The Meta CMO Interview - Digital Marketing Measurement, AI & Why the Basics Still Matter

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 been dubbed a modern classic, 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.

Useful Links:

📕 Click Here by Alex Schultz (Penguin Books): https://geni.us/ClickHereAlexSchultz
✈️ Try Alex’s top-performing paper plane: https://www.paperairplanes.co.uk