Meta CMO Alex Schultz on loosening content rules, marketing AI glasses & tech regulation

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] optimize campaigns. And it’s very effective.

Meta’s Q3 earnings report warned that AI infrastructure costs would likely spike in coming months – which is happening across the board. Do you anticipate that that will impact your marketing budget?

I don't think so. We’re already in a position where our revenue has roughly doubled since when I became CMO, and the marketing budget has shrunk. And I’m actually really, really proud of that. I’m proud of my teams because we have been efficient.

From a brand and a performance perspective, Meta’s in a better position now than it was four and a half years ago when I got the job. And if you look at our marketing spend per dollar of earnings, we’re one of the most efficient big tech companies out there.

I don’t think that the spend in AI is going to impact our marketing budgets, but I’m going to push for us to keep getting efficient because we’re doing great things with smaller budgets. And I’m really, really proud of that. And that’s core to who we are as a team.

On the topic of budgets, how are you thinking about investments across the funnel? Something I talked to a lot of CMOs about is the shape of the funnel. Is the funnel dead? Is performance coming closer to brand? How are you thinking about the funnel today?

Well, I love Byron Sharp’s and Jenni Romaniuk’s work… from the University of South Australia. They wrote How Brands Grow and all of those books and they rightly push on the funnel.

I’m a believer in the funnel. If you look at something like WhatsApp, we have top-of-funnel problems in the United States. We do. People aren’t aware that WhatsApp exists. And so, if you look at our work, we bias our media budget more towards top-of-the-funnel with WhatsApp and more towards awareness. Whereas, when you’re looking at something like Instagram or Facebook, people who don’t use Instagram or Facebook in the United States is not because they don’t know they exist. The shape of the funnel varies by products and by stage and lifecycle of that product. So we use it all the time. We look at it all the time. It really informs both what channels and how we use them. So, the funnel is alive and well, in my opinion.

There’s appropriate criticism of it, and there are good ways that people are thinking about how you can make it better. But it is a very effective tool for thinking about the right campaign to run at the right life stage for each product.

Beyond Meta’s flagship products, talk a little bit more about how you think about positioning Meta’s emerging tech, like the Orion glasses, Meta’s AR products, the Llama models and more.

The overarching strategy is to make it clear that we’re a technology company whose best days are ahead, because that really correlates with people seeing us as innovative.

And the hardware does better [in terms of helping] people seeing innovation. Atoms do better than bits. So when we talk about the [Ray-Ban AI] glasses, when we talk about the headsets, the inspiration that gives people the [sense that] that our best days are ahead is huge and actually in many ways more impactful than AI. [We’re combining] them with smart glasses… we’ve gone beyond smart glasses, which everyone still associates with Google Glass – and we’re now talking about AI glasses, which people associate with the Ray-Ban Metas. That change has enabled us to be seen as the leader in that category, together with our great partners Luxottica, and to be seen as very, very innovative. When we look across all those things that you just described holistically, our strategy is to be seen as a leading innovative tech company whose products you want to use because their best days are ahead and they’re going to enable you to use the most innovative technology.

The flagship is the eyeglasses. They’ve massively beaten our expectations. We’ve made so many more than we intended to make. We have so many more announcements this year around them. The software is improving all the time. because you can use the hardware and then the software just gets better over time as the AI gets better. They are really the crown jewels.

All signs point to continued growth in the creator economy and influencer marketing in the year ahead. Instagram and Facebook are big hubs for the creator economy. How are you helping brands and creators work more effectively together?

Some of it is [attributable to the fact that] we have really good partner teams that work directly with creators and brands, who help them as advisors, partners and salespeople.

The other thing is that we’re building tools. We have editing software that we’ve rolled out on Instagram recently. We have a really cool tool that’s going well on ads… where there are partner ads where someone can buy an ad from us with a creator. It will be clearly labeled as an ad, but they can have the creator actually produce the ad, and they can boost that as an ad. That’s really successful right now. We partner directly, we give advice, we help, we provide tools. Those tools can be organic tools like the editing tools or they can be paid tools like the partner ads tools that help both sides monetize and be successful. And we’ll continue to roll out suites of products like that over the coming year.

Over a million advertisers have already embraced Meta’s generative AI advertising tools. Tell us about that growth.

That tool works with creatives and marketers to get them to be able to leverage AI for their creative, which has been very successful. We’re going to launch more tools like that. What we’re finding is that it’s really helpful for people to be able to try more versions of a creative or take a piece of creative and edit it so that it will work in other scenarios and settings. And so we’re going to be building on those tools and launching more tools and improving those tools.

[In terms of] working with AI developers, we’re going to be focused on our open-source LLMs. We want to see developers in companies use Llama X… we want to see them use Llama in their products. We think it’s really good for things like when you want to have a completely on-premise solution – you can take Llama and run it any way you want to. You don’t have to run it in anyone’s cloud. It will run on anyone’s cloud. But it’s also open-source. You can just build your own model. You can take it and you can run it on-premise without any connection to the internet if you want. And that gives people a lot of control.

So when we work with developers, we’re going to be focused on the benefits of Llama.

I want to talk about privacy. The launch of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency regime a few years ago had a significant impact on Meta’s revenues. And while Google has hit the brakes on third-party cookie deprecation, signal loss on the open web is accelerating. How are you thinking about changes in the privacy landscape today?

I’ll always say Apple’s ATT frustrates me. It’s ‘tracking’ for all of us third parties, and there’s a big interstitial when people use third-party apps if they want to do tracking – whereas, for Apple, it’s ‘personalization’ and it’s buried in a settings menu. That shows a little bit of their cynicism with respect to privacy. Whenever ATT comes up, it is important to remember that. I don’t think it’s as principled as they lay it out to be.

When it comes to responding to it, generative AI has been really important – or, more importantly, large multimodal models have been important because they’ve enabled us to model a lot of the data and put ourselves in a position where we don’t need to use as much data to get results.

It sometimes feels like a cliché in these moments when people are like, ‘AI has always been part of our business,’ but going back to when we launched Newsfeed, we’ve been doing ranking and machine learning [for many years]. PyTorch, on which OpenAI trains, is one of our open-source things. That work has come out of the company, and that foundation has been incredible for us to recover from ATT and put us in a position where we can do data minimization and use less and less data but produce better and better results – both for consumers who prefer personalized ads substantially to unpersonalized ads and for advertisers, so they can get better return on ad spend.

So we’re going to keep leaning into AI. We’re going to do a lot more first-party stuff, like clicks and messaging ads, like lead gen ads, like the purchase shop ads where you can buy [within] our products. Those are a meaningful percentage of our revenue now, those three products. [There’s] more to come, and that kind of stuff will enable us to have first-party data. So, no worries about third-party data there. The combination of using AI to model to get better return on ad spend and give users a better experiences with personalized advertising – and using third-party conversion experiences so that there’s no third-party data involved at all – are megatrends that we’re doing, that TikTok is doing, that others are doing. [That trend] is going to be really positive for privacy and positive for great user experiences.

Does Meta have a position on whether we can expect to see federal privacy regulation in this country? Europe is ahead in terms of privacy and tech regulation, but Mark Zuckerberg has been involved in a number of congressional hearings and has potentially signaled some openness to the idea of regulation.

We certainly have some openness. Federal regulatory regimes are generally better for us than when there’s a regulatory regime [at the state level].

It’s important to understand what’s going on in Europe, though. I’m British, my dad’s German. I love the EU, but, like, [the EU Commission’s] von der Leyen is the current president. And Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, created a report at her request, to look at why Europe has not [kept pace with the US economically]. 20 years ago, Europe and the US had the same sized economy. Today, Europe is [about] a third smaller.

Why has that happened? The report says, ‘Europe has overregulated.’ Through protectionism and regulation… on technology – which is the biggest growth sector – Europe has ended up with a smaller economy.

Growth matters for better living standards. And the US is benefiting from growth.

It would be good for the US to have federal privacy legislation. We’ve said that before. It’s better for us than having state-by-state legislation, and we think that standard would be great. But the US needs to recall [that] Europe may be ahead [in terms of regulation], but it’s not happy with the outcomes. It’s in this place where the current president [of the EU Commission and Mario Draghi], the former head of the European Central Bank, say they have regulated themselves into a position with lower growth – where they’ve lost their footing on the global stage versus America.

America shouldn’t hurt itself.

In your view, what are one or two overhyped tech trends?

I think AI is just, all the time, all anyone ever talks about. I really believe in the Gartner Hype Cycle. The modification from those [Y Combinator] folks like Paul Graham with the wiggles of false hope [are overblown]. AI is a bit overhyped at the moment. But it is going to be really important in the long term. It’s like, the most exciting thing and it’s the most overhyped [thing].

My degree, believe it or not, was in semiconductor and quantum physics, weirdly, and I ended up in this route. That’s how I came in – by the data route. And I paid for college doing online marketing, so that that was how I got both [experiences].

And I think quantum is so exciting because it’s made so much progress since I was at university – and yet it is way further off than the current hype about it says. It’s really amazing what they’ve done [in quantum physics] – I never thought we’d get this far in 20 years. But at the same time, it’s much further off than much of the hype.

Can you share one prediction for how you think that marketing and advertising will evolve in the coming 12 to 18 months?

We’re going to focus more on performance again, more on results. Marketing will get further away from some of the performative stuff that we do as an industry and more towards remembering that we only get our budgets because we sell things for companies. That’s really important. That’s something I’vee always felt very deeply in my role – it’s why I’m so proud of the fact my team’s become more efficient in the last four years – and the results it’s getting for the company.

I believe there will be a pushback on a lot of the noise out of marketing and more of a push towards performance results and selling, because that is what gives us the right to be engaged in other things. I personally think we’ve gotten a little bit farther away from that as an industry over the last 10 years.

Stream the full conversation here.