October 7, 2025 • 35 mins
In this special episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, Daniel Rowles sits down with Alex Schultz, Meta’s Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Analytics, to unpack the future of digital marketing, and why the fundamentals still matter more than ever. Alex shares lessons from his remarkable journey: from running the world’s top paper airplane website to leading growth at Meta, managing multi-billion dollar ad campaigns, and now authoring the industry-defining book Click Here. With high-profile endorsements from Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Daniel Ek, and Matthew Vaughn, the book has already gettimg rave reviews, and Daniel is putting it straight onto the reading list for his students at Imperial College. Together, Daniel and Alex dig into the core principles of great marketing: how to set meaningful goals, measure true impact, build high-performance teams, and embrace AI without losing your strategic edge. In This Episode: Why Alex wrote Click Here and why the industry desperately needed a book that gets back to fundamentals, marketing measurement, and pride in the profession. The power of incrementality: How to run meaningful tests, avoid vanity metrics, and prove real value to your CEO and CFO. Why goals are not the same as metrics and how mixing them up can derail your marketing efforts. The importance of awareness: Why most businesses fail because people simply don’t know they exist. Marketing mix matters: How one newspaper mention outperformed every digital channel—and why the basics still beat the buzz. Mediocre marketing + great conversion = success: Why broken funnels kill campaigns, no matter how brilliant your creative is. How Meta builds defensible growth : What sets their marketing apart, from deep integration with product and engineering, to AI-powered insights. AI’s real impact on marketing jobs: A breakdown of the three kinds of disruption AI will bring, and why the marketers who embrace it will thrive. Paper planes, transparency, and unexpected beginnings: Hear how Alex’s nerdy hobby turned into a viral website, and why he publicly shares his university grades to inspire others. Key Takeaways: Get back to basics: Clear goals, good data, and fundamental models (like the funnel) still win. Measure what matters: Metrics are not goals - incrementality is everything. Focus on defensibility and scale in your marketing channels, don’t waste time on things that can’t grow. AI won’t replace marketers - marketers who use AI will replace those who don’t. Be transparent and human: Success doesn’t require perfection, it requires clarity, curiosity, and continuous learning. 📥 Access the show notes, tools, and links at: 📩 Join the free newsletter for access to monthly live sessions:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Daniel Rowles (00:00):
Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought
(00:02):
to you by Target internet.com.
And in this episode we have aninterview with the Chief Marketing
Officer of Meta, Alex Schultz.
So we get at least 20 emails aday suggesting guests for the
podcast, some of whom are fantastic.
(00:23):
You would've heardthem, some not so great.
But lots of 'em are authors who areapproaching the launch date of a book.
I wanna share some of their insights.
And wherever we can, we take a lookat the book, see if we think they
can actually provide some value.
And one of the first things you end updoing is looking at the book cover and
you have a quick look at recommendations.
And as, as an author myself, I knowit could be really hard to get these
(00:44):
recommendations 'cause you've onlyjust finished the book and you need
someone to read it urgently so theycan give you a quote so you can
kind of hit your publishing deadlineand therefore you end up asking
your close colleagues and friends.
Well, quite often for me that mightbe me asking Kieran or something
like, well, this particular author.
Who did he ask?
Well, he's got quotes from MarkZuckerberg, a Facebook fame, Sam
(01:04):
Altman from OpenAI, and then evenMatthew 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 CMOof Meta and VP of their analytics,
and he's all around an amazing guy.
You'll, you'll hear more from me in theinterview as well, but he's written what
(01:26):
I think is gonna become the definitivebook about digital marketing measurement
and the book's called Click Here.
There's loads of useful insights in here.
It was a really fun interviewa very open interview as well.
So sit back and enjoy the interviewwith Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta.
Okay, I am here with Alex.
(01:47):
Alex, tell us a little bit about thebook and why you decided to write it.
And I, I should say before we getgoing as well, this book is epic.
I mean, I, I, we, we get a lotof invites to speak to authors,
and this is the first one.
I'm actually gonna put onto a coursetext for my students at Imperial
College 'cause listeners will knowthat I'm senior lecturer there.
So, no one else also has Sam Altman,mark Zuckerberg, Daniel EK from Spotify,
(02:12):
and my favorite Matthew Vaughan givingrecommendations to the book as well.
So I have to say congratulations.
So congratulations to the book.
Tell us what it's about and tellus why you decide to write it.
Alex Schultz (02:20):
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 thinklike 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 (02:38):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (02:38):
and I keep being asked for a book on digital marketing
that kind of tells you, ev a highlevel 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 (02:50):
Yeah.
Right.
Alex Schultz (02:51):
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 fromone of their, one of their imprints.
And so went for it and wentfor the gap in the market.
'cause I want a book I can give to people.
So that's the easy answer.
Daniel Rowles (03:09):
Nice.
Alex Schultz (03:10):
The less easy answer is.
really believe in what we do andthere are so many people pooping
on marketing in general, right?
Like marketing in general.
You're trying to convince people tobuy things they don't want with money.
They don't have to quote fight club andthe digital marketing realm in particular.
You've got surveillance capital,you've got everyone kind
Daniel Rowles (03:31):
Right.
Alex Schultz (03:31):
on about this, you know, and we had, we adhere to
all laws that are put out there.
But we get all the laws putin that are not helping it.
And, and bluntly, I just thinkthey're stopping people from getting
personalized ads that make their livesbetter, give them products for free
and connect them to products thatthey actually like by showing them
slightly more relevant ads for trainers.
On the other side, create business growthso people are employed so businesses
(03:54):
can grow, so the economy can grow.
So there can be taxes, which fundsso much of what we have, as you
know, institutions in the uk.
And so I also wanted to just belike, online marketing is good.
It grows the economy and I'mproud of it, and someone needs
to say something positive.
So I wanted to say something positive.
Daniel Rowles (04:12):
Love it.
I mean, on the, on that firstpoint 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 knowwhat those fundamentals are.
And I think this book is beautifulat going through and just giving
that kind of right mindset andgoing through and saying, look,
this is, need to think about it.
(04:32):
Get back to those real corekind of pieces as well.
I also think that thing of being proudof digital marketing is a really key one.
If you look at how, the ease oflaunching new businesses now.
My master's students come intome and are kind of terrified
on two fronts at the moment.
One constant horror stories, digital'sbad, you know, all this kind of stuff.
There's that side of it, but there'salso, they're terrified 'cause of
ai and we'll get into that later on.
(04:52):
And I keep saying to them, look, andit's a quote that came from you as
well, was that the tools changed, butactually the fundamentals stayed the same.
And I thought that was areally interesting, I picked
out from the book as well, so.
Let, let's get into some key areasin the book as well, and I think this
is a lovely one to start with, thatdifference between goals and metrics
Alex Schultz (05:07):
Hmm.
Daniel Rowles (05:08):
and, and what that means to people.
'cause this is, thisis kind of fundamental.
Alex Schultz (05:12):
Yeah, I mean the back to basics thing, when I was reading
my audio book, which I know you'vegone through that torture as well,
Daniel Rowles (05:18):
Exactly
Alex Schultz (05:18):
I was just going, oh my gosh, I need to go and spend
time with my team and tell themto do these things because like,
Daniel Rowles (05:23):
right.
Alex Schultz (05:24):
basics that you just need to do,
Daniel Rowles (05:25):
I.
Alex Schultz (05:26):
and one of the very basic things is.
Actually be super clear what your goal isand realize that a metric is not a goal.
so, you know, our historic goalwas connect the world online.
Like people know that through Facebook,our metric was monthly active users.
And the thing is, a metric can be gamedand so many people like turn a metric
(05:46):
into a goal and then the metric doesn'tactually 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 andyou visit the site for 10 seconds, I
really connected the world online ordid I just get a ten second session?
we set the goal, connect the world online.
(06:08):
then have the metric monthlyactive 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 arenot 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, wherewe had, we wanted the, for the
(06:28):
acquisition team, the North Starwas, get everyone to use eBay, right?
I mean, pretty simple.
The goal we used to set wasconfirmed registered users.
But the thing is, you'd get affiliates outthere, incentive affiliates, incentivizing
people to sign up for eBay and confirm.
You get search affiliates sendingpeople to the registration
(06:49):
page and not the search landing
Daniel Rowles (06:51):
Right.
Alex Schultz (06:52):
which got registrations and confirmations, but none
of those users activated andbecame long-term active users.
We changed the metric to A CIU.
We kept the goal, get everyoneto use eBay, which is activated,
confirmed, registered users.
those incentive affiliatesbasically went away and the search
affiliates changed their landingpage to be the search results page.
'cause that's what gotsomeone to bid by Activate.
(07:14):
So.
The goal and the metric have to beseparate because you create metrics
that never perfectly describe the goal.
Daniel Rowles (07:24):
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 hadthe same effect on me as well.
Like, we preach this stuff allthe 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 anice thing 'cause marketing is
inherently challenging, right?
Because I think there'sthat whole piece that.
(07:46):
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 (07:52):
Yes,
Daniel Rowles (07:52):
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 thingthat 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 meanin practice for people?
Alex Schultz (08:04):
Yeah.
I mean the, the.
Fundamentally, the thing for me isI 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 howI think about the world.
And I think too many marketers, weOgilvy, has the useful idiot in his
(08:24):
book of the person who know, doesn'tget 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 youshould just do testing and
depending on the channel, right?
Search doesn't let you do lift studiesand conversion tracking in that way.
So search, you have todo match to market tests.
(08:46):
You have to do pre-post tests, like that'skind of what you have to do with search.
Social, most of the social companies allowyou to do holdouts 'cause all their users
are logged in, they've got user IDs andso we offer to lift studies, but all the
other guys offer various different things.
there you should leverage those and youshould actually see what is the uplift.
So it's, yeah, it's really simple.
It's like do a test.
(09:07):
See if you got more results in thetest group than the control group.
And that dates right back toClaude c Hopkins a hundred years
with scientific advertising.
This is not a new principle in marketing.
Daniel Rowles (09:20):
I think it's interesting because the more and more talk there
is about a no click environment, andthere'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 (09:33):
I mean the, the fraud is one example.
Fraud and waste.
So.
From a fraud perspective, the worstexamples I saw back in my day at eBay.
Well, actually Uber's areally good example, right?
So, Kevin Frisch was head ofmarketing at Uber, and they ended
up suing their banner agency.
Daniel Rowles (09:51):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (09:52):
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 theyfound it which funnily enough,
we found something similar.
The way they found it was their adswere showing up on the wrong sites.
So they were trying to avoid controversy.
They weren't trying to be onBreitbart at the time, and their
ads kept showing up on Breitbart.
(10:12):
And what was actually happening wasthat their, either a subcontractor
or their agency, or their agencywas putting ads out in places where
they weren't supposed to be put outso they could get extra impressions.
The worst thing that was happening is theywere putting them out below the fold and
getting no results and just scatteringcookies and by scattering cookies
saying that they were driving results.
And so when he turned it off, hesaw no drop in top line growth.
(10:37):
I recently did a similar experimentin India where I turned off all
of our marketing for Facebook, theapp in India, during the period
I turned it off, Facebook shrank.
It had a top line impact on Facebookoverall to turn off all of our marketing.
That's the difference is like if aUber at that stage they could turn off
the advertising and nothing changed.
(10:58):
And in India we turned off theadvertising and Facebook shrank.
That tells you the differencebetween actually having incremental
impact and not That's all you need.
That's like what you need for your job.
But actually that matters forfinance, that matters for the
CEO that matters for the board.
Like that.
India result's only a couple ofyears old and it's a legendary
result inside the company.
Every time I go to the board, theCEO, every time I go to the CFO, I'm
(11:19):
able to point to that and say, I'mnot lying to you when I say I drive
top line results for the company.
Daniel Rowles (11:25):
Right.
And I think that that proof ofconcept is actually said, let's do it.
Let's do an experiment of some type toactually prove this is working and let's
scale from that kind of point of view.
I mean, there's a couple of quotesI'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, youknow, there's, there is no funnel.
There is, and I've always beena big advocate of a funnel is a
great way of thinking about things.
Are enough relevant people, even awareof your product or company exists.
(11:47):
And I'll tell you why.
I've just pulled this one out.
We did a load of analysis and actuallyupon doing it, we worked out that
about, you know, it was only a verysmall percentage of people that got
to our website were actually gettingto our sales pages, but when they
weren't getting there, they wereconverting it at about 12, 15%.
So, oh, the sales page is amazing.
The thing is, is there's not enoughpeople getting here in the first
place, and without taking thatstat, we wouldn't have got there.
(12:08):
So that, that marketing funnelpiece came out quite a lot.
And do you mind just talkingto us about that a little bit?
Alex Schultz (12:13):
Yeah, I mean.
First and foremost, this isanother one of those basics.
I'm going back to what you saidat the beginning, which is a core
principle for me of the book.
Like, principles are timeless.
Channels change.
So the marketing funnel has beenaround 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.
(12:34):
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 havethis story in the book.
This is an incremental one.
Blake Ross, the guy who foundedFirefox, came to work for Facebook.
He is a genius.
I love him.
(12:55):
Really amazing guy, and also made me feelvery welcome at the company as a gay man.
So there's a, an element of thatthat makes him very special too.
He was tasked with growing the contactimporters and as a good engineer.
What he did was he ranked the contactimporters 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'mgonna put a OL and Earth link first.
(13:17):
If you're a younger person,I'll put Gmail first.
And he did all of this andhe got some nice uplift.
And then I came along and I put alink on the homepage of Facebook
and the thing went up tenfold.
And he wrote, he literally wrotea 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'mholding and you don't have a video, but
(13:40):
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 (13:49):
right.
Alex Schultz (13:50):
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 saleswent up a third in the week following
the Super Bowl and stayed up becausepeople just didn't know they exist.
Like awareness is a thing
Daniel Rowles (14:07):
Yeah.
Right.
Alex Schultz (14:07):
do it.
Daniel Rowles (14:09):
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 morningand 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 itsays, well, search has gone up.
Social media's gone up.
Email's gone up, direct's gone upand like, oh, this is really strange.
And then they go, oh, there were mentionedin the Times, newspaper, two paragraphs.
And it just, and that's the thing.
(14:29):
It's like you, yeah,let's take a step back.
We're digital marketers, butactually this is a marketing mix.
Right?
So I think that was.
Alex Schultz (14:34):
percent.
Daniel Rowles (14:34):
That was great insight.
I, I love this other one as well.
Mediocre marketing with a greatconversion flow is way better than
brilliant marketing with a broken one.
Talk to us about that.
Alex Schultz (14:43):
The whole way through.
And then, then you've gotta say witha great product or a bad product,
that's the next level down.
Look, I mean, a, a classic exampleof this was the brilliant Coinbase
ad that they did in the Super Bowl.
They did a, they did this ad, which wasjust a QR code bouncing around the screen.
Now I am slightly upset about this 'cause.
I wanted to put a QR code in thatand wasn't allowed to another time.
(15:04):
But, so, you know, I, I, I dunno, I, theygot a, I dunno how they got it done, but
they got it done and that's brilliant.
And they drive so much top of funnelto the site and the site crashed and
Daniel Rowles (15:13):
Right,
Alex Schultz (15:14):
nobody could convert.
The conversion funnel was
Daniel Rowles (15:16):
right,
Alex Schultz (15:17):
it really does matter that the, that the, the basics work,
the flow actually like, takes youthrough the flow and doesn't block you.
There are so many, like when Istarted at Facebook, our like
signup form was five pages long.
'Cause we got you to fill outyour profile in the signup form.
We reduced it to fivefields on the homepage.
Guess what?
All the numbers went up.
So, so yeah, you put the wrongconversion funnel in front of someone.
(15:39):
It doesn't matter how good yourmarketing is, people will not get
through that conversion funnel.
You have a bad product.
doesn't matter how good yourconversion funnel on your marketing is.
We do not make up for,for that with marketing.
Daniel Rowles (15:52):
Let's move on Flex.
There's another quote, and Ithink there's two pieces to it.
So I'll read you the whole quote andthen I'll just go to the two bits.
It says, first of all, channels, pickchannels 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 firstbit, pitch channels by scale,
defensibility and capabilities.
(16:13):
Can you just talk to us about thatfor our audience a little bit.
Alex Schultz (16:15):
Yeah, so I think the first one's pretty obvious.
Which is, what are thescale of results you can get
Daniel Rowles (16:21):
Mm.
Alex Schultz (16:22):
channel?
If you are absolutely brilliant at buyingads 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 (16:33):
Yeah, I, I, so we, we'll get to this in a moment, but
there's some history of this, butI, 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 (16:42):
okay.
Daniel Rowles (16:43):
target internet com slash podcast.
Let's come back to it.
I interrupted you.
Please go ahead.
Alex Schultz (16:46):
good.
That's great.
That looks like the nagar toMacker lock or the Nicks plane.
Daniel Rowles (16:50):
It was Nick's plane.
That's the one well done.
Alex Schultz (16:52):
So yeah, so, so you can buy it on like some niche website and
that's awesome, but it's gonna limityour maximum scale you can achieve.
So you need to just have somethingbig enough you buy on that.
If you succeeded it, it'll matter.
I, I, I think one of the things I get alot is a statistically significant result
that isn't actually significant for the
So you need scale, the scale piece Ithink is actually like, like really,
(17:13):
really interesting and, and, but easy,the defensibility piece is fascinating.
So when I started doing advertisergrowth for Facebook, we copied all the
keywords that Google used to acquireadvertisers for themselves, for our
purchases on Google, is awesome.
It shows how non-defense it is sometimesto have just a bunch of keywords you
(17:37):
buy because someone can go and scrapeGoogle or buy it from a third party
and basically build a keyword listand immediately compete with you.
When I was buying on Facebook, what Idid was I, we actually created custom
audiences, the original custom audiences,Danny Ferrante in the core data science
Daniel Rowles (17:54):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (17:55):
at the company.
He built this tool where wecould take user IDs of people
who'd entered the checkout flowfor ads or people who had pages.
And we were able to do these reallyclever 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.
(18:15):
it put us in a place where when we wanted
our advertise, I mean, you look at thenumbers we put out, we have well over
10 million monthly active advertisers.
Nobody else is puttingout any similar numbers.
We have a superpower in dealing withSMBs, and a ton of that is our acquisition
channels, whether buying our own adsor in product merchandising, which
obviously no one else can put a linkin the Facebook page asking a Facebook
(18:38):
user or a link in the Instagram appasking an Instagram business to buy an
ad. Those things have driven us to beable to have that huge number of active
advertisers who are all small businesses.
They're completely defensiblechannels that nobody else can get
access to, which puts us in the lead.
So scale and defensibilityare really, really important.
Daniel Rowles (18:58):
And then the last piece of that was capabilities, and I think
that's just, you know, it is leaningintro capabilities as well, right.
Alex Schultz (19:03):
Absolutely.
Like superpowers for us.
targeting superpowers for us,like in product conversion.
You know, Harry Stebbings hasthis concept of channel market
fit that he talks about for
Daniel Rowles (19:15):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (19:15):
And I really think it's true.
There is a channel market fit.
You have a channel that isthe right channel for you.
Ideally it's defensible, but whateverhappens, it has to have scale and it
has to lean into your capabilitiesif you can make it defensible, too.
Killer.
Daniel Rowles (19:30):
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 (19:37):
Yeah.
I mean, this one is an old eBay thing.
I know I
Daniel Rowles (19:40):
Hmm.
Alex Schultz (19:40):
eBay, but it was an amazing, an amazing teaching ground for me.
Enrich.
In southwest London.
Daniel Rowles (19:46):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (19:47):
I was based at at eBay.
yeah.
So if you're thinking aboutincrementality and return on
investment, I think the thing thatyou need to think about is marginal
incremental returns if you can do it.
returns are so obvious.
feel embarrassed on a podcast likethis saying it, but it's that the
(20:08):
last a hundred dollars you spend
Daniel Rowles (20:10):
Right.
Alex Schultz (20:10):
you a lot less money than the first a hundred dollars
you spend if you're being logical.
Online auctions, so meta, butSnapchat, YouTube, Google, all of
the places you can buy online areauctions, second price auctions.
They act very much like perfecteconomic systems, which is really
cool and really interesting.
And that means you get thesediminishing return curves,
(20:32):
which starts with zero zero.
You spend $0, you get zero, and then youget 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 slopeof the curve at the spend that you have
Daniel Rowles (20:48):
Right.
Alex Schultz (20:49):
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 negativebefore the average goes negative,
Daniel Rowles (21:00):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (21:01):
And if you allocate between channels based on the marginal return
being the same across every channel.
You'll actually find that you massivelymove up ROI, just by budget allocation.
within channels, you can subdivide them.
So you can have clusters of users and lookat the marginal return for, say British
users versus French users, for example.
And then you can optimize for thesame marginal return between each
(21:24):
user cluster or keyword cluster,whichever one you're working at.
So, so yeah, marginal returns.
And if you can get reallyclever, you wanna look at
marginal incremental returns.
pretty hard to do even atthe scale we operate at.
So I currently separateincrementality and marginality,
but that's the way we look at it.
Daniel Rowles (21:41):
Love it.
I think that's, that's missed so much.
So let's talk about the capabilitiesto do these things then.
So how do you think that marketingorganizations should start thinking
about the team building collaboration?
How does that play intoall of this as well?
Alex Schultz (21:53):
I mean, there's a load of stuff in this.
Which teams do you wanna collaborate with?
Daniel Rowles (21:56):
Let's talk about that because let's talk about
that marketing engineering thingthat you talk about a lot as well.
I think that's really important.
And I just think that the role ofthat in these kind of businesses that
are successful is really important.
Alex Schultz (22:06):
The engineering team.
When I was at eBay, thiswas one of the negatives.
So I said a lot of positive thingsabout what was happening at eBay.
This is a negative on what we did.
We were in this place where we hada direct mail team, what they did
was they extracted the data fromthe database, they transferred it to
the marketing server at that time.
Then they loaded it into their marketingemail engine or onsite merchandising
(22:27):
engine, and then they trafficked it.
process would take 48hours, something like that.
'cause the data would be processedovernight, like extraction, transfer and
loading would take some time, and thenyou'd send out the emails the next day.
So it'd be two days.
Then eBay had a notifications team inengineering who obviously would send the,
you've just been outbid emails, right?
Things like that, that werecritical for using the product.
(22:49):
Why weren't they one team?
Daniel Rowles (22:51):
Right.
Alex Schultz (22:51):
we in this place where if you had a brilliant marketing email,
it would be able to be delivered by themassive infrastructure eBay had set up
to send all of their notification emails?
Honestly, the reason was theteams just didn't collaborate.
The teams didn't kind of.
Get excited about each other.
So the marketing folks, and this waschanging towards the time I left, which
(23:12):
was 20 years ago, but the marketingfolks didn't really value how important
time is when you are doing databasemarketing and how critical it is to do
something right at the moment the actionhas happened that you're triggering on.
the engineering teams, they didn't valuethe marketers, they didn't value the
var marketing insights and the ideasand the the clever things that they had.
And so they just didn't worktogether and they built completely
(23:34):
different email systems.
Which gave deliverability problemsfor marketing, which gave, you know,
time lag, problems for marketing,conversion problems for marketing.
But on the other hand, the engineeringteams had lower conversion rates than
they would've had, despite the fact theyhad 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 theproduct and engineering teams.
(23:56):
I run the marketing and analytics teams.
We are very close friends.
We talk all the time.
Our teams are fully integrated, infact exchange people between our teams
and we operate as a single unit acrossengineering and marketing to do growth.
And I think that format has led to whatpeople call product-led growth at this
Daniel Rowles (24:13):
Right.
Alex Schultz (24:14):
And the companies that do that, I think do a lot better
than the ones that use the old model.
Daniel Rowles (24:18):
Love it.
And then how'd you, we won't go intoall the teams, but how do you think
comms fits in with this as well?
'cause that's always abit of a challenging one,
Alex Schultz (24:25):
Yeah, I mean, again, so much of this stuff boils down
to interpersonal relationships.
Daniel Rowles (24:30):
right?
Alex Schultz (24:31):
You know, and I've advised a bunch of companies, I'm on a few
Daniel Rowles (24:33):
Hmm.
Alex Schultz (24:34):
Fundamentally it boils down to can the head of marketing
get on with the head of comm?
Daniel Rowles (24:37):
Right.
Alex Schultz (24:38):
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 theywanna 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 socialmedia apparatus outta marketing.
It was kind of at that stage, it waslike a third in comms, two thirds
(24:59):
in marketing, and I just moved thewhole thing over to comms proactively.
Daniel Rowles (25:02):
Interesting.
Alex Schultz (25:02):
No one even asked me for it, I just did it.
You know what?
That was really important for buildinga good relationship with the comms team
because they had a vision that theywere gonna do modern communications,
and of course they would manage.
Meta has a Standing Press Corps, whichis kind of unusual for a company.
But of course, they wouldmanage the Press Corps.
They would work with our journalists,but they wanted to talk directly
to our, you know, themselves.
(25:26):
And for them that matteredto do social media.
move ended up solidifying therelationship between our teams
and made us way more collaborativethan we would've been otherwise.
So taking these actions to actuallylike be a good partner is the number one
thing to be able to work well with comms.
'cause comms is genuinely afully people driven business.
They aren't doingmassive scaled marketing.
(25:48):
It isn't loads of analytics,
Daniel Rowles (25:50):
Right.
Alex Schultz (25:50):
it's people, it's relationships, it's communications.
So communicate well with them.
Be good partners.
Daniel Rowles (25:56):
Brilliant.
All right, well let's move onto the subject at the moment.
And does AI sadly, or gladly, Idunno, either way, but how, how do
you feel it's changing marketing?
How is it gonna change marketing?
And I, I was really interested inhow you reflected that on the book.
So let's talk about that.
Alex Schultz (26:10):
Yeah, I mean the, the, the quote that's doing the rounds at
the moment that I really love AI's notgonna take your job in the near term.
Somebody else using AI is gonna take
Daniel Rowles (26:20):
Right.
Alex Schultz (26:20):
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 pieceof content shown to engage people on
Instagram and Facebook were connected.
You'd joined a group, you'd likea page, you'd followed someone on
(26:40):
Instagram, you'd friended someone.
Everything was connected.
Now.
And we just spent a bunch oftime testifying in court on this.
Now, the majority of the usage of Facebookand Instagram is unconnected content.
It's mostly these short form videos
Daniel Rowles (26:56):
Right.
Alex Schultz (26:57):
you didn't follow.
And the only reason, the onlyreason we can do that is because
of the modern AI systems allowingsemantic 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, youknow, comedy videos, you get a bunch
of comedy videos and it's amazing howfast the systems adapt to your mindset
(27:20):
on the day you visit the product.
So we've been totally disrupted.
We are a completely different companynow than we were six years ago.
You layer in app trackingtransparency from Apple, one of the
more brilliant and cynical movesI've seen in the, in industry.
It is, it is only, it's onlypersonalization if it comes from the
Cupertino region of Silicon Valley.
(27:40):
Otherwise it's sparkling personalization,sparkling track tracking.
Yeah, so, so we've also had tomodel a bunch of conversions and
get to the place where we're usingAI 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 andour ad side of our business have been
utterly transformed by AI in six years,and they will be transformed again.
(28:05):
We are gonna see this.
And then over 10 years, 10years ago, I would never use an
automated Now all of my campaigns
Daniel Rowles (28:15):
Right.
Alex Schultz (28:15):
are auto optimizing app install campaigns and similar.
clever creative thingI'm doing is the data.
Thinking about what data we're feedingthrough, how do we tag it, how do we
send it through, how do we actually.
Optimize the flows, build the campaignstructure, and so on and so forth.
Those changes aren't finished.
So the C, the industry is gonna betotally transformed in the next 10
years, in my mind, in three categories.
(28:38):
One, you're gonna do existingthings more efficiently.
example there is, you know, you'renot gonna create 47 variants
of the banner ad yourself.
You're gonna chuck it into anai, and the AI will produce them.
That will destroy jobs thatbit is definitely gonna cause
s work.
And that's where someone whouses AI will outsmart you.
So you've gotta be learning to use AIand it's within the capabilities today.
(29:01):
This isn't some future.
Oh my god, this is gonna happen.
This is today two.
We are gonna be in the place wherethings that were possible but
weren't efficient suddenly get done.
the example I use there is weoffer customer support now in
the United States Chat support.
If you lose access to youraccount on Facebook and Instagram.
is enabled by ai.
(29:22):
You start by chatting with a chat bot.
It took something that was prohibitiveto do to make it actually viable to do.
And we've always wanted todo 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 lessthan the ridiculous number of
people it would've been before.
And then the third category isthings that were utterly impossible.
(29:46):
Before suddenly become possible.
And that's semantic understanding of
Daniel Rowles (29:50):
Right.
Alex Schultz (29:50):
based ranking like, like TikTok, short form video, YouTube
shorts, Instagram, Facebook reels.
And so those three categorieshave come along and they are
going to change marketing.
But marketing always changes.
Like 20 years ago, you made allyour money from a creative agency.
40 years ago there wasno internet marketing.
You know, 60 years ago, you don'tjust had soap operas come along.
(30:11):
80 years ago there wasn't TV.
A hundred years ago, there wasn't radio.
Every 20 years, marketing is completelychanging itself, and that's awesome.
And we're really lucky to bein 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 inthose three categories.
Hopefully those examplesgive people structure to it.
And a person with AI will take your job.
(30:31):
AI is not gonna take yourjob in the next few years.
Daniel Rowles (30:34):
I love it.
'cause all my students come to me in anabsolute panic when I show them all the
AI stuff in the first lecture and actuallysay, look, we're getting this stuff first.
We, we seem to be getting the techway in advance of, in many other
industries, and actually there is theopportunity there to engage with it.
The book's out in the 7th of October.
We'll put everything into the shownotes you can link through and, and
kind of get the book from there as well.
I just wanna get into one final thingto explain to people why I was showing
(30:55):
you a paper airplane earlier on.
Do you wanna talk to people about that?
A little bit of backgroundon what that was.
Little nice little nugget at the end.
Alex Schultz (31:00):
Yeah, I mean the way my whole career started was geo
Cities, for those of you who are
Daniel Rowles (31:05):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (31:05):
remember
Daniel Rowles (31:06):
I.
Alex Schultz (31:06):
Yep.
before it was bought by Yahoo and Icreated a website with Formula One paper
airplanes, fun science experiments.
'cause I was a nerd.
The paper airplane bitstarted to rank on alavita.
'cause one company linked to.
I then created usingfree net name who was a
Daniel Rowles (31:24):
I remember well.
Alex Schultz (31:25):
in the uk.
Yep.
I created my first paperairplanes.co uk and I created a
website all about paper airplanes.
And for the next 20 years I had thenumber one paper airplanes site on Earth.
it made me actually a lot of money.
It made me
Daniel Rowles (31:41):
Yeah, right.
Alex Schultz (31:41):
to pay for all my accommodation at college
my rowing training camps.
I ended up having YouTube videoswith it, which have about 10 million
views of me making paper airplanes,
Daniel Rowles (31:53):
Yeah,
Alex Schultz (31:53):
been updated in a decade, genuinely.
And it went really well.
Daniel Rowles (31:58):
yeah, it's, it's a great example 'cause I went on there and the
first thing I did was make the one thatwas 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 (32:06):
very welcome.
Daniel Rowles (32:06):
the, the last one as well.
And we can edit this out if you don'twanna talk about it, was that on your
LinkedIn profile, you've got your gradesfor your degree in your MSC program.
And I thought this was amazing becausea-level results have just come out.
There'll be lots of, lots ofyoung people around the UK and
around the world stressing abouttheir exam results as well.
And as someone that teaches at ImperialCollege, you know, we've got some of the
(32:29):
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, Ireally like that transparency for the
fact to say, look, actually this iswhat 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 bravething to put up your LinkedIn Pro,
which I guess is, it doesn't reallymatter now, it's not that brave.
(32:50):
But at the time, I guess it's interesting
Alex Schultz (32:51):
Yeah, no, I mean, look, I, I did well at undergrad.
I, to be honest with you, I reallyenjoyed myself at university.
I at high school I did,I worked very hard.
I was very nerdy, and then Icame 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.
(33:13):
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 (33:21):
not sure that's totally messing up, if I'm honest.
I mean, you know, I've done alot worse than some of the things
that I've done, but you know.
Alex Schultz (33:26):
That is fair.
Maybe that's, that's anunfair way to put it.
I did very also, I didvery bad at theoretical.
I was very good at experimental, butmy theoretical physics was terrible.
so I'm not, I'm not abrilliant 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 thething that was, was good for me,
(33:49):
which was experimentation, and I
Daniel Rowles (33:51):
Right.
And what I took from that is lookat 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 (33:57):
look, one, one of the best people he's ever worked for me is
this chap called Brian Hale, and he willhave no problem with me saying this.
He's currently the headof growth at DoorDash.
Absolute genius, likereally brilliant guy.
he didn't go to college.
It's on his LinkedIn too.
Like some of the best people who've workedfor me didn't have the best traditional
education or didn't even go to college.
I mean, Brian genuinely was my righthand for, I don't know, over a decade,
(34:22):
and he's now the head of growth,chief growth officer at DoorDash.
Like, credentialism isn't that important?
Daniel Rowles (34:29):
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 shownotes, target internet.com/podcast.
You can buy the book.
Please do.
It's phenomenal.
It's really, really worth, andyou'll come back to it again and
again and again and again, Alex,thank you so much for your time.
Alex Schultz (34:47):
Thank you so much.
For more episodes, resources toleave a review or to get in contact,
go to target internet.com/podcast.
Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought
(00:02):
to you by Target internet.com.
And in this episode we have aninterview with the Chief Marketing
Officer of Meta, Alex Schultz.
So we get at least 20 emails aday suggesting guests for the
podcast, some of whom are fantastic.
(00:23):
You would've heardthem, some not so great.
But lots of 'em are authors who areapproaching the launch date of a book.
I wanna share some of their insights.
And wherever we can, we take a lookat the book, see if we think they
can actually provide some value.
And one of the first things you end updoing is looking at the book cover and
you have a quick look at recommendations.
And as, as an author myself, I knowit could be really hard to get these
(00:44):
recommendations 'cause you've onlyjust finished the book and you need
someone to read it urgently so theycan give you a quote so you can
kind of hit your publishing deadlineand therefore you end up asking
your close colleagues and friends.
Well, quite often for me that mightbe me asking Kieran or something
like, well, this particular author.
Who did he ask?
Well, he's got quotes from MarkZuckerberg, a Facebook fame, Sam
(01:04):
Altman from OpenAI, and then evenMatthew 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 CMOof Meta and VP of their analytics,
and he's all around an amazing guy.
You'll, you'll hear more from me in theinterview as well, but he's written what
(01:26):
I think is gonna become the definitivebook about digital marketing measurement
and the book's called Click Here.
There's loads of useful insights in here.
It was a really fun interviewa very open interview as well.
So sit back and enjoy the interviewwith Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta.
Okay, I am here with Alex.
(01:47):
Alex, tell us a little bit about thebook and why you decided to write it.
And I, I should say before we getgoing as well, this book is epic.
I mean, I, I, we, we get a lotof invites to speak to authors,
and this is the first one.
I'm actually gonna put onto a coursetext for my students at Imperial
College 'cause listeners will knowthat I'm senior lecturer there.
So, no one else also has Sam Altman,mark Zuckerberg, Daniel EK from Spotify,
(02:12):
and my favorite Matthew Vaughan givingrecommendations to the book as well.
So I have to say congratulations.
So congratulations to the book.
Tell us what it's about and tellus why you decide to write it.
Alex Schultz (02:20):
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 thinklike 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 (02:38):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (02:38):
and I keep being asked for a book on digital marketing
that kind of tells you, ev a highlevel 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 (02:50):
Yeah.
Right.
Alex Schultz (02:51):
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 fromone of their, one of their imprints.
And so went for it and wentfor the gap in the market.
'cause I want a book I can give to people.
So that's the easy answer.
Daniel Rowles (03:09):
Nice.
Alex Schultz (03:10):
The less easy answer is.
really believe in what we do andthere are so many people pooping
on marketing in general, right?
Like marketing in general.
You're trying to convince people tobuy things they don't want with money.
They don't have to quote fight club andthe digital marketing realm in particular.
You've got surveillance capital,you've got everyone kind
Daniel Rowles (03:31):
Right.
Alex Schultz (03:31):
on about this, you know, and we had, we adhere to
all laws that are put out there.
But we get all the laws putin that are not helping it.
And, and bluntly, I just thinkthey're stopping people from getting
personalized ads that make their livesbetter, give them products for free
and connect them to products thatthey actually like by showing them
slightly more relevant ads for trainers.
On the other side, create business growthso people are employed so businesses
(03:54):
can grow, so the economy can grow.
So there can be taxes, which fundsso much of what we have, as you
know, institutions in the uk.
And so I also wanted to just belike, online marketing is good.
It grows the economy and I'mproud of it, and someone needs
to say something positive.
So I wanted to say something positive.
Daniel Rowles (04:12):
Love it.
I mean, on the, on that firstpoint 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 knowwhat those fundamentals are.
And I think this book is beautifulat going through and just giving
that kind of right mindset andgoing through and saying, look,
this is, need to think about it.
(04:32):
Get back to those real corekind of pieces as well.
I also think that thing of being proudof digital marketing is a really key one.
If you look at how, the ease oflaunching new businesses now.
My master's students come intome and are kind of terrified
on two fronts at the moment.
One constant horror stories, digital'sbad, you know, all this kind of stuff.
There's that side of it, but there'salso, they're terrified 'cause of
ai and we'll get into that later on.
(04:52):
And I keep saying to them, look, andit's a quote that came from you as
well, was that the tools changed, butactually the fundamentals stayed the same.
And I thought that was areally interesting, I picked
out from the book as well, so.
Let, let's get into some key areasin the book as well, and I think this
is a lovely one to start with, thatdifference between goals and metrics
Alex Schultz (05:07):
Hmm.
Daniel Rowles (05:08):
and, and what that means to people.
'cause this is, thisis kind of fundamental.
Alex Schultz (05:12):
Yeah, I mean the back to basics thing, when I was reading
my audio book, which I know you'vegone through that torture as well,
Daniel Rowles (05:18):
Exactly
Alex Schultz (05:18):
I was just going, oh my gosh, I need to go and spend
time with my team and tell themto do these things because like,
Daniel Rowles (05:23):
right.
Alex Schultz (05:24):
basics that you just need to do,
Daniel Rowles (05:25):
I.
Alex Schultz (05:26):
and one of the very basic things is.
Actually be super clear what your goal isand realize that a metric is not a goal.
so, you know, our historic goalwas connect the world online.
Like people know that through Facebook,our metric was monthly active users.
And the thing is, a metric can be gamedand so many people like turn a metric
(05:46):
into a goal and then the metric doesn'tactually 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 andyou visit the site for 10 seconds, I
really connected the world online ordid I just get a ten second session?
we set the goal, connect the world online.
(06:08):
then have the metric monthlyactive 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 arenot 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, wherewe had, we wanted the, for the
(06:28):
acquisition team, the North Starwas, get everyone to use eBay, right?
I mean, pretty simple.
The goal we used to set wasconfirmed registered users.
But the thing is, you'd get affiliates outthere, incentive affiliates, incentivizing
people to sign up for eBay and confirm.
You get search affiliates sendingpeople to the registration
(06:49):
page and not the search landing
Daniel Rowles (06:51):
Right.
Alex Schultz (06:52):
which got registrations and confirmations, but none
of those users activated andbecame long-term active users.
We changed the metric to A CIU.
We kept the goal, get everyoneto use eBay, which is activated,
confirmed, registered users.
those incentive affiliatesbasically went away and the search
affiliates changed their landingpage to be the search results page.
'cause that's what gotsomeone to bid by Activate.
(07:14):
So.
The goal and the metric have to beseparate because you create metrics
that never perfectly describe the goal.
Daniel Rowles (07:24):
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 hadthe same effect on me as well.
Like, we preach this stuff allthe 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 anice thing 'cause marketing is
inherently challenging, right?
Because I think there'sthat whole piece that.
(07:46):
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 (07:52):
Yes,
Daniel Rowles (07:52):
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 thingthat 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 meanin practice for people?
Alex Schultz (08:04):
Yeah.
I mean the, the.
Fundamentally, the thing for me isI 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 howI think about the world.
And I think too many marketers, weOgilvy, has the useful idiot in his
(08:24):
book of the person who know, doesn'tget 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 youshould just do testing and
depending on the channel, right?
Search doesn't let you do lift studiesand conversion tracking in that way.
So search, you have todo match to market tests.
(08:46):
You have to do pre-post tests, like that'skind of what you have to do with search.
Social, most of the social companies allowyou to do holdouts 'cause all their users
are logged in, they've got user IDs andso we offer to lift studies, but all the
other guys offer various different things.
there you should leverage those and youshould actually see what is the uplift.
So it's, yeah, it's really simple.
It's like do a test.
(09:07):
See if you got more results in thetest group than the control group.
And that dates right back toClaude c Hopkins a hundred years
with scientific advertising.
This is not a new principle in marketing.
Daniel Rowles (09:20):
I think it's interesting because the more and more talk there
is about a no click environment, andthere'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 (09:33):
I mean the, the fraud is one example.
Fraud and waste.
So.
From a fraud perspective, the worstexamples I saw back in my day at eBay.
Well, actually Uber's areally good example, right?
So, Kevin Frisch was head ofmarketing at Uber, and they ended
up suing their banner agency.
Daniel Rowles (09:51):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (09:52):
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 theyfound it which funnily enough,
we found something similar.
The way they found it was their adswere showing up on the wrong sites.
So they were trying to avoid controversy.
They weren't trying to be onBreitbart at the time, and their
ads kept showing up on Breitbart.
(10:12):
And what was actually happening wasthat their, either a subcontractor
or their agency, or their agencywas putting ads out in places where
they weren't supposed to be put outso they could get extra impressions.
The worst thing that was happening is theywere putting them out below the fold and
getting no results and just scatteringcookies and by scattering cookies
saying that they were driving results.
And so when he turned it off, hesaw no drop in top line growth.
(10:37):
I recently did a similar experimentin India where I turned off all
of our marketing for Facebook, theapp in India, during the period
I turned it off, Facebook shrank.
It had a top line impact on Facebookoverall to turn off all of our marketing.
That's the difference is like if aUber at that stage they could turn off
the advertising and nothing changed.
(10:58):
And in India we turned off theadvertising and Facebook shrank.
That tells you the differencebetween actually having incremental
impact and not That's all you need.
That's like what you need for your job.
But actually that matters forfinance, that matters for the
CEO that matters for the board.
Like that.
India result's only a couple ofyears old and it's a legendary
result inside the company.
Every time I go to the board, theCEO, every time I go to the CFO, I'm
(11:19):
able to point to that and say, I'mnot lying to you when I say I drive
top line results for the company.
Daniel Rowles (11:25):
Right.
And I think that that proof ofconcept is actually said, let's do it.
Let's do an experiment of some type toactually prove this is working and let's
scale from that kind of point of view.
I mean, there's a couple of quotesI'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, youknow, there's, there is no funnel.
There is, and I've always beena big advocate of a funnel is a
great way of thinking about things.
Are enough relevant people, even awareof your product or company exists.
(11:47):
And I'll tell you why.
I've just pulled this one out.
We did a load of analysis and actuallyupon doing it, we worked out that
about, you know, it was only a verysmall percentage of people that got
to our website were actually gettingto our sales pages, but when they
weren't getting there, they wereconverting it at about 12, 15%.
So, oh, the sales page is amazing.
The thing is, is there's not enoughpeople getting here in the first
place, and without taking thatstat, we wouldn't have got there.
(12:08):
So that, that marketing funnelpiece came out quite a lot.
And do you mind just talkingto us about that a little bit?
Alex Schultz (12:13):
Yeah, I mean.
First and foremost, this isanother one of those basics.
I'm going back to what you saidat the beginning, which is a core
principle for me of the book.
Like, principles are timeless.
Channels change.
So the marketing funnel has beenaround 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.
(12:34):
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 havethis story in the book.
This is an incremental one.
Blake Ross, the guy who foundedFirefox, came to work for Facebook.
He is a genius.
I love him.
(12:55):
Really amazing guy, and also made me feelvery welcome at the company as a gay man.
So there's a, an element of thatthat makes him very special too.
He was tasked with growing the contactimporters and as a good engineer.
What he did was he ranked the contactimporters 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'mgonna put a OL and Earth link first.
(13:17):
If you're a younger person,I'll put Gmail first.
And he did all of this andhe got some nice uplift.
And then I came along and I put alink on the homepage of Facebook
and the thing went up tenfold.
And he wrote, he literally wrotea 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'mholding and you don't have a video, but
(13:40):
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 (13:49):
right.
Alex Schultz (13:50):
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 saleswent up a third in the week following
the Super Bowl and stayed up becausepeople just didn't know they exist.
Like awareness is a thing
Daniel Rowles (14:07):
Yeah.
Right.
Alex Schultz (14:07):
do it.
Daniel Rowles (14:09):
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 morningand 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 itsays, well, search has gone up.
Social media's gone up.
Email's gone up, direct's gone upand like, oh, this is really strange.
And then they go, oh, there were mentionedin the Times, newspaper, two paragraphs.
And it just, and that's the thing.
(14:29):
It's like you, yeah,let's take a step back.
We're digital marketers, butactually this is a marketing mix.
Right?
So I think that was.
Alex Schultz (14:34):
percent.
Daniel Rowles (14:34):
That was great insight.
I, I love this other one as well.
Mediocre marketing with a greatconversion flow is way better than
brilliant marketing with a broken one.
Talk to us about that.
Alex Schultz (14:43):
The whole way through.
And then, then you've gotta say witha great product or a bad product,
that's the next level down.
Look, I mean, a, a classic exampleof this was the brilliant Coinbase
ad that they did in the Super Bowl.
They did a, they did this ad, which wasjust a QR code bouncing around the screen.
Now I am slightly upset about this 'cause.
I wanted to put a QR code in thatand wasn't allowed to another time.
(15:04):
But, so, you know, I, I, I dunno, I, theygot a, I dunno how they got it done, but
they got it done and that's brilliant.
And they drive so much top of funnelto the site and the site crashed and
Daniel Rowles (15:13):
Right,
Alex Schultz (15:14):
nobody could convert.
The conversion funnel was
Daniel Rowles (15:16):
right,
Alex Schultz (15:17):
it really does matter that the, that the, the basics work,
the flow actually like, takes youthrough the flow and doesn't block you.
There are so many, like when Istarted at Facebook, our like
signup form was five pages long.
'Cause we got you to fill outyour profile in the signup form.
We reduced it to fivefields on the homepage.
Guess what?
All the numbers went up.
So, so yeah, you put the wrongconversion funnel in front of someone.
(15:39):
It doesn't matter how good yourmarketing is, people will not get
through that conversion funnel.
You have a bad product.
doesn't matter how good yourconversion funnel on your marketing is.
We do not make up for,for that with marketing.
Daniel Rowles (15:52):
Let's move on Flex.
There's another quote, and Ithink there's two pieces to it.
So I'll read you the whole quote andthen I'll just go to the two bits.
It says, first of all, channels, pickchannels 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 firstbit, pitch channels by scale,
defensibility and capabilities.
(16:13):
Can you just talk to us about thatfor our audience a little bit.
Alex Schultz (16:15):
Yeah, so I think the first one's pretty obvious.
Which is, what are thescale of results you can get
Daniel Rowles (16:21):
Mm.
Alex Schultz (16:22):
channel?
If you are absolutely brilliant at buyingads 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 (16:33):
Yeah, I, I, so we, we'll get to this in a moment, but
there's some history of this, butI, 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 (16:42):
okay.
Daniel Rowles (16:43):
target internet com slash podcast.
Let's come back to it.
I interrupted you.
Please go ahead.
Alex Schultz (16:46):
good.
That's great.
That looks like the nagar toMacker lock or the Nicks plane.
Daniel Rowles (16:50):
It was Nick's plane.
That's the one well done.
Alex Schultz (16:52):
So yeah, so, so you can buy it on like some niche website and
that's awesome, but it's gonna limityour maximum scale you can achieve.
So you need to just have somethingbig enough you buy on that.
If you succeeded it, it'll matter.
I, I, I think one of the things I get alot is a statistically significant result
that isn't actually significant for the
So you need scale, the scale piece Ithink is actually like, like really,
(17:13):
really interesting and, and, but easy,the defensibility piece is fascinating.
So when I started doing advertisergrowth for Facebook, we copied all the
keywords that Google used to acquireadvertisers for themselves, for our
purchases on Google, is awesome.
It shows how non-defense it is sometimesto have just a bunch of keywords you
(17:37):
buy because someone can go and scrapeGoogle or buy it from a third party
and basically build a keyword listand immediately compete with you.
When I was buying on Facebook, what Idid was I, we actually created custom
audiences, the original custom audiences,Danny Ferrante in the core data science
Daniel Rowles (17:54):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (17:55):
at the company.
He built this tool where wecould take user IDs of people
who'd entered the checkout flowfor ads or people who had pages.
And we were able to do these reallyclever 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.
(18:15):
it put us in a place where when we wanted
our advertise, I mean, you look at thenumbers we put out, we have well over
10 million monthly active advertisers.
Nobody else is puttingout any similar numbers.
We have a superpower in dealing withSMBs, and a ton of that is our acquisition
channels, whether buying our own adsor in product merchandising, which
obviously no one else can put a linkin the Facebook page asking a Facebook
(18:38):
user or a link in the Instagram appasking an Instagram business to buy an
ad. Those things have driven us to beable to have that huge number of active
advertisers who are all small businesses.
They're completely defensiblechannels that nobody else can get
access to, which puts us in the lead.
So scale and defensibilityare really, really important.
Daniel Rowles (18:58):
And then the last piece of that was capabilities, and I think
that's just, you know, it is leaningintro capabilities as well, right.
Alex Schultz (19:03):
Absolutely.
Like superpowers for us.
targeting superpowers for us,like in product conversion.
You know, Harry Stebbings hasthis concept of channel market
fit that he talks about for
Daniel Rowles (19:15):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (19:15):
And I really think it's true.
There is a channel market fit.
You have a channel that isthe right channel for you.
Ideally it's defensible, but whateverhappens, it has to have scale and it
has to lean into your capabilitiesif you can make it defensible, too.
Killer.
Daniel Rowles (19:30):
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 (19:37):
Yeah.
I mean, this one is an old eBay thing.
I know I
Daniel Rowles (19:40):
Hmm.
Alex Schultz (19:40):
eBay, but it was an amazing, an amazing teaching ground for me.
Enrich.
In southwest London.
Daniel Rowles (19:46):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (19:47):
I was based at at eBay.
yeah.
So if you're thinking aboutincrementality and return on
investment, I think the thing thatyou need to think about is marginal
incremental returns if you can do it.
returns are so obvious.
feel embarrassed on a podcast likethis saying it, but it's that the
(20:08):
last a hundred dollars you spend
Daniel Rowles (20:10):
Right.
Alex Schultz (20:10):
you a lot less money than the first a hundred dollars
you spend if you're being logical.
Online auctions, so meta, butSnapchat, YouTube, Google, all of
the places you can buy online areauctions, second price auctions.
They act very much like perfecteconomic systems, which is really
cool and really interesting.
And that means you get thesediminishing return curves,
(20:32):
which starts with zero zero.
You spend $0, you get zero, and then youget 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 slopeof the curve at the spend that you have
Daniel Rowles (20:48):
Right.
Alex Schultz (20:49):
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 negativebefore the average goes negative,
Daniel Rowles (21:00):
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (21:01):
And if you allocate between channels based on the marginal return
being the same across every channel.
You'll actually find that you massivelymove up ROI, just by budget allocation.
within channels, you can subdivide them.
So you can have clusters of users and lookat the marginal return for, say British
users versus French users, for example.
And then you can optimize for thesame marginal return between each
(21:24):
user cluster or keyword cluster,whichever one you're working at.
So, so yeah, marginal returns.
And if you can get reallyclever, you wanna look at
marginal incremental returns.
pretty hard to do even atthe scale we operate at.
So I currently separateincrementality and marginality,
but that's the way we look at it.
Daniel Rowles (21:41):
Love it.
I think that's, that's missed so much.
So let's talk about the capabilitiesto do these things then.
So how do you think that marketingorganizations should start thinking
about the team building collaboration?
How does that play intoall of this as well?
Alex Schultz (21:53):
I mean, there's a load of stuff in this.
Which teams do you wanna collaborate with?
Daniel Rowles (21:56):
Let's talk about that because let's talk about
that marketing engineering thingthat you talk about a lot as well.
I think that's really important.
And I just think that the role ofthat in these kind of businesses that
are successful is really important.
Alex Schultz (22:06):
The engineering team.
When I was at eBay, thiswas one of the negatives.
So I said a lot of positive thingsabout what was happening at eBay.
This is a negative on what we did.
We were in this place where we hada direct mail team, what they did
was they extracted the data fromthe database, they transferred it to
the marketing server at that time.
Then they loaded it into their marketingemail engine or onsite merchandising
(22:27):
engine, and then they trafficked it.
process would take 48hours, something like that.
'cause the data would be processedovernight, like extraction, transfer and
loading would take some time, and thenyou'd send out the emails the next day.
So it'd be two days.
Then eBay had a notifications team inengineering who obviously would send the,
you've just been outbid emails, right?
Things like that, that werecritical for using the product.
(22:49):
Why weren't they one team?
Daniel Rowles (22:51):
Right.
Alex Schultz (22:51):
we in this place where if you had a brilliant marketing email,
it would be able to be delivered by themassive infrastructure eBay had set up
to send all of their notification emails?
Honestly, the reason was theteams just didn't collaborate.
The teams didn't kind of.
Get excited about each other.
So the marketing folks, and this waschanging towards the time I left, which
(23:12):
was 20 years ago, but the marketingfolks didn't really value how important
time is when you are doing databasemarketing and how critical it is to do
something right at the moment the actionhas happened that you're triggering on.
the engineering teams, they didn't valuethe marketers, they didn't value the
var marketing insights and the ideasand the the clever things that they had.
And so they just didn't worktogether and they built completely
(23:34):
different email systems.
Which gave deliverability problemsfor marketing, which gave, you know,
time lag, problems for marketing,conversion problems for marketing.
But on the other hand, the engineeringteams had lower conversion rates than
they would've had, despite the fact theyhad 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 theproduct and engineering teams.
(23:56):
I run the marketing and analytics teams.
We are very close friends.
We talk all the time.
Our teams are fully integrated, infact exchange people between our teams
and we operate as a single unit acrossengineering and marketing to do growth.
And I think that format has led to whatpeople call product-led growth at this
Daniel Rowles (24:13):
Right.
Alex Schultz (24:14):
And the companies that do that, I think do a lot better
than the ones that use the old model.
Daniel Rowles (24:18):
Love it.
And then how'd you, we won't go intoall the teams, but how do you think
comms fits in with this as well?
'cause that's always abit of a challenging one,
Alex Schultz (24:25):
Yeah, I mean, again, so much of this stuff boils down
to interpersonal relationships.
Daniel Rowles (24:30):
right?
Alex Schultz (24:31):
You know, and I've advised a bunch of companies, I'm on a few
Daniel Rowles (24:33):
Hmm.
Alex Schultz (24:34):
Fundamentally it boils down to can the head of marketing
get on with the head of comm?
Daniel Rowles (24:37):
Right.
Alex Schultz (24:38):
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 theywanna 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 socialmedia apparatus outta marketing.
It was kind of at that stage, it waslike a third in comms, two thirds
(24:59):
in marketing, and I just moved thewhole thing over to comms proactively.
Daniel Rowles (25:02):
Interesting.
Alex Schultz (25:02):
No one even asked me for it, I just did it.
You know what?
That was really important for buildinga good relationship with the comms team
because they had a vision that theywere gonna do modern communications,
and of course they would manage.
Meta has a Standing Press Corps, whichis kind of unusual for a company.
But of course, they wouldmanage the Press Corps.
They would work with our journalists,but they wanted to talk directly
to our, you know, themselves.
(25:26):
And for them that matteredto do social media.
move ended up solidifying therelationship between our teams
and made us way more collaborativethan we would've been otherwise.
So taking these actions to actuallylike be a good partner is the number one
thing to be able to work well with comms.
'cause comms is genuinely afully people driven business.
They aren't doingmassive scaled marketing.
(25:48):
It isn't loads of analytics,
Daniel Rowles (25:50):
Right.
Alex Schultz (25:50):
it's people, it's relationships, it's communications.
So communicate well with them.
Be good partners.
Daniel Rowles (25:56):
Brilliant.
All right, well let's move onto the subject at the moment.
And does AI sadly, or gladly, Idunno, either way, but how, how do
you feel it's changing marketing?
How is it gonna change marketing?
And I, I was really interested inhow you reflected that on the book.
So let's talk about that.
Alex Schultz (26:10):
Yeah, I mean the, the, the quote that's doing the rounds at
the moment that I really love AI's notgonna take your job in the near term.
Somebody else using AI is gonna take
Daniel Rowles (26:20):
Right.
Alex Schultz (26:20):
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 pieceof content shown to engage people on
Instagram and Facebook were connected.
You'd joined a group, you'd likea page, you'd followed someone on
(26:40):
Instagram, you'd friended someone.
Everything was connected.
Now.
And we just spent a bunch oftime testifying in court on this.
Now, the majority of the usage of Facebookand Instagram is unconnected content.
It's mostly these short form videos
Daniel Rowles (26:56):
Right.
Alex Schultz (26:57):
you didn't follow.
And the only reason, the onlyreason we can do that is because
of the modern AI systems allowingsemantic 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, youknow, comedy videos, you get a bunch
of comedy videos and it's amazing howfast the systems adapt to your mindset
(27:20):
on the day you visit the product.
So we've been totally disrupted.
We are a completely different companynow than we were six years ago.
You layer in app trackingtransparency from Apple, one of the
more brilliant and cynical movesI've seen in the, in industry.
It is, it is only, it's onlypersonalization if it comes from the
Cupertino region of Silicon Valley.
(27:40):
Otherwise it's sparkling personalization,sparkling track tracking.
Yeah, so, so we've also had tomodel a bunch of conversions and
get to the place where we're usingAI 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 andour ad side of our business have been
utterly transformed by AI in six years,and they will be transformed again.
(28:05):
We are gonna see this.
And then over 10 years, 10years ago, I would never use an
automated Now all of my campaigns
Daniel Rowles (28:15):
Right.
Alex Schultz (28:15):
are auto optimizing app install campaigns and similar.
clever creative thingI'm doing is the data.
Thinking about what data we're feedingthrough, how do we tag it, how do we
send it through, how do we actually.
Optimize the flows, build the campaignstructure, and so on and so forth.
Those changes aren't finished.
So the C, the industry is gonna betotally transformed in the next 10
years, in my mind, in three categories.
(28:38):
One, you're gonna do existingthings more efficiently.
example there is, you know, you'renot gonna create 47 variants
of the banner ad yourself.
You're gonna chuck it into anai, and the AI will produce them.
That will destroy jobs thatbit is definitely gonna cause
s work.
And that's where someone whouses AI will outsmart you.
So you've gotta be learning to use AIand it's within the capabilities today.
(29:01):
This isn't some future.
Oh my god, this is gonna happen.
This is today two.
We are gonna be in the place wherethings that were possible but
weren't efficient suddenly get done.
the example I use there is weoffer customer support now in
the United States Chat support.
If you lose access to youraccount on Facebook and Instagram.
is enabled by ai.
(29:22):
You start by chatting with a chat bot.
It took something that was prohibitiveto do to make it actually viable to do.
And we've always wanted todo 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 lessthan the ridiculous number of
people it would've been before.
And then the third category isthings that were utterly impossible.
(29:46):
Before suddenly become possible.
And that's semantic understanding of
Daniel Rowles (29:50):
Right.
Alex Schultz (29:50):
based ranking like, like TikTok, short form video, YouTube
shorts, Instagram, Facebook reels.
And so those three categorieshave come along and they are
going to change marketing.
But marketing always changes.
Like 20 years ago, you made allyour money from a creative agency.
40 years ago there wasno internet marketing.
You know, 60 years ago, you don'tjust had soap operas come along.
(30:11):
80 years ago there wasn't TV.
A hundred years ago, there wasn't radio.
Every 20 years, marketing is completelychanging itself, and that's awesome.
And we're really lucky to bein 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 inthose three categories.
Hopefully those examplesgive people structure to it.
And a person with AI will take your job.
(30:31):
AI is not gonna take yourjob in the next few years.
Daniel Rowles (30:34):
I love it.
'cause all my students come to me in anabsolute panic when I show them all the
AI stuff in the first lecture and actuallysay, look, we're getting this stuff first.
We, we seem to be getting the techway in advance of, in many other
industries, and actually there is theopportunity there to engage with it.
The book's out in the 7th of October.
We'll put everything into the shownotes you can link through and, and
kind of get the book from there as well.
I just wanna get into one final thingto explain to people why I was showing
(30:55):
you a paper airplane earlier on.
Do you wanna talk to people about that?
A little bit of backgroundon what that was.
Little nice little nugget at the end.
Alex Schultz (31:00):
Yeah, I mean the way my whole career started was geo
Cities, for those of you who are
Daniel Rowles (31:05):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alex Schultz (31:05):
remember
Daniel Rowles (31:06):
I.
Alex Schultz (31:06):
Yep.
before it was bought by Yahoo and Icreated a website with Formula One paper
airplanes, fun science experiments.
'cause I was a nerd.
The paper airplane bitstarted to rank on alavita.
'cause one company linked to.
I then created usingfree net name who was a
Daniel Rowles (31:24):
I remember well.
Alex Schultz (31:25):
in the uk.
Yep.
I created my first paperairplanes.co uk and I created a
website all about paper airplanes.
And for the next 20 years I had thenumber one paper airplanes site on Earth.
it made me actually a lot of money.
It made me
Daniel Rowles (31:41):
Yeah, right.
Alex Schultz (31:41):
to pay for all my accommodation at college
my rowing training camps.
I ended up having YouTube videoswith it, which have about 10 million
views of me making paper airplanes,
Daniel Rowles (31:53):
Yeah,
Alex Schultz (31:53):
been updated in a decade, genuinely.
And it went really well.
Daniel Rowles (31:58):
yeah, it's, it's a great example 'cause I went on there and the
first thing I did was make the one thatwas 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 (32:06):
very welcome.
Daniel Rowles (32:06):
the, the last one as well.
And we can edit this out if you don'twanna talk about it, was that on your
LinkedIn profile, you've got your gradesfor your degree in your MSC program.
And I thought this was amazing becausea-level results have just come out.
There'll be lots of, lots ofyoung people around the UK and
around the world stressing abouttheir exam results as well.
And as someone that teaches at ImperialCollege, you know, we've got some of the
(32:29):
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, Ireally like that transparency for the
fact to say, look, actually this iswhat 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 bravething to put up your LinkedIn Pro,
which I guess is, it doesn't reallymatter now, it's not that brave.
(32:50):
But at the time, I guess it's interesting
Alex Schultz (32:51):
Yeah, no, I mean, look, I, I did well at undergrad.
I, to be honest with you, I reallyenjoyed myself at university.
I at high school I did,I worked very hard.
I was very nerdy, and then Icame 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.
(33:13):
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 (33:21):
not sure that's totally messing up, if I'm honest.
I mean, you know, I've done alot worse than some of the things
that I've done, but you know.
Alex Schultz (33:26):
That is fair.
Maybe that's, that's anunfair way to put it.
I did very also, I didvery bad at theoretical.
I was very good at experimental, butmy theoretical physics was terrible.
so I'm not, I'm not abrilliant 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 thething that was, was good for me,
(33:49):
which was experimentation, and I
Daniel Rowles (33:51):
Right.
And what I took from that is lookat 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 (33:57):
look, one, one of the best people he's ever worked for me is
this chap called Brian Hale, and he willhave no problem with me saying this.
He's currently the headof growth at DoorDash.
Absolute genius, likereally brilliant guy.
he didn't go to college.
It's on his LinkedIn too.
Like some of the best people who've workedfor me didn't have the best traditional
education or didn't even go to college.
I mean, Brian genuinely was my righthand for, I don't know, over a decade,
(34:22):
and he's now the head of growth,chief growth officer at DoorDash.
Like, credentialism isn't that important?
Daniel Rowles (34:29):
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 shownotes, target internet.com/podcast.
You can buy the book.
Please do.
It's phenomenal.
It's really, really worth, andyou'll come back to it again and
again and again and again, Alex,thank you so much for your time.
Alex Schultz (34:47):
Thank you so much.
For more episodes, resources toleave a review or to get in contact,
go to target internet.com/podcast.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com