of marketing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that one's really sensible. And also no landmines in that space.

[A]

Just answer that in like 30 seconds.

[B]

Look, I, I think the, the, the way I've been talking, there's two questions I think you need to ask yourself around. This one is how weird is it going to get? Like, how far is the AI going to go? I would recommend, on top of reading my book where the last chapter goes through some of this, but the Main. I'd recommend three essays I'd recommend AI 2027, which I think is the Max Doom view of the world. I would recommend Sam Altman's the Gentle Singularity. And I would recommend in the Middle, Dario from Anthropic, his Machines of Loving Grace. And if you read those three, at least it gives you a framework to think about how weird the world's going to get. We're very, we're very AI maximalist as a company. So we believe in superintelligence and we are investing very heavily believing that will come. You will have to determine for yourself whether you believe it will come and on what time horizon.

[A]

Of course it's coming.

[B]

So assuming it's coming, the question is only time horizon, how fast will it come? Yeah, and then what happens on the outcome? I am a positive guy. I tend to believe like the very positive view of the world. Mark put out a view of that with his essay on superintelligence. And so that takes us to the second point is, okay, if you really believe this is going to go a long way and it's going to happen, it's going to happen in our lifetimes, what is going to happen? I think three things are going to happen. Number one, things that can already be done are going to be done a lot more efficiently. So existing jobs, you're not going to get replaced by AI at least in the near future, but you're going to be replaced by somebody using AI. And so like the current stuff. An example of that is our content moderation. It's now in a number of categories being done by modern AI systems based on llama 4. The second category of things that's going to happen is a ton of things that were possible but nobody did because they were so expensive are suddenly going to become ROI positive. Two examples of that example for marketing is chatbots over WhatsApp. Like in the developing world, especially weirdly, especially for cosmetics, these are going really well. And people are like one big brand said to me that they were selling for DTC in one specific South American country that they were testing in. A third of their direct to consumer was happening with bots chatting with consumers over WhatsApp. So like AI chatbots, like we do support now in the US that you can chat to a support agent when you've lost access to your account. That was never something that could scale. Now with AI, we have it available. So things that weren't possible suddenly become possible and that causes more people to be employed. So that doesn't destroy job, that creates jobs. And then the third thing is Stuff that could never have happened before will now happen. The example I use for that is Reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts. That is based on a semantic understanding of the content and the interest of the consumer. That could not have existed five years ago. That has been entirely created by modern AI systems. We are now majority unconnected content connected from people you don't follow, friend, like join, whatever. That has been a total transformation in social media in five years entirely because AI systems made something that was impossible. Finding the content you wanted out of all the billions of pieces or trillions of pieces of content and showing it to you possible. So I think about those three categories of things and that helps me think about how is AI going to change agency, life, creative life, media buying and all the different divisions.

[A]

How fast do you think that's going to happen?

[B]

So I think it'd be threshold thing number one. And so what will happen is we sit there and we do these precision recall curves against the target that we're training towards. For example, what is the precision and which is, sorry, recall is how much of a thing we find precision is how correct we get our decisions. So say, for example, we want to get, on our part, we ban all adult nudity on Facebook. So we want to get all adult nudity off of Facebook. Makes for a very brand safe platform. It's something we care about. So in terms of doing that, we see of all adult nudity in our carefully labeled sample, how much did the AI catch and how many times did it get it wrong and take down stuff that wasn't adult nudity? Because we really can care about not making those mistakes too. And then we plot the curve and we say how far is it getting? And at the point where it overtook human capability on that particular thing and it OOVERTOOK our existing ML systems on that particular thing, we replaced those with the AI to do that particular job. So I think what will happen is in certain areas nothing happens. Nothing happens, Nothing happens. And then suddenly you feel a massive change has happened. And I think that will happen repeatedly over the next five years.

[A]

That's a very good example. Yeah, thank you for that. What is your role as cmo? How do you work internally and then externally with, with agencies? And how do you think about that?

[B]

Yeah, we use massive amounts of agencies. And I have, I mean my first thing when I joined Facebook and I, I do comment on this in the book, the first thing I did was I brought in external agencies to do my paid media buying and my measurement for, for Facebook for use for advertiser. Growth as it was at that stage, because they were doing all, you know, not invented here. And so we were doing all of the tracking in house. And I'm like, this is a solved problem. Everyone can we just buy off the shelf? The solved problem, solve, solved solution. So, yeah, I use agencies for everything. I have two media buying agencies, one for direct response, one for brand demand generation and top of funnel, I have creative agencies at record for each of the different brands. Like, I have a suite of agencies. They're incredibly important. As a big company, I need someone who can look across all the platforms I buy on and not just. Not just Google, not just. So, yeah, I use tons of agencies. They're incredibly valuable for me. They also give me best practices that I wouldn't learn if I was so insular and did everything in house. Like, I get best practices across the industry because of them. It's. I love my agencies. I've got a whole chapter on how you select agencies, how you build your team, and I think agencies are like going to be here for a long time for big companies like us.

[A]

That's good to hear. What's one thing that you hope marketers take away from? Obviously we want people to buy the book. There's a lot to dive into there. I think you can order it now for. You can order it now presale. If you had, I don't know, maybe one or two key takeaways that someone's going to get from the book, what.

[B]

Would that be a really good way to show to your colleagues what we do. So I think, like this book, if you hand it to your finance partner, if you hand it to your business partner, getting them to understand the basics of online marketing. So that's the first thing I want people to get, a tool they can use to help them get along with other departments and help other departments understand us.

[A]

How did you create the book knowing that you're targeting sort of nascent marketers, middle of the road marketers and then expert marketers?

[B]

Well, the first two people I had read, the first three people I had read the book, one was an excellent online marketer guy called joost. The other two were CEOs of successful startups that are now. One sold for a billion dollars and one is nine figures in valuation and doing very well and they're very good friends. And like, I wanted to make sure it worked for both someone who really got marketing very well and people who were business leaders who did not fundamentally, marketing wasn't their number one thing. So that's And I tested that throughout. If you look on the back of my book, I've got, you know, Sam Altman, Daniel Ek, but also, like Matthew Vaughn, business leaders who actually run sort of businesses who aren't marketers endorsing it. But then I also get, like, agency leaders like David Droger and Andrew Robertson and. And also CMOs like Lara Adobe or, you know, Kelly, the old CMO of the old CMO of Netflix, who did the Narco's Billboard I love so much, and others like Kofi at Doordash and so on. So I. I really tested the book with the different audiences. I wanted to read it to make sure it could work, whether you're a business leader or someone who really gets marketing. So it's really important to me.

[A]

And did that change how you edited the book based on some of that feedback?

[B]

Oh, yeah. Yes, it did. I put in a lot more examples, actually, because I got asked for more examples. And I also. There were some specific things, like in the SEO chapter where I talked about categories, not just keywords, where the SEO experts said, people talk about categories now. Alex, you're sounding old.

[A]

What's one business challenge that keeps you up at night?

[B]

Right now, it is how we match supply with demand. For the glasses. I just literally, my meeting before this was talking about matching supply with demand because the glasses have done so much better than we thought they would.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Now we have to figure out how we make that puzzle work, which is the great puzzle. Don't get me wrong. It's the great puzzle, but at the same time, we've got a lead. We're first out in the market with these AI Glasses. It's going really well. How do we make sure we make the most of that lead? And so that's the big business problem that I'm focused on right now.

[A]

And final question. Do you have a mantra quote or a philosophy that kind of guides you or that you think about or that you come back to?

[B]

I've got a few. I actually, like, literally write them in the front of my. Front of my notebook.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Let's hear a few of them.

[B]

The top one is the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. It's a very old quote. It's a science fiction author. The second one is you need to skate to where the puck is going.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And then the third thing that's top of mind with me actually is incrementality is everything. Like, it matters that what I did made a difference. It matters that I am sitting here doing work in the world where the world is different after I did my work and I didn't just do busy work and hang out. And it's a core principle of the book, but for me it's a core principle of my life is if I do something, I want it to make a difference. I don't want to just do it because it looks cool. I don't just want to do it so I feel good. I feel good when I do something that's had an incremental impact. And so that's the third, third mantra I've got. But there's a bunch of others.

[A]

I actually think that last quote sums up. Yeah. The book and your philosophy very, very well.

[B]

Thank you very much.

[A]

Yeah, it's strong. Well, thanks for being on the podcast and this is going to be a great one. I can't wait for the listeners to dive in.

[B]

Okay. I really appreciate it. I love the top the I love the topics and discussion and detail of this podcast. Soul and Science is exactly the right way to talk about this.

[A]

Thanks so much for listening to Soul and Science and we'll see you next week. Soul and Science is a mechanism podcast produced by Maggie Bowles, Brian Tillotson, and Lily Jablonski. The show is edited by Daniel Ferreira with theme music by Kyle Merritt and I'm your host Jason Harris. At Mechanism, we build iconic brands with Soul and Science. The soul is culturally relevant brand building and the science is the always on marketing activities that drive the bottom line. Learn [e-mail] ra.