Meta’s CMO Alex Schultz on AI, creativity, and what’s next for digital marketing

Speaker 2  0:02  
Welcome to the CIM Marketing podcast. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Ben Walker  0:17  
Hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM marketing podcast, and every so often in the history of this show, we are joined by a real great, a real big name described the god level marketers. I don't think he can call himself that, but someone in his book, I think, refers to him as that. And I'm giving you a bit of a clue there. We are joined today by Mr. Alex Schultz, who is none other than Chief Marketing Officer at meta and author of the great new book. Click here, Alex. It's great to have on the show. How are you?

Alex Schultz  0:54  
I'm really great. Thank you very much for having me. Weirdly, I live in the UK, but I'm currently talking to you from the US. So this is strange,

Ben Walker  1:00  
yeah, it is a bit strange, as though it's a perfect line, and we're great to have you on the show. I assume you're on the West Coast. Is that right?

Alex Schultz  1:07  
Yep, yep. Manlow Park, we just finished up our next conference. So that's what I'm explaining here about right now.

Ben Walker  1:13  
That's fantastic. It's fantastic. Very exciting. And this book's good. I've taken a good read of it, and I have to commend it to everybody who listens to this show. It's a fantastic book by Alex Schultz called click here, the art and science of digital marketing and advertising. Of course, all marketing is, to some degree or less digital now. So you could call it a bible of marketing. It's very readable, it's very interesting. And I commend it to everybody who listens to the cin marketing podcast at its centre, the one of its key premises is this concept of incrementality. You even go as far to say you actually say in so many words in the book, I think on more than one occasion, incrementality is everything people might not yet know what incrementality is. Can you please explain it to us?

Alex Schultz  2:07  
Yeah, I mean, it's just the question of, if you didn't do the marketing, would the same stuff have happened otherwise, and so is your marketing incremental to what would have happened otherwise? And it isn't always.

Ben Walker  2:19  
Is your point, doesn't it? Very often we measure results based on what's happened rather than what we have caused to happen. And that's the key point of this book,

Alex Schultz  2:29  
isn't it? Yeah. And I think one of the really interesting things is, if you look at the history of offline marketing, I actually think the FMCG companies, the unilevers, the Procter and gambles, all the ones that we know and love are probably better than a lot of the digital first marketers at thinking about this, because they're used to I put up some billboards in Leicester and I didn't put them up in Bristol, and I sold. How many toilet rolls I sold in Leicester versus Bristol? Whereas a lot of the digital people came along and said, What I measured, someone clicked on my ad and they converted. Therefore I drove the conversion. And so in many ways, this is a space where digital has, by nature, been behind analogue in terms of marketing angles like social media and most social media companies, not just us, offer this. Allow you to do lift studies where there's a set of logged in users and you show them the ad. There's a set of logged in users, and you don't show them the ad, and then you track those users over time, and you see how their behaviours are different. But other channels like search, especially SEO, so organic, natural search, but also paid search, doesn't typically bias its measurement around that kind of lived stuff. It's all keyword based the way that you do the measurement. And so for those channels, typically what I do is I turn them on and off, or I create matched markets. So very similar to the FMCG market. As of old, I'll run paid search in Leicester. I won't run it in Bristol, and I'll see how the usage of Instagram goes up in Leicester or doesn't versus Bristol. So first thing is, you go and look at your channel and say, what capabilities do you have within the channel? And then you leverage the best capabilities of that channel to measure inferentiality.

Ben Walker  4:09  
And there's been some classic examples of where it's that advice has not been heeded or it's not been executed. And very big companies, some of them the biggest brands in the world have been found to spending lots of money on stuff that's getting them no benefit. There is one that springs to mind,

Alex Schultz  4:27  
yes, well, the canonical One is there's this chap, Steve to Dallas, and I really like Steve. I've known him a long time. I used to work at eBay, and he actually joined eBay after me, after I'd left as the chief economist at eBay, and he did it at Amazon as well. And while at eBay, he did a paper that studied the keyword eBay. So eBay was buying the keyword eBay. It's a great debate in online marketing, do you buy your own brand name? It's a great debate. I've written about it on LinkedIn, and he. He did an actual experiment where they turned off bidding on the keyword eBay, and they looked at what happened to eBay's traffic from the word eBay, from natural search versus paid search, and they looked at eBay's conversions, they looked at eBay's usage to understand if there was any delta, and they couldn't find a statistically significant delta between the two, and this is a very large chunk of the results that were supposedly driven by the paid search channel for eBay. And there's a whole paper about he's published all the data and all the results, but he proved that, in this case, eBay shouldn't have been buying the keyword eBay. They

Ben Walker  5:35  
were lavishing 1000s of dollars, 10s of 1000s of dollars, probably, on an act that made no difference. Those people, those customers, would have come to them. They would have found eBay. They would have clicked through or whatever way you want to measure it, without that spend happening, which just shows you the risks of not following this sort of advice, these structures, that you can end up spending a lot of money on stuff that doesn't work. And presumably the alternate is true. You can spend a little bit of money in the right way. Things that work very well.

Alex Schultz  6:07  
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are other great examples, which I got in the book. There's a massive affiliate broadcast that eBay dealt with around cookie stuffing, where there was a non incremental affiliate. Kevin frischer, Uber, Uber ended up suing one of their ad networks, and I believe they won because of another massive incident where the ad network had affiliates themselves who were putting ads in the wrong place. So yes, there's a tonne of that where lots of examples of where it goes wrong, but in terms of going right, absolutely like what I'm doing, even on the book, is I'm looking at the ads that we're running, the emails we're sending, and so on, and then I'm cutting that data by a bunch of different variables, like, are you an active advertiser? Do you have a small business page? Have you visited any of our pages recently about business and so on and so forth? And you can see that very small subsets of the overall volume you send or money you spend on ads end up driving a huge amount of the results. And so for my team, my head of media says that his job is untargeting. His job is getting people out of our target audience to get to the minimum possible audience where we get the maximum result. Which I guess is a fairly obvious thing, but it's something that people don't do very efficiently. I think

Ben Walker  7:19  
one of the things I loved about the book was things like this. It's clear, simple advice that is stripping back, particularly for the sort of first half of the book, into getting the basics absolutely right, sometimes taking a step back. There's this fantastic section early in the book about this concept of the North Star, the North Star being your guiding light, your priority, your overarching goal. And there's this great point in there, which I think is true in life, by the way, as much as it is in marketing, that the biggest threat to your overarching goal, to your North Star, is your second most important

Alex Schultz  7:55  
goal. Yeah, I totally took this Warren Buffett. This is the Warren Buffett thing, yeah. And I really believe in it deeply. I mean, the number one thing I've given it to a bunch of my friends who are startup founders or big company founders. Now you'll see in the endorsements like and the number one feedback I've actually got is that the North Star section has been the most useful for them in thinking through their work and their company. But look, I mean, let's say we're absolutely brilliant. We created a top 10 priority list, and we rank them in the order that we think they're the best order, and number one is your nonstar goal, the thing you want to achieve over everything else. Things will flex in the world. Also, we're not perfect, and the difference between your thought on what your top priority is versus your second priority will shift. And you may not have even got it right in the first place. But if it's that close, it almost doesn't matter, right? Like you're not going to write. But the issue is, let's say for Facebook, back in the day, one focus we could have had was revenue. Make as much money as you can. We need to raise money. We need to exist a business. We need to survive. The other one was, maximise user growth. We'll raise enough money from VCs. We don't need to think primarily about revenue. We need to actually build out the consumer usage before we maximise revenue. Those are two very reasonable goals. The company needed to make money. It wasn't making money. The company needed to build for a future. And you can actually see there's clearly a trade off between those goals. You take over the homepage with a massive flashing graphic, people will be turned off. They'll go away. The ad business we built was actually much more subtle and didn't drive people away from the business. That decision did come down to the fact that we prioritised users over money and have actually consistently as a company, because we think that's the long term benefit. But if there wasn't that much clarity between those two, or if we kept changing our mind, we'd just be going back and forwards and back and forwards, rather than optimising and driving both forward as hard as we can, but knowing which one's the top priority and never giving in and making the second priority top priority. So yeah, ruthlessness on that front is really hard, but if you want to make progress, it is really necessary.

Ben Walker  9:58  
It is hard, but. If you're an organisation and you're being buffeted or lobbied, shall we say, by different parts of the organisation, which may have different goals. So that goal, making that defining that North Star, to me, was a very compelling episode, if you like, in this book, a very compelling chapter in this book, because actually, it's harder than it sounds. You know, is it revenue? Is it users? Does Bob think it's revenue? Does Jill think it's users? Who's right between Bob or Jill? But the point you're making in the book, and you make very strongly, is you have to reconcile that early on. You have to know what your North story is, what the main goal is, because you can bet that your second biggest goal will conflict. It will take focus and it will take resources.

Alex Schultz  10:45  
It's so deeply British as well, to make space for Bob and Jill, to have the to be heard and to not, not want to upset anyone's feelings. And it's so deeply American, American, to be like, yeah, Jill's right. We're going, Yes. And I think, like, if you look at the top entrepreneurs in the UK, I think they have that decisiveness and that ability, and the top business people in the UK, that ability to be like, No, this is what I'm doing, and I'm doing it from hell or high water. And I think from a perspective of growth and business and success, that clarity of purpose in almost any field, politics, business, academia, you know that clarity of purpose, of like, what is your thing, and you're driving towards it, and the ability to make the decision move and hold with it, even though people are upset, is rare. It's so simple to say and it's so hard to do, and it's so so important. And the successful people, I think they all have clarity of vision. They have clarity of North Star, and they are decisive. One

Unknown Speaker  11:41  
of the other great things about that the way you intro it is because you explain the risks of not doing that very clearly and very in this very compelling way that the biggest threat to your North story, your biggest threat to your main goal is your second most important goal. People immediately grab from the book that hang on a second. Oh God, right now I understand. I've got to be absolutely crystal clear, not just myself, but my organisation, my team, what I'm going for. And then you then go on to define how goals and metrics differ, and that I found quite interesting as well. You say, this is your goal. So let's say, for example, of the two you've just said is to maximise revenue. It may not be but for an argument, that's your goal, your goal is the maximisation of revenue. If your goal is the maximisation of revenue, what's

Alex Schultz  12:28  
your metric? This is really quite fun as well. So my main role at meta, weirdly, is running analytics for the company, right? So I run all of that data science and data engineering, and so I spend a lot of time refining metrics to describe goals for different product teams around the company. Around the company. And so the first question you ask is, okay, revenue over what time period? Like? Is it quarterly revenue? Is it annual revenue? Is it five year revenue? Because you do different things. If you're looking to maximise revenue two years out from now, or you want to maximise it in the next quarter, your trade offs are going to be very different. So time timeline is really important. Really important. When you say a goal like revenue, timeline is absolutely critical, then you need to actually question, does margin matter? So for example, Tiktok has allegedly, according to the media, overtaken us in revenue, but a lot of that is commerce revenue, and it's a lower margin than ads revenue, eBay, for example, Walmart, Walmart has massive revenue, but it has like, 3% margins. Tesco, same, legal, same. So do you care about your margins when you look at revenue as well? And so your precision of how you go, okay, cool. Make revenue. Make enough money to let this company operate and be successful in the future, make enough money to make our shareholders happy. Really good goal, totally relevant. Next level down is okay. Let's get the refinement on that over what time does it matter? What the margin is? And you start asking a series of details, and then you get to the place where you like revenue. But even there, it gets complicated. So currency fluctuations matter a lot, and so at the moment, a tonne of stuff I've been doing in the last year around revenue for meta has been dealing with the fact that every currency on Earth has been jumping around like crazy over the last year. And should I track revenue on a normalised currency basis? Because that takes out of consideration the impact of foreign effects and it says what we're doing from a product perspective, or should I track it normalised to the US dollar, because that's what's going to come out in our financial earnings. And in the end, that's what our shareholders care about. So so many people think, Oh, just counting stuff is so easy, and my background is physics, and I'll tell you, like, I got to study about CERN and all of this stuff as the cutting edge doing my masters and and measurement is not easy. Numbers are not easy. And actually getting the measurement right is often hard. Once you've said what your goal is, getting a metric that describes it properly is not easier.

Ben Walker  14:52  
It is that comes through really, really clearly. Again, with with fantastic examples like the one you said, is that actually? Yes, great. How? Of revenue maximisation, but the way you are measuring that, the way you are judging yourself on that, will change deeply the behaviour of what you do, yeah, even if it's even if it's something as notionally simple as timescale, if your aim is to, as you say, maximise revenue and for the next quarter, you will behave very differently to if you're going to make investments that will deliver that revenue growth in two years or five years. So first thing, get the goal, then be precise about your metrics, and understand the concept of incrementality. They were three things that really come through in the earlier part of the book, basics, you might say, but basics that still marketers often get wrong, or at least don't necessarily address in such a fulsome way as they should at the start of projects or at the start of a term of employment.

Alex Schultz  15:50  
Well, the thing I push even more, and I hope this book is useful for, is I've specifically written this book so we can give it to our peers in other functions. So the idea is this book can be read by a business leader who wants to leverage these channels. And so my hope is that often, I think the reason that the marketers don't get this stuff right is because the executives and business leaders they're dealing with don't understand the consequences of them not leaning in and getting this right with their marketing team, and they say, oh, that's that's details, go, go, go. And so my hope is that you can hand the book over to a client of marketing and see them understand, oh, man, I need to go and actually get this detail right with the marketing team. So not just marketers who do this wrong. Marketers may desperately want to do the right thing, but they're dealing with a business leader who says, Stop bothering me with these details. It's revenue. How hard is that?

Ben Walker  16:48  
It's interesting and give you there's also the butthof is a great guide to how marketers can start out, yes, understanding the concepts, but can also start out how to choose the right channels, which, again, is a is a harder task that may be immediately obvious. It seems we've got an almost infinite number of channels, and it offers some sort of guidance to, you know, where to start, a nice structure, a sort of thought process on where to start, doesn't it? Have, you know, if you're trying to launch a product or a marketing drive, a taxonomy, if you like, of decision making in how to start deciding what, where to use and how to go forward with it.

Alex Schultz  17:31  
Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is, everyone hates to admit they copy. I feel I don't. I'm like, you know, what is it? Great Artist, copy, brilliant artist, steal, or something like, first thing you do is, okay, let's say you're launching a new hotel in Brighton. Okay, look at what all the other hotels in Brighton do. I bet you they pay a bunch of money to booking.com for placement. I bet you that they probably aren't buying the paid search themselves. They're relying on essentially, the retail ad networks of booking and Expedia for them to do it. I bet you they care about SEO, because search is really important in travel and so like, I think it's really important. First thing you do is to go out and say, okay, am I doing something other people have done before? If so, I'm just going to copy what they've chosen to be the best channels Second. Okay, then you explore other channels. That's cool. A good way to explore it is affiliates, because that allows you to try a lot of channels at once. But you can also systematically work through channels yourself, if you don't have someone to copy. And then, thirdly, if you have a clever idea, if you're like, I have something different to do. The example I use in the book for this one is Dollar Shave Club, where they turned a viral social video on YouTube and Facebook into a billion dollar sale to Unilever. It was brilliant, and like they had a clever idea about how they would cut through with this new channel, essentially, of influencer and social marketing that, to be fair, very few other companies had done before them, and they said, I am deliberately going to do something new to break into the category of selling races. That's cool, too, but be deliberate. So I'd say one, copy. Two, if there's nothing to copy, explore with affiliates, or if you have the time and money, explore systematically, channel by channel yourself. Three, if you want to do something totally new that no one else has succeeded in that's amazing. Be deliberate about it and know that you're

Ben Walker  19:25  
doing that. Yeah, don't be scared of being a copycat. That really rang through when I was reading the book.

Alex Schultz  19:30  
It's so hard to launch a hotel you don't have to completely redeploy and hotel marketing as well.

Ben Walker  19:35  
Yes, focus on the venture rather than the model of marketing. If somebody else is doing it, and they seem to be successful in doing it, then go ahead and copy them exactly. There is more to it than that, but that was a really important lesson of the book. Now here's the difficult part, and you admit it's difficult using a typically colourful quote from a gentleman by the name of Arthur C Clarke. I. And obviously cock said it is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a very few years. Use that quote of his in the book, and then go on to try to predict the future. And guess what I'm going to ask you to do is to try to predict the future we've talked a lot about. And the book does go into the brass tacks of marketing and how to get those right, and actually explains in clear, colourful detail why actually getting them right, getting the simple stuff right, the basics right, is not maybe as easy as you may think it is, we're told by colleagues of yours, actually Alex, but also everyone in the tech industry that actually, you know, AI is going to get this all right, and we'll soon, as marketers, be able to walk off into a sort of creative Xanadu, where we spend most of our time sort of Thinking about great big ideas and things like goals and metrics and incrementality and North Stars or something that machines will do, is that accurate?

Alex Schultz  21:09  
So yes and no, the first thing I'd push on is, I think as marketers, we often define creativity as pixels and nothing else. And I personally struggle with that. Like I love Ogilvy on advertising. I still give those books out. I have 100 of them sitting by my desk to hand to people, literally right now. And so like the creativity of sticking a card to a billboard with super glue when you're selling super glue, really great. Still works today. Brilliant thinking, amazing. But creativity doesn't stop with pixels and atoms. Creativity exists in bits and bytes as well. And so I think the first thing I'd say is the creative piece of all of the work, from determining your north star to figuring out how you could actually get hold of the data to so on and so forth, is always going to not always, but in the foreseeable future, is going to require a lot of human intervention, and that's where we have a delta as human beings. That being said in my day to day life now at work, I sit in meetings and I have an AI chat open, and I ask the chat questions to inspire me. So in the last meeting, I said, What are the top three analytics questions you would ask for Instagram in competing with Tiktok or youth users and time? And it came up with really good ones, and then I looped it and refined it, and so on and so forth. And so what you're finding in Silicon Valley is companies like anthropic. 90 something percent of the code now is being written directly by AI that's moving into taking the analytics questions as well. They're not allowing people to hire people unless they have first said why AI can't do it, or why they can't do it with incremental AI work. And you know, I sat in a meeting with one of our most senior guys who, in the old world, would never be writing code anymore, and he literally in front of me if I had coded a web parser and improved a seven month project by a series of engineers in one hour in front of me. And so the delta of what AI is going to do, it's real. It's going to take over a tonne of the work. I think I think the thing is thinking of the ideas. I mean, the thing that he thought of was a way of using the tool that no one else had really used the tool before. And it was that creative spark that made it possible for him to do that using a new tool that exists. So, no, I don't think AI is going to give us just some kind of creative Xanadu, putting metrics and goals and everything to one side, what it will do is it will push us up the value chain to the more creative thinking, just like word processors did, just like photo cameras did, just like a lot of technological advances did. This one, however, is really material.

Ben Walker  23:55  
What's it going to change the way we manage marketing organisations in terms of building our teams and how we collaborate with other departments. What do you see as a key shifts from what you where we are today and where we are in three years time, five years time in terms of the way our teams are composed and interact with each other?

Alex Schultz  24:18  
I'm just sounding more and more crazy I understand as I talk through this bit. So, like, this is where the Arthur C Clarke works. Yeah, it's going to change it completely, right? I think we are going to be working with AIS as CO pilots for our lives in work within two years. Like, I mean, I'm doing it as a senior executive at meta right now, like I I'm sitting in meetings with an AI open as my co pilot. We are behind the cutting edge AI companies, the ones that are completely AI native and born in the last few years, where, literally, they have an AI sitting in the meeting, listening to taking the meeting notes, and. Actually like suggesting things to do, and they're asking the AI how to solve things and the AI to do things. So I think what we're going to be doing is we are going to be changing dramatically because of two to three things. One, if we are not using AI to do our jobs. So I'm not saying AI replaces us, but if we aren't using AI to do our jobs, we will likely get replaced by somebody else who does use AI to do their job, because they will be so much more productive. Two, we are going to be in this world where a lot of what we're doing is feeding data into the AI, asking questions of the AI, or checking if the AI gave a reasonable answer. And three, I think you're going to be in a world where people's AI agents are talking to other people's AI agents for a tonne of the work. And we will deploy an agent to go do a thing, and it will go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and come back to us at the moment where we have to make a decision in our personal and professional lives. So five to 10 years from now, the most extreme version of that, I think, is going to be pretty standard in life, because the futures here is not evenly distributed yet and and by the way, this has changed in a year, like a year ago. It wasn't like this in the valley. This is, in my opinion, it has changed dramatically in the last year, how this has permeated the big tech companies, even if the smaller ones, the startups, were there, they were there a year ago, I feel it's permeating all my colleagues who are senior at other big tech companies. It's their lives too. Now it's interesting

Ben Walker  26:37  
what you say about not, so much about AI replacing our jobs as marketers, but AI will replace you as a marketer if you don't know how to use AI. It recalls, to me, on a much grander scale, what I call the mobile phone on desk paradox in that when mobile phones first came out, they had popular usage. They were banned in many offices. People weren't allowed to bring them in to offices. They weren't allowed to answer calls on their mobile while they were at the desk. It seems almost extraordinary, and some people listening to the show will be too young to remember it, but that was definitely the case. In fact, it was probably the case in a majority of offices, certainly in the UK, if not in the United States. Now, when, yeah, and now, of course, the opposite is true, that every employer wants and needs you to have a mobile phone to be a member of their organisation. In fact, you probably have to agree to have a mobile phone to be a member of many, or probably most organisations if you work in a sort of office based profession. And that seems to me, to what you alluding to with AI is that it perhaps has gone through a stage. It may still be in that stage with some organisations where using AI is seen as a sort of slightly naughty shortcut, or, you know, a cheat a cheat mode. Yes, exactly. And what you're saying is, well, that's going to change very rapidly, to be becoming, if you're not using AI, then you're going to be like the people who refuse to have a mobile phone in a in a big corporate organisation, you're going to get in

Alex Schultz  28:14  
trouble. Yeah, I mean, and I think there's also, there's, there's so many similarities. People are really worried about defending their data, because if they type stuff from the corporate environment, if they type questions they have from the corporate environment, they're giving away to the AI, the questions that they have. Like, I'm sitting here as a senior executive in meta, I am typing questions into everyone else's AIS as well as our AIS to make sure I'm using all of them. And by the way, different ones are good at different things. Claude is like better at code. Guess what? Google is better at searching the web. Who knew mid journey is better at images like you use different ones for different different things. I'm not worried about it. And I think, like that was another problem that came with with phones, and it's happening now with AI so, so, so yes, it's going to transform everything. And it is a person who uses AI who takes your job. It's not AI that takes your job. And so you can become the person using AI like you became the person using a mobile phone.

Ben Walker  29:12  
The slightly facile comment is that people will feed in click here by Alex Schultz, and then AIS will learn all this stuff, all these important lessons we've been talking about the basics incrementality, the difference between goals and metrics. And you know, we as marketers can deploy our AIS to do that, while we think about the big decisions and the big created stuff

Alex Schultz  29:34  
that would be awesome. And that's literally what's happening in coding right now, like the basics of how you sort a list or how you do an if while loop, like that stuff literally like, you shouldn't do it yourself. Like code migrations, human beings shouldn't do code migrations anymore. Prototyping. You shouldn't prototype by hand anymore. Like a tonne of stuff that used to be the basics of coding has now been pushed to vibe coding. And what's funny is I started coding with scripting languages. I didn't start coding with machine code. I started coding and it was already obfuscated two layers. It was obfuscated from machine code, but it was also obfuscated from C plus plus whatever Fortran, like those things I was dealing with, PHP, Python was where I got into coding. And so I already had two layers of abstraction. We're just abstracting more and more and more, and that's happening in coding, and it will happen in other business functions too, including

Ben Walker  30:26  
Mark. So you're quite happy for this great book of yours to be fed into Claude, chat, GPT and be shared widely for free around the world.

Alex Schultz  30:36  
Well, my publisher would tell me that we can't have it plagiarised. We can't have it shared for free, but the insights in it. Look, I'm trying to get them out everywhere. I want them to be in business school courses. I want them to be something that people are using in their company. We're paying for loads of copies for our clients as a company. And from my perspective, the goal of this book, I don't make a penny for it. It's all it's all going to be given away. So I will not make a penny of royalties from this book for me at all, because the point is that it's out there, and it's teaching people how to do marketing, and it's a kind of giving back and something that I really care about doing, and it aligns with our business. So, yeah,

Ben Walker  31:11  
that's what I took from it. Is, like, it's a really useful handbook for marketers that is also a really great read. You know, it's got some adult the risk. Repeating what we said at the start of the show. You know, it does actually go back to brass TAs to first principles, and checking that we're getting these first principles right before we go on to the more complex stuff later in the book. Can we expect a follow up at some point?

Alex Schultz  31:37  
Alex, I mean, I'd love it. I this is my second book. My first was about paper aeroplanes that was sold through marks and Spencer's So, and it sold a lot of copies, actually, weirdly. So I like it. I think it's really genuine for me on how I communicate. So I'd love to but there are no plans in the pipeline right now. I have a lot of a lot of work to do in my day job. Do

Ben Walker  31:58  
you find it easy to write? Sometimes I think we we carry things around in our heads as professionals, and when it actually comes to distilling it, to crystallising it, it takes a bit of effort.

Alex Schultz  32:07  
Honestly, this really flowed. So I did it mostly on planes. I was, I was writing it on all my flights back and forth from San Francisco and the US to London, and then I did the edits, like sitting on a beach in the Caribbean during my Christmas holidays. And yeah, there was a lot of stuff I just wanted to say for all of these channels, I have frameworks for how I've taught 1000s of marketers working for me across, working at eBay, working at meta, being an advisor at places like Airbnb, Coursera, health, tap, others. So I have good frameworks for me in my head about how I want to talk about it. So it actually blurred really clearly what I wanted to say because of all of that history. Well,

Ben Walker  32:50  
that's fantastic, and this is a great book. I do commend it to the audience here. This is click here, by Alex Schultz cmo old meta. It is out now, and we'll leave a link in the notes, Alex, thank you very much. On a very busy schedule, joining us from the West Coast today to join us on the show. Hope you've enjoyed it, and maybe you'll come back on the show at a later date.

Alex Schultz  33:11  
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it, and I would be happy to thank you. That's great.

Ben Walker  33:18  
That's all the time we have for this episode of the CIM marketing podcast, you can find detailed show notes and links to additional resources mentioned by our guests at cim.co.uk forward slash content dash insights forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and find it helpful, please consider supporting the show by leaving a rating and review. It really helps grow our reach. The CIM Marketing Podcast is hosted by me Ben Walker and produced for CIM by Bryndley Walker, no relation. Thanks again for tuning in to the CIM Marketing podcast. We'll catch you next time

Introduction  33:52  
CIM marketing podcast