In a sweeping conversation at CES 2025, the tech exec opined marketing AI products, using data effectively, tech regulation and more.
On Tuesday, following an announcement from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the company plans to adopt more lax content moderation practices, the company’s CMO and vice-president of analytics, Alex Schultz, met The Drum for a wide-ranging conversation about all things marketing at Meta, AI and tech regulation.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Stream the full conversation on The Drum TV.
Read 5 question and answer highlights from the conversation below:
You’re not only CMO, but also VP of analytics at Meta. I imagine it’s a big role spanning a lot of different functions. Can you tell me about what your day-to-day looks like and how you balance all of these different responsibilities?
Balancing responsibilities is easy. I’ve got a great team of people working for me, so I’m just lucky I can delegate a lot of stuff to them. I really manage a team of five people running [various] departments. And each of those departments runs very independently. I spend my time a lot on strategy. That’s what the data is useful for. We understand what’s going on, we look at the big trends and we make sure we’re responding to them. That’s probably the single most important thing I’m doing for the company.
Secondarily, looking at how things are going is really important. But the marketing part of it is really interesting because there, I’m spending a little bit more time in the details because I’ve only taken the job, sort of four years ago, so it’s much more [about] actually looking at how things are performing and really getting into the details of the execution with the teams. So, yeah, my day is high-level strategy and detailed marketing execution.
We just learned this morning that Mark Zuckerberg might be rolling back some content protections on the platform. That’s a really interesting move. How do you stay on top of all the constant changes?
I get to stay on top of the priorities because I’m lucky enough to be on Mark’s staff, and I’ve been there for over a decade. So, you know, all of the latest changes – I’ve been involved the whole way through. I understand what we’re doing. I feel really good about it. I actually think it’s probably wrong to frame it as ‘getting rid of content protections,’ and it’s right to frame it as ‘reducing censorship and mistakes and getting to a better, more balanced place.’ This fits with the core and history of the company. It’s easy for me to stay on top of [the changes] because being in that room means I know what’s coming and I can be on top of it. And I’ll go back to what I said before: I’m really proud of the people who work for me, and I have a great team. They enable me to have the time to stay on top of what’s happening with the company, so I don’t get too much into the day-to-day … I would get in their way if I did.
What are your priorities for 2025?
We need to actually stand up for tech and stand up for our company against places around the world that have actually been pushing inappropriately on US technology companies. That is something we’re going to be focused on this year. There is a cost to too much regulation and you’re seeing that in the Draghi report and [EU Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen statements in Europe already and we care about that a lot on the public affairs side.
When we look at the core business, things are going really, really well. So it’s [about] doubling down on what’s working well. We’re not looking to make major shifts there. We will, of course, be talking about the AI creative tools used by more than a million advertisers; we will talk about the ranking and the return on ad spend people are getting all from artificial intelligence, which is really working. But it’s really more of the same on the business side. Things are working.
On the enterprise side, we’re going to [be] encouraging people to use more of Lama for their products.
And then, on the consumer side, in America, we want to win with WhatsApp. And so we’re going to get the foot on the gas on making sure that WhatsApp continues to make progress in the US. We announced breaking 100 million active US users on WhatsApp last year. That’s like a third of the population. We’re really on the front foot and we’re excited about how it’s going and marketing is super important to that.
On the analytics side of the aisle, how are you using Meta’s abundance of data to inform your marketing strategies?
That’s actually a really big question. It covers a lot of ground. The single most important thing is using our analytics capabilities to understand the incremental impact of our marketing. And I’m really focused on the fact that all of marketing performs. All the marketing performs, whether it’s top-of-the-funnel awareness to bottom-of-the-funnel action, but you need to do the right experimentation to understand how well it’s working. That is the number one place where we use our data and skills.
Beyond that, it goes back to… understanding the megatrends. What is happening with the megatrends? How are things evolving? A year and a half ago, we were not seen as one of the leaders of AI. We looked at that and we said, ‘Well, that’s not okay for a technology company. A technology company should be seen as a leader in AI and should be seen as someone whose best days ahead. So we went out there and we understood what would convince people, and we went to market, did that together with the comms team, and got [that message] out there. And now, we’re seen as in the bunch with Google and Microsoft [on the AI front], which is real progress for us. But it was understanding those market trends that helped us get there.
We use the data otherwise like everyone else. We feed data to platforms to make sure we get conversions [and help advertisers] optimise campaigns. And it’s very effective.
For the full interview see The Drum