Daniel Rowles: Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Target internet.com.

And in this episode we have an interview with the Chief Marketing Officer of Meta, Alex Schultz.

So we get at least 20 emails a day suggesting guests for the podcast, some of whom are fantastic.

You would've heard them, some not so great.

But lots of 'em are authors who are approaching the launch date of a book.

I wanna share some of their insights.

And wherever we can, we take a look at the book, see if we think they can actually provide some value.

And one of the first things you end up doing is looking at the book cover and you have a quick look at recommendations.

And as, as an author myself, I know it could be really hard to get these recommendations 'cause you've only just finished the book and you need someone to read it urgently so they can give you a quote so you can kind of hit your publishing deadline and therefore you end up asking your close colleagues and friends.

Well, quite often for me that might be me asking Kieran or something like, well, this particular author.

Who did he ask?

Well, he's got quotes from Mark Zuckerberg, a Facebook fame, Sam Altman from OpenAI, and then even Matthew Vonner, director of Layer Cake.

It's one of my favorite movies.

So who on earth was this person?

We were pretty excited.

So.

Alex Schultz is the longtime CMO of Meta and VP of their analytics, and he's all around an amazing guy.

You'll, you'll hear more from me in the interview as well, but he's written what I think is gonna become the definitive book about digital marketing measurement and the book's called Click Here.

There's loads of useful insights in here.

It was a really fun interview a very open interview as well.

So sit back and enjoy the interview with Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta.

Daniel Rowles: Okay, I am here with Alex.

Alex, tell us a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it.

And I, I should say before we get going as well, this book is epic.

I mean, I, I, we, we get a lot of invites to speak to authors, and this is the first one.

I'm actually gonna put onto a course text for my students at Imperial College 'cause listeners will know that I'm senior lecturer there.

So, no one else also has Sam Altman, mark Zuckerberg, Daniel EK from Spotify, and my favorite Matthew Vaughan giving recommendations to the book as well.

So I have to say congratulations.

So congratulations to the book.

Tell us what it's about and tell us why you decide to write it.

Alex Schultz: Matthew Vaughn is he shot our Super Bowl ad it 'cause, 'cause I paid.

He says it's a good book, genuinely.

No, he's a great, he's a great lad..

Know, there's two, there's two reasons why I did the book, and I, I think like you'll probably, one of them is like very banal, but it's true, which is there was a gap in the market

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Alex Schultz: and I keep being asked for a book on digital marketing that kind of tells you, ev a high level overview of every area and gets you started and gets you going.

And I just don't have one.

There's a scattering, like I tell people

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Right.

Alex Schultz: loop, I tell people scoring points.

The Tesco Club card story, but there's no one book.

And so there's this gap.

And I talked to Ettes CEO.

He agreed.

They actually publish Ogilvy from one of their, one of their imprints.

And so went for it and went for the gap in the market.

'cause I want a book I can give to people.

So that's the easy answer.

Daniel Rowles: Nice.

Alex Schultz: The less easy answer is.

really believe in what we do and there are so many people pooping on marketing in general, right?

Like marketing in general.

You're trying to convince people to buy things they don't want with money.

They don't have to quote fight club and the digital marketing realm in particular.

You've got surveillance capital, you've got everyone kind

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: on about this, you know, and we had, we adhere to all laws that are put out there.

But we get all the laws put in that are not helping it.

And, and bluntly, I just think they're stopping people from getting personalized ads that make their lives better, give them products for free and connect them to products that they actually like by showing them slightly more relevant ads for trainers.

On the other side, create business growth so people are employed so businesses can grow, so the economy can grow.

So there can be taxes, which funds so much of what we have, as you know, institutions in the uk.

And so I also wanted to just be like, online marketing is good.

It grows the economy and I'm proud of it, and someone needs to say something positive.

So I wanted to say something positive.

Daniel Rowles: Love it.

I mean, on the, on that first point as well, I completely agree.

There is a massive.

Gap in the market.

'cause we spent a whole time, so Kieran, my co-host, but we spent the whole time going, people need to get back to basics.

They need to get back to fundamentals.

I don't think people know what those fundamentals are.

And I think this book is beautiful at going through and just giving that kind of right mindset and going through and saying, look, this is, need to think about it.

Get back to those real core kind of pieces as well.

I also think that thing of being proud of digital marketing is a really key one.

If you look at how, the ease of launching new businesses now.

My master's students come into me and are kind of terrified on two fronts at the moment.

One constant horror stories, digital's bad, you know, all this kind of stuff.

There's that side of it, but there's also, they're terrified 'cause of ai and we'll get into that later on.

And I keep saying to them, look, and it's a quote that came from you as well, was that the tools changed, but actually the fundamentals stayed the same.

And I thought that was a really interesting, I picked out from the book as well, so.

Let, let's get into some key areas in the book as well, and I think this is a lovely one to start with, that difference between goals and metrics

Alex Schultz: Hmm.

Daniel Rowles: and, and what that means to people.

'cause this is, this is kind of fundamental.

Alex Schultz: Yeah, I mean the back to basics thing, when I was reading my audio book, which I know you've gone through that torture as well,

Daniel Rowles: Exactly

Alex Schultz: I was just going, oh my gosh, I need to go and spend time with my team and tell them to do these things because like,

Daniel Rowles: right.

Alex Schultz: basics that you just need to do,

Daniel Rowles: I.

Alex Schultz: and one of the very basic things is.

Actually be super clear what your goal is and realize that a metric is not a goal.

so, you know, our historic goal was connect the world online.

Like people know that through Facebook, our metric was monthly active users.

And the thing is, a metric can be gamed and so many people like turn a metric into a goal and then the metric doesn't actually do what they want as a company and they're really upset about it.

And that's because they forgot their goal.

And so the example I use is.

If I get you to click on an email and you visit the site for 10 seconds, I really connected the world online or did I just get a ten second session?

we set the goal, connect the world online.

then have the metric monthly active users, and then we have a bunch of guardrails against it.

So percent weekly, percent daily, all of those kind of things.

Lifetime value to make sure we are not bringing minimally active users.

We're bringing actual.

Monthly active users, full stop.

And I got so many examples of it.

The other one's, eBay, where we had, we wanted the, for the acquisition team, the North Star was, get everyone to use eBay, right?

I mean, pretty simple.

The goal we used to set was confirmed registered users.

But the thing is, you'd get affiliates out there, incentive affiliates, incentivizing people to sign up for eBay and confirm.

You get search affiliates sending people to the registration page and not the search landing

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: which got registrations and confirmations, but none of those users activated and became long-term active users.

We changed the metric to A CIU.

We kept the goal, get everyone to use eBay, which is activated, confirmed, registered users.

those incentive affiliates basically went away and the search affiliates changed their landing page to be the search results page.

'cause that's what got someone to bid by Activate.

So.

The goal and the metric have to be separate because you create metrics that never perfectly describe the goal.

Daniel Rowles: I love the fact that when you were going through and reading your own book out, you started thinking, oh, we really need to refocus on this.

I mean, reading your book had the same effect on me as well.

Like, we preach this stuff all the time and we run a business and you know, we're successful.

But you look at it and go, yeah, we're not doing that.

We should be doing more of that.

And that's a gap there and we need to go.

And I always think it's a nice thing 'cause marketing is inherently challenging, right?

Because I think there's that whole piece that.

If it was just something you could repeat, there'd be a guy that you could buy for $99 online and everyone would buy it, and then it wouldn't work anymore anyway.

Alex Schultz: Yes,

Daniel Rowles: it is like, it's an art and it's a science, and I think there's that, that, that kind of key piece.

And that brings me onto this thing that came out again in the end of the book is like that incrementality piece.

So if incremental is everything, that's the key principle.

What, what does that mean in practice for people?

Alex Schultz: Yeah.

I mean the, the.

Fundamentally, the thing for me is I just, I really want what I do in life to matter, to make a difference, to actually, the fact I showed up.

Things are different because I showed up.

I didn't just collect a paycheck.

That's really just how I think about the world.

And I think too many marketers, we Ogilvy, has the useful idiot in his book of the person who know, doesn't get modern marketing well, I've got a useful idiot, essentially, which is.

Someone who uses post-click tracking and incrementality.

So what it means to me is you should just do testing and depending on the channel, right?

Search doesn't let you do lift studies and conversion tracking in that way.

So search, you have to do match to market tests.

You have to do pre-post tests, like that's kind of what you have to do with search.

Social, most of the social companies allow you to do holdouts 'cause all their users are logged in, they've got user IDs and so we offer to lift studies, but all the other guys offer various different things.

there you should leverage those and you should actually see what is the uplift.

So it's, yeah, it's really simple.

It's like do a test.

See if you got more results in the test group than the control group.

And that dates right back to Claude c Hopkins a hundred years with scientific advertising.

This is not a new principle in marketing.

Daniel Rowles: I think it's interesting because the more and more talk there is about a no click environment, and there's more challenges of attribution, modeling, all those kind of things.

Kind of getting the basics right, becomes more and more important.

So just let's come back to that, just why is it so important to get those basics right?

Alex Schultz: I mean the, the fraud is one example.

Fraud and waste.

So.

From a fraud perspective, the worst examples I saw back in my day at eBay.

Well, actually Uber's a really good example, right?

So, Kevin Frisch was head of marketing at Uber, and they ended up suing their banner agency.

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Alex Schultz: their DSPI think it was because they realized when they turned off hundreds of millions of spend, the conversions didn't drop for Uber.

And actually the way they found it which funnily enough, we found something similar.

The way they found it was their ads were showing up on the wrong sites.

So they were trying to avoid controversy.

They weren't trying to be on Breitbart at the time, and their ads kept showing up on Breitbart.

And what was actually happening was that their, either a subcontractor or their agency, or their agency was putting ads out in places where they weren't supposed to be put out so they could get extra impressions.

The worst thing that was happening is they were putting them out below the fold and getting no results and just scattering cookies and by scattering cookies saying that they were driving results.

And so when he turned it off, he saw no drop in top line growth.

I recently did a similar experiment in India where I turned off all of our marketing for Facebook, the app in India, during the period I turned it off, Facebook shrank.

It had a top line impact on Facebook overall to turn off all of our marketing.

That's the difference is like if a Uber at that stage they could turn off the advertising and nothing changed.

And in India we turned off the advertising and Facebook shrank.

That tells you the difference between actually having incremental impact and not That's all you need.

That's like what you need for your job.

But actually that matters for finance, that matters for the CEO that matters for the board.

Like that.

India result's only a couple of years old and it's a legendary result inside the company.

Every time I go to the board, the CEO, every time I go to the CFO, I'm able to point to that and say, I'm not lying to you when I say I drive top line results for the company.

Daniel Rowles: Right.

And I think that that proof of concept is actually said, let's do it.

Let's do an experiment of some type to actually prove this is working and let's scale from that kind of point of view.

I mean, there's a couple of quotes I've just put out the book here that I thought were relevant for the audience, which is start with a marketing funnel.

And I love the fact that, you know, there's, there is no funnel.

There is, and I've always been a big advocate of a funnel is a great way of thinking about things.

Are enough relevant people, even aware of your product or company exists.

And I'll tell you why.

I've just pulled this one out.

We did a load of analysis and actually upon doing it, we worked out that about, you know, it was only a very small percentage of people that got to our website were actually getting to our sales pages, but when they weren't getting there, they were converting it at about 12, 15%.

So, oh, the sales page is amazing.

The thing is, is there's not enough people getting here in the first place, and without taking that stat, we wouldn't have got there.

So that, that marketing funnel piece came out quite a lot.

And do you mind just talking to us about that a little bit?

Alex Schultz: Yeah, I mean.

First and foremost, this is another one of those basics.

I'm going back to what you said at the beginning, which is a core principle for me of the book.

Like, principles are timeless.

Channels change.

So the marketing funnel has been around since the 19th century, I think.

Elias, St.

John, I think is the, the guy who's attributed with it.

For me, I like to use the old one, awareness, intention, decision, action.

You can use whatever you like.

The only thing I do is I add virality.

Like element that, that drives awareness.

I, I look back at our contact importers, so I'm in a similar place to you.

I don't think I even have this story in the book.

This is an incremental one.

Blake Ross, the guy who founded Firefox, came to work for Facebook.

He is a genius.

I love him.

Really amazing guy, and also made me feel very welcome at the company as a gay man.

So there's a, an element of that that makes him very special too.

He was tasked with growing the contact importers and as a good engineer.

What he did was he ranked the contact importers on the contact importing page.

He put them in the right order.

Like if you're a young professional, I'm gonna put LinkedIn first.

If you are like an older person, I'm gonna put a OL and Earth link first.

If you're a younger person, I'll put Gmail first.

And he did all of this and he got some nice uplift.

And then I came along and I put a link on the homepage of Facebook and the thing went up tenfold.

And he wrote, he literally wrote a post about this internally, like, don't over optimize your if people even know your thing exists.

And that is the difference.

Like, you know, these glasses which I'm holding and you don't have a video, but these glasses that we're selling we, we did a Super Bowl ad and like I'm a digital Marks, I'm a direct response guy.

Why am I doing a Super Bowl at?

'cause the awareness was low.

We

Daniel Rowles: right.

Alex Schultz: in the US to over 50% of our RayBan meta glasses.

I'm, I particularly like the Oakley Mets.

That's, that's what I like.

But we drove 'em to over 50% and sales went up a third in the week following the Super Bowl and stayed up because people just didn't know they exist.

Like awareness is a thing

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Right.

Alex Schultz: do it.

Daniel Rowles: There's a, there's a lovely story from Kieran that he kind of came in.

He an eCommerce brand he's working with.

They came in on a Monday morning and sales had gone up about two and a half thousand percent.

And they were like, what's going on?

They look at the analytics and it says, well, search has gone up.

Social media's gone up.

Email's gone up, direct's gone up and like, oh, this is really strange.

And then they go, oh, there were mentioned in the Times, newspaper, two paragraphs.

And it just, and that's the thing.

It's like you, yeah, let's take a step back.

We're digital marketers, but actually this is a marketing mix.

Right?

So I think that was.

Alex Schultz: percent.

Daniel Rowles: That was great insight.

I, I love this other one as well.

Mediocre marketing with a great conversion flow is way better than brilliant marketing with a broken one.

Talk to us about that.

Alex Schultz: The whole way through.

And then, then you've gotta say with a great product or a bad product, that's the next level down.

Look, I mean, a, a classic example of this was the brilliant Coinbase ad that they did in the Super Bowl.

They did a, they did this ad, which was just a QR code bouncing around the screen.

Now I am slightly upset about this 'cause.

I wanted to put a QR code in that and wasn't allowed to another time.

But, so, you know, I, I, I dunno, I, they got a, I dunno how they got it done, but they got it done and that's brilliant.

And they drive so much top of funnel to the site and the site crashed and

Daniel Rowles: Right,

Alex Schultz: nobody could convert.

The conversion funnel was

Daniel Rowles: right,

Alex Schultz: it really does matter that the, that the, the basics work, the flow actually like, takes you through the flow and doesn't block you.

There are so many, like when I started at Facebook, our like signup form was five pages long.

'Cause we got you to fill out your profile in the signup form.

We reduced it to five fields on the homepage.

Guess what?

All the numbers went up.

So, so yeah, you put the wrong conversion funnel in front of someone.

It doesn't matter how good your marketing is, people will not get through that conversion funnel.

You have a bad product.

doesn't matter how good your conversion funnel on your marketing is.

We do not make up for, for that with marketing.

Daniel Rowles: Let's move on Flex.

There's another quote, and I think there's two pieces to it.

So I'll read you the whole quote and then I'll just go to the two bits.

It says, first of all, channels, pick channels by scale, defensibility, annual capabilities, then work down the list.

Allocate budgets are on marginal, not average, ROI, and fit the channel to the conversion you want.

So this just goes to the first bit, pitch channels by scale, defensibility and capabilities.

Can you just talk to us about that for our audience a little bit.

Alex Schultz: Yeah, so I think the first one's pretty obvious.

Which is, what are the scale of results you can get

Daniel Rowles: Mm.

Alex Schultz: channel?

If you are absolutely brilliant at buying ads on a paper, airplane's website with a thousand visitors a month, that's great.

You're not gonna get, ah, thank you.

He held up a paper airplane for the,

Daniel Rowles: Yeah, I, I, so we, we'll get to this in a moment, but there's some history of this, but I, I did that, which was supposed to be one of your favorite designs.

And I have to say, I am very, very impressed and we will put this into the show notes,

Alex Schultz: okay.

Daniel Rowles: target internet com slash podcast.

Let's come back to it.

I interrupted you.

Please go ahead.

Alex Schultz: good.

That's great.

That looks like the nagar to Macker lock or the Nicks plane.

Daniel Rowles: It was Nick's plane.

That's the one well done.

Alex Schultz: So yeah, so, so you can buy it on like some niche website and that's awesome, but it's gonna limit your maximum scale you can achieve.

So you need to just have something big enough you buy on that.

If you succeeded it, it'll matter.

I, I, I think one of the things I get a lot is a statistically significant result that isn't actually significant for the So you need scale, the scale piece I think is actually like, like really, really interesting and, and, but easy, the defensibility piece is fascinating.

So when I started doing advertiser growth for Facebook, we copied all the keywords that Google used to acquire advertisers for themselves, for our purchases on Google, is awesome.

It shows how non-defense it is sometimes to have just a bunch of keywords you buy because someone can go and scrape Google or buy it from a third party and basically build a keyword list and immediately compete with you.

When I was buying on Facebook, what I did was I, we actually created custom audiences, the original custom audiences, Danny Ferrante in the core data science

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Alex Schultz: at the company.

He built this tool where we could take user IDs of people who'd entered the checkout flow for ads or people who had pages.

And we were able to do these really clever data cuts to target people on Facebook with ads for Facebook ads.

And that was completely defensible 'cause nobody could recreate that list.

Nobody could target the same people.

it put us in a place where when we wanted our advertise, I mean, you look at the numbers we put out, we have well over 10 million monthly active advertisers.

Nobody else is putting out any similar numbers.

We have a superpower in dealing with SMBs, and a ton of that is our acquisition channels, whether buying our own ads or in product merchandising, which obviously no one else can put a link in the Facebook page asking a Facebook user or a link in the Instagram app asking an Instagram business to buy an ad.

Those things have driven us to be able to have that huge number of active advertisers who are all small businesses.

They're completely defensible channels that nobody else can get access to, which puts us in the lead.

So scale and defensibility are really, really important.

Daniel Rowles: And then the last piece of that was capabilities, and I think that's just, you know, it is leaning intro capabilities as well, right.

Alex Schultz: Absolutely.

Like superpowers for us.

targeting superpowers for us, like in product conversion.

You know, Harry Stebbings has this concept of channel market fit that he talks about for

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Alex Schultz: And I really think it's true.

There is a channel market fit.

You have a channel that is the right channel for you.

Ideally it's defensible, but whatever happens, it has to have scale and it has to lean into your capabilities if you can make it defensible, too.

Killer.

Daniel Rowles: And, and then the last piece is brilliant, which is allocate budgets on marginal, not average, ROI, and fit the channel to the conversion you want.

Alex Schultz: Yeah.

I mean, this one is an old eBay thing.

I know I

Daniel Rowles: Hmm.

Alex Schultz: eBay, but it was an amazing, an amazing teaching ground for me.

Enrich.

In southwest London.

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Alex Schultz: I was based at at eBay.

yeah.

So if you're thinking about incrementality and return on investment, I think the thing that you need to think about is marginal incremental returns if you can do it.

returns are so obvious.

feel embarrassed on a podcast like this saying it, but it's that the last a hundred dollars you spend

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: you a lot less money than the first a hundred dollars you spend if you're being logical.

Online auctions, so meta, but Snapchat, YouTube, Google, all of the places you can buy online are auctions, second price auctions.

They act very much like perfect economic systems, which is really cool and really interesting.

And that means you get these diminishing return curves, which starts with zero zero.

You spend $0, you get zero, and then you get a beautiful diminishing return curve where your last dollar you are getting, usually nothing back for your last dollar as well in sort of that theoretical model.

And so you have to look at the slope of the curve at the spend that you have

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: than the average slope to the spend.

And that means that you'll find, and, and we found this at eBay, that actually you are spending ROI negative before the average goes negative,

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Alex Schultz: And if you allocate between channels based on the marginal return being the same across every channel.

You'll actually find that you massively move up ROI, just by budget allocation.

within channels, you can subdivide them.

So you can have clusters of users and look at the marginal return for, say British users versus French users, for example.

And then you can optimize for the same marginal return between each user cluster or keyword cluster, whichever one you're working at.

So, so yeah, marginal returns.

And if you can get really clever, you wanna look at marginal incremental returns.

pretty hard to do even at the scale we operate at.

So I currently separate incrementality and marginality, but that's the way we look at it.

Daniel Rowles: Love it.

I think that's, that's missed so much.

So let's talk about the capabilities to do these things then.

So how do you think that marketing organizations should start thinking about the team building collaboration?

How does that play into all of this as well?

Alex Schultz: I mean, there's a load of stuff in this.

Which teams do you wanna collaborate with?

Daniel Rowles: Let's talk about that because let's talk about that marketing engineering thing that you talk about a lot as well.

I think that's really important.

And I just think that the role of that in these kind of businesses that are successful is really important.

Alex Schultz: The engineering team.

When I was at eBay, this was one of the negatives.

So I said a lot of positive things about what was happening at eBay.

This is a negative on what we did.

We were in this place where we had a direct mail team, what they did was they extracted the data from the database, they transferred it to the marketing server at that time.

Then they loaded it into their marketing email engine or onsite merchandising engine, and then they trafficked it.

process would take 48 hours, something like that.

'cause the data would be processed overnight, like extraction, transfer and loading would take some time, and then you'd send out the emails the next day.

So it'd be two days.

Then eBay had a notifications team in engineering who obviously would send the, you've just been outbid emails, right?

Things like that, that were critical for using the product.

Why weren't they one team?

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: we in this place where if you had a brilliant marketing email, it would be able to be delivered by the massive infrastructure eBay had set up to send all of their notification emails?

Honestly, the reason was the teams just didn't collaborate.

The teams didn't kind of.

Get excited about each other.

So the marketing folks, and this was changing towards the time I left, which was 20 years ago, but the marketing folks didn't really value how important time is when you are doing database marketing and how critical it is to do something right at the moment the action has happened that you're triggering on.

the engineering teams, they didn't value the marketers, they didn't value the var marketing insights and the ideas and the the clever things that they had.

And so they just didn't work together and they built completely different email systems.

Which gave deliverability problems for marketing, which gave, you know, time lag, problems for marketing, conversion problems for marketing.

But on the other hand, the engineering teams had lower conversion rates than they would've had, despite the fact they had great deliverability and great timing because they didn't have great ideas.

So at Meta we built it differently.

I am, my friend Naomi runs the product and engineering teams.

I run the marketing and analytics teams.

We are very close friends.

We talk all the time.

Our teams are fully integrated, in fact exchange people between our teams and we operate as a single unit across engineering and marketing to do growth.

And I think that format has led to what people call product-led growth at this

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: And the companies that do that, I think do a lot better than the ones that use the old model.

Daniel Rowles: Love it.

And then how'd you, we won't go into all the teams, but how do you think comms fits in with this as well?

'cause that's always a bit of a challenging one,

Alex Schultz: Yeah, I mean, again, so much of this stuff boils down to interpersonal relationships.

Daniel Rowles: right?

Alex Schultz: You know, and I've advised a bunch of companies, I'm on a few

Daniel Rowles: Hmm.

Alex Schultz: Fundamentally it boils down to can the head of marketing get on with the head of comm?

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: so something that happened on our side is a lot of my teams wanted to do the social media for meta.

It makes sense, I get why they wanna do it, but Zuck does his social media through comms.

That's where he goes to, that's who he believes in.

And so I transferred the entire social media apparatus outta marketing.

It was kind of at that stage, it was like a third in comms, two thirds in marketing, and I just moved the whole thing over to comms proactively.

Daniel Rowles: Interesting.

Alex Schultz: No one even asked me for it, I just did it.

You know what?

That was really important for building a good relationship with the comms team because they had a vision that they were gonna do modern communications, and of course they would manage.

Meta has a Standing Press Corps, which is kind of unusual for a company.

But of course, they would manage the Press Corps.

They would work with our journalists, but they wanted to talk directly to our, you know, themselves.

And for them that mattered to do social media.

move ended up solidifying the relationship between our teams and made us way more collaborative than we would've been otherwise.

So taking these actions to actually like be a good partner is the number one thing to be able to work well with comms.

'cause comms is genuinely a fully people driven business.

They aren't doing massive scaled marketing.

It isn't loads of analytics,

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: it's people, it's relationships, it's communications.

So communicate well with them.

Be good partners.

Daniel Rowles: Brilliant.

All right, well let's move on to the subject at the moment.

And does AI sadly, or gladly, I dunno, either way, but how, how do you feel it's changing marketing?

How is it gonna change marketing?

And I, I was really interested in how you reflected that on the book.

So let's talk about that.

Alex Schultz: Yeah, I mean the, the, the quote that's doing the rounds at the moment that I really love AI's not gonna take your job in the near term.

Somebody else using AI is gonna take

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: Thing people don't understand about us is that we have been completely disrupted in six years.

Like six years ago.

Every single ad well, every single piece of content shown to engage people on Instagram and Facebook were connected.

You'd joined a group, you'd like a page, you'd followed someone on Instagram, you'd friended someone.

Everything was connected.

Now.

And we just spent a bunch of time testifying in court on this.

Now, the majority of the usage of Facebook and Instagram is unconnected content.

It's mostly these short form videos

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: you didn't follow.

And the only reason, the only reason we can do that is because of the modern AI systems allowing semantic understanding of content and also semantic understanding of.

User's intent at that moment.

Like if you come in and you're like, oh, I want cooking videos today.

You get a ton of cooking videos.

If you come in and you want, you know, comedy videos, you get a bunch of comedy videos and it's amazing how fast the systems adapt to your mindset on the day you visit the product.

So we've been totally disrupted.

We are a completely different company now than we were six years ago.

You layer in app tracking transparency from Apple, one of the more brilliant and cynical moves I've seen in the, in industry.

It is, it is only, it's only personalization if it comes from the Cupertino region of Silicon Valley.

Otherwise it's sparkling personalization, sparkling track tracking.

Yeah, so, so we've also had to model a bunch of conversions and get to the place where we're using AI very heavily to use less data to make decisions in the service.

And so those two things means both our.

Engagement side of our business and our ad side of our business have been utterly transformed by AI in six years, and they will be transformed again.

We are gonna see this.

And then over 10 years, 10 years ago, I would never use an automated Now all of my campaigns

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: are auto optimizing app install campaigns and similar.

clever creative thing I'm doing is the data.

Thinking about what data we're feeding through, how do we tag it, how do we send it through, how do we actually.

Optimize the flows, build the campaign structure, and so on and so forth.

Those changes aren't finished.

So the C, the industry is gonna be totally transformed in the next 10 years, in my mind, in three categories.

One, you're gonna do existing things more efficiently.

example there is, you know, you're not gonna create 47 variants of the banner ad yourself.

You're gonna chuck it into an ai, and the AI will produce them.

That will destroy jobs that bit is definitely gonna cause s work.

And that's where someone who uses AI will outsmart you.

So you've gotta be learning to use AI and it's within the capabilities today.

This isn't some future.

Oh my god, this is gonna happen.

This is today two.

We are gonna be in the place where things that were possible but weren't efficient suddenly get done.

the example I use there is we offer customer support now in the United States Chat support.

If you lose access to your account on Facebook and Instagram.

is enabled by ai.

You start by chatting with a chat bot.

It took something that was prohibitive to do to make it actually viable to do.

And we've always wanted to do it and now we can do it.

And that has created jobs 'cause there's still more people needed than zero to do that.

But the AI has meant it's less than the ridiculous number of people it would've been before.

And then the third category is things that were utterly impossible.

Before suddenly become possible.

And that's semantic understanding of

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Alex Schultz: based ranking like, like TikTok, short form video, YouTube shorts, Instagram, Facebook reels.

And so those three categories have come along and they are going to change marketing.

But marketing always changes.

Like 20 years ago, you made all your money from a creative agency.

40 years ago there was no internet marketing.

You know, 60 years ago, you don't just had soap operas come along.

80 years ago there wasn't TV.

A hundred years ago, there wasn't radio.

Every 20 years, marketing is completely changing itself, and that's awesome.

And we're really lucky to be in a field that's actually very good at changing itself.

So yeah, there's gonna be a lot of change.

I think it'll happen in those three categories.

Hopefully those examples give people structure to it.

And a person with AI will take your job.

AI is not gonna take your job in the next few years.

Daniel Rowles: I love it.

'cause all my students come to me in an absolute panic when I show them all the AI stuff in the first lecture and actually say, look, we're getting this stuff first.

We, we seem to be getting the tech way in advance of, in many other industries, and actually there is the opportunity there to engage with it.

The book's out in the 7th of October.

We'll put everything into the show notes you can link through and, and kind of get the book from there as well.

I just wanna get into one final thing to explain to people why I was showing you a paper airplane earlier on.

Do you wanna talk to people about that?

A little bit of background on what that was.

Little nice little nugget at the end.

Alex Schultz: Yeah, I mean the way my whole career started was geo Cities, for those of you who are

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Yeah.

Alex Schultz: remember

Daniel Rowles: I.

Alex Schultz: Yep.

before it was bought by Yahoo and I created a website with Formula One paper airplanes, fun science experiments.

'cause I was a nerd.

The paper airplane bit started to rank on alavita.

'cause one company linked to.

I then created using free net name who was a

Daniel Rowles: I remember well.

Alex Schultz: in the uk.

Yep.

I created my first paper airplanes.co uk and I created a website all about paper airplanes.

And for the next 20 years I had the number one paper airplanes site on Earth.

it made me actually a lot of money.

It made me

Daniel Rowles: Yeah, right.

Alex Schultz: to pay for all my accommodation at college my rowing training camps.

I ended up having YouTube videos with it, which have about 10 million views of me making paper airplanes,

Daniel Rowles: Yeah,

Alex Schultz: been updated in a decade, genuinely.

And it went really well.

Daniel Rowles: yeah, it's, it's a great example 'cause I went on there and the first thing I did was make the one that was the top and it flies better than any airplane I've ever made before.

So thank you for that.

If nothing else as well

Alex Schultz: very welcome.

Daniel Rowles: the, the last one as well.

And we can edit this out if you don't wanna talk about it, was that on your LinkedIn profile, you've got your grades for your degree in your MSC program.

And I thought this was amazing because a-level results have just come out.

There'll be lots of, lots of young people around the UK and around the world stressing about their exam results as well.

And as someone that teaches at Imperial College, you know, we've got some of the highest grades in the world like Oxford, Cambridge, all those kind of places.

Actually you put on their look, this was going on my life.

I got a tutu and actually, and I, I really like that transparency for the fact to say, look, actually this is what was going on, but this is where I'm now, so it's kind of irrelevant.

And I just thought that was a, given the time of where we are, I thought that was quite a nice thing.

So I thought that was quite a brave thing to put up your LinkedIn Pro, which I guess is, it doesn't really matter now, it's not that brave.

But at the time, I guess it's interesting

Alex Schultz: Yeah, no, I mean, look, I, I did well at undergrad.

I, to be honest with you, I really enjoyed myself at university.

I at high school I did, I worked very hard.

I was very nerdy, and then I came to university and I just, I really had a great time.

I got a decent grade.

I got two, one at undergrad.

Then when I hit my masters, I, I was coming out as gay and, and I got dumped by my boyfriend.

after I came out to my parents, and so like, it kind of felt the world was over and, and I, I totally mucked up my masters.

I got a tutu and everything's

Daniel Rowles: not sure that's totally messing up, if I'm honest.

I mean, you know, I've done a lot worse than some of the things that I've done, but you know.

Alex Schultz: That is fair.

Maybe that's, that's an unfair way to put it.

I did very also, I did very bad at theoretical.

I was very good at experimental, but my theoretical physics was terrible.

so I'm not, I'm not a brilliant theoretician.

I'm a good experimenter, and that's what, and majority of the grade comes from theory, minority comes from experiments.

So, you know, I went into the thing that was, was good for me, which was experimentation, and I

Daniel Rowles: Right.

And what I took from that is look at your career and look at where that experimentation took you, and that's what marketing is.

So I thought that was a, that was great.

So

Alex Schultz: look, one, one of the best people he's ever worked for me is this chap called Brian Hale, and he will have no problem with me saying this.

He's currently the head of growth at DoorDash.

Absolute genius, like really brilliant guy.

he didn't go to college.

It's on his LinkedIn too.

Like some of the best people who've worked for me didn't have the best traditional education or didn't even go to college.

I mean, Brian genuinely was my right hand for, I don't know, over a decade, and he's now the head of growth, chief growth officer at DoorDash.

Like, credentialism isn't that important?

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Love it.

Okay.

I think it's a beautiful point to end on.

So thank you for joining us, Alex.

I really appreciate your time.

I know you're a very, very busy man.

Everything will be in the show notes, target internet.com/podcast.

You can buy the book.

Please do.

It's phenomenal.

It's really, really worth, and you'll come back to it again and again and again and again, Alex, thank you so much for your time.

Alex Schultz: Thank you so much.

For more episodes, resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to target internet.com/podcast.