Alex Schultz | CMO at Meta | Marketing at Meta - The View From the Eye of the Storm"

0:00The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

0:54I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Alex Schultz. Today's topic, marketing at Meta, the view from the eye of the storm. Now, Alex is the CMO and VP of analytics at Meta, a position he has held for five years. Prior to that, he had various positions in growth marketing at Meta and also founded Paper Planes, a UK-based website nearly 30 years ago. We'll talk about that later. He is also on the board of Lindblad Expeditions. And full disclosure, we worked together at eBay a number of years ago. Welcome, Alex, and it's great to see you.

1:39Thank you. It's nice to see you too. And thanks for the support in my early days at Meta. Yes. All right. So let's talk about this role at Meta. What exactly is the CMO VP of Analytics responsible for and how is your group structured? Yeah, I mean, the way I like to think about things is it's kind of like what I used to do with my little websites was you want to get people to visit the websites and you want to count how many people visited the websites and what they did on it. And that's basically what I do for Meta. And that used to be my hobby. So I have all of the marketing teams globally. So product marketing, experiential marketing, business, consumer, all of our brands.

2:21So we have a centralized marketing team similar to Apple or Microsoft or Google. and then I have about a third of the analytics team report to me directly so those are the analytics team that cover you know our ads products our infrastructure community integrity so anything run by the COO reports to me directly the rest of analytics is decentralized and I actually decentralized it completely when I took over a set of analytics so there is a head of analytics for reality labs who's awesome there's also a head of analytics for Facebook app WhatsApp app, Instagram, and there's a head of analytics for Meta Super Intelligence Labs.

2:59So I act kind of as very godmother for those guys. And then the rest of my org is whatever my boss currently doesn't want to do. So currently, I'm also running user research. I'm running competitive intelligence as a month ago. I run translations, have done for the last 14 years. So I'm kind of the COO to the COO in some ways. So this is like, I want to talk about the decentralization just so our listeners understand. How did you decide to decentralize? And then how do you manage as a overseer of that and compensate that group to make sure that the analytics are all on the same page? Yeah, I think it's really interesting.

3:41For marketing, I felt we needed to centralize it because there are a lot of correct ways to do marketing. But if you do multiple different correct ways, they'll cancel each other out. So there's loads of different positions you can take for any given company. But once you've decided the position, everyone has to pull the same position, you know, otherwise it won't work. For analytics, I felt it's the reverse, right? Data is generally truth. And you can scrutinize each other's work well. And there's usually only one correct answer with the data for any question. And so for that, I felt like actually peer review and being able to look at each other's work meant that we would be able to be correct.

4:23And the decentralization meant that the leaders where the analytics team were decentralized to would have to care more about that team because they reported to them, because they'd be managing them. and it's worked out that way actually like the analytics teams are being supported by their leaders and their leaders are really thinking about what they have to say and believe in it and we're keeping it factually correct because I kind of act as a little bit of a weight in the center to make sure that we have that factual correctness um the one thing I'd say is just don't decentralize analytics too deeply so you heard me say there's a head of analytics for whatsapp there's a head of analytics for reality labs it's not the subdivisions of whatsapp or reality labs that have um that have heads of analytics they're they're aggregated still up to the level where it's at the product group or business unit level they're not a subdivision level because at that point i think you start to get the analytics team captured by the local director or whatever and they're not a strong enough senior enough analytics leader to push back when people are critical of what the data says.

5:33Well, I hear you saying, and I've done similar stuff, which is the marketing analytics is really the company interfacing with its customers. The operating analytics, which is what I kind of hear you saying in WhatsApp and everything else, that's actually business units that have specific analytics they need that can't draft as easily off the company analytics. and so they need their own kind of player or set of groups is that a fair way to look at it yeah a hundred percent although you could do it centrally like in most companies analytics exists in this superposition of states where like it could be decentralized or it could be centralized and people centralize it when they're not getting the right answers because people are grading their own working yeah and they and you know what they decentralize it when people are not feeling they're getting the support they need from the central team.

6:24And so we've managed to decentralize it like a decade ago and keep it in that state. So you're right, it can draft off the product team. How did you get, how did you get, you know, the other thing that happens, particularly as you acquire companies, is there sometimes there's not one set of analytical truth because there's not one agreed upon set of data. How did you get all the data in the same place or get everybody to agree yeah this is the data we're going to use you can't just be pulling it from here or there yeah i mean i yeah i i think so i've run into this a lot with companies and people i've advised and worked with and so on the fact of the matter is there is usually one set of truth like revenue is revenue free cash flow is free cash flow either does he better you know there's there's a greed it's hard to argue with those yeah right but also active users active users like monthly active users like did they log in or did they not log in daily active users is the same it's the same thing um time spent like it's the same thing so i think one of the problems actually is that you often get leaders who want to create their own custom vanity metric yep and so i believe and look this might be arrogant i believe one of the reasons that we've been able to get to a standardized set of metrics like for example um instagram really wants their monthly actives to be 28 days and the industry standard is 30 days and for the company we report 30 just across the whole company because i can make that decision but look the instagram team looks at 28 days and that's fine because there's not that much of a variance so i don't care about it that much there's slight differences in how you how you define viewport views versus impressions so facebook it's viewport views for a feed impression instagram it's a different slightly different definition of impressions what percent of pixels need to be on screen how long do they need to be on screen all of these kind of details so there's some variance but fundamentally the core of social media is do they visit how often they visit how much time do they spend and like how much content do they produce you know and you can debate lots and lots of different things but it's actually quite simple and having me in the center as a pretty strong leader in the company means we debate that stuff less than other companies because i'm pretty well empowered as a head of analytics um and so i think actually a chunk of how you get to this debate is that a ceo board senior leadership team doesn't actually empower their head of analytics and it really is a problem for the company because then you two teams will say monthly active two teams will say revenue and it means different things right yeah the other thing well that sounds like a really good foundational set of analytics so let's flip over what's it like to do marketing in a business that is always in the center of just about every piece of news in the world um you got political debates social debates you're always referenced even for almost everything tell me what it's like to sit in the center of that and how do you manage it yeah i mean it's very it's very stressful and you know people have strong opinions about meta it is interesting to me how much people want to blame platforms versus people for what they say and what i see all the time is the it's funny i was on a podcast uh a few months ago during the book launch and um the person had a set of very political questions they asked me and i was like okay thanks to those questions i can tell you your politics because like you can take the same point of view and you can look at it from different angles and both sides sort of have have different point of views look in most of the world it's good so in most of the world we have a really strong brand and we're in a really great place um in the u.s and amongst kind of elites in europe and throwing Australia and Canada.

10:33We're in a much tougher place. And it is stressful to be in the middle of that. But for me, I believe very deeply in what we're doing. And so I'm able to actually handle the stress because I believe in what we're doing. I believe in our responses. I feel pretty strongly that this is a good company run by good people who I love and trust. And so that enables me from an emotional level to be able to manage through it and which is important and then hopefully from an emotional level be able to manage my team through it which is also important because when you right because there's a lot of emotion around this kind of stuff every day yeah so i think the number one thing is like how do you manage your emotions and your team's emotions through it and that comes from a place of like really believing in what we do and feeling good about it and then from a practical point of view look the number one thing we can do is stay focused on our products and get past whatever the latest political usually motivated thing is that's going on with us and so where we can reduce the cycle length that's the number one focus is like just let's not have long cycles and get back to talking about product and innovation that's when we do well and so from a marketing and comms basis it's a focus on let's talk about product innovation let's talk about people using our products.

11:53That always feels good. And let's try and minimize any of the other new cycles in terms of just length. Hey, for people that are not as experienced as this, which is probably everybody listening to this, how do you, do you have rules of the road to reduce cycle length or response rules to keep this from exacerbating itself when you get in the middle of it or not? well that's that i mean that's really the comms team i'm very closely partnered with the comms team but in our company comms doesn't report to marketing um you know i think i think like

12:34number one like tell the truth is the most important thing i think a lot you know and hold hold your position on what you believe is the truth is actually really really really important and beyond that i think you'd really have to talk to the comms team got it okay So you're sitting in the center of all the AI stuff as well. How should people out there be thinking about the future of marketing in the era of AI? And what tips can you give our listeners? And we have at least 5 ,000 CMOs that listen to the show. So give some tips about how you see the AI revolution, how meta is playing it, and then tips you would, advice you would give to our listeners.

13:22Yeah, look, I think from an AI revolution perspective, there's two things kind of to look at in my role. One is what's meta doing in terms of producing AI, using AI and whatever. And the other is like, how are we using AI to make ourselves more productive and effective? um on the second piece i think that's where probably the most tips and tricks are for people who are also cmos and heads of analytics um and the the things that i think about for that um is it's very much a threshold technology for any given problem and what i mean by that is like the ai typically for any problem has a precision like how right does it get it and it has a recall how many things can it get that right basically of all the things you could ask it what percentage can it get right um and a human being's the same like you ask any given human being um for example uh like create me a really great ad for oakley vanguards for people running in the park um and the human being can go and take photos or they can use cgi or they can use photoshop or They could do whatever to create that person in the glasses.

14:40And my version of really great ad will vary from some other CMOs as to how I review it. But how correct they get it for me to say, yes, run that ad is the precision. And then how many things I could ask them. It's like running, cycling, biking, golfing. How many of those they can do is the recall. And so what happens is the AI just gets better and better and better at a given problem. and it marches up from having 0 % precision and recall until it gets to that human level of precision and recall. And the moment that it beats the human level precision and recall, that's when you start using the AI to do things versus using the human being on their own.

15:17Now, typically what's happening is it's a human using the AI. The AI doesn't just run off on its own and do it. And so the reason I say it's a threshold technology is you just don't use it to do anything until it gets better than a human being doing it on their own. And then suddenly it feels crazy that you would ever have done it without AI being part of the solution. And as such, a very gradual move feels very sudden to people when it crosses that threshold. So number one, expect it to be a threshold technology and just see how it's developing because it will come on you suddenly. It'll appear suddenly, even though it's actually been a gradual improvement.

15:54Number two, AI doesn't work on its own right now. creativity currently is not something the ai does very well also you need to review the output of pretty much any ai because like it hallucinates it makes mistakes it's not very self sometimes it's wrong too sometimes it gets it wrong yeah the other day i asked our analytics agent how many people had more than five gigabytes of storage backups for whatsapp on iphone in the us and it told me 90 billion wow incorrect but it did actually say and i got this wrong which i thought it was really good that it said it got it wrong clever but you need a human in the loop like you need a human in the loop both for creativity taste and also review and so the second thing is it's ginny romany's quote ai isn't going to take your job someone using ai is going to take your job and so the second piece is like we're looking at it from a like okay who is the best person at using ai and our team to do these jobs and then the places where it's working really well are analytics so this analytics agent using clawed code is just amazing um and it's got me writing queries again for the first time in like five years yeah um it is working well at scaling creatives it is um i'm making our videos and changing backgrounds you know just like cgi photoshop used to do it just does it better um and so those two areas it's really showing promise and then obviously the summarization composition you know the joke of like turn these five bullet points into an email turn this email into five bullet points all of that stuff so that's why we're seeing it working and it is scaling people and it's making people more productive um you know and then for us yeah i'm like really excited about next year like we've had a bad year in 25 we had an amazing year in 24 i'm pretty hopeful we'll have a great year again next year but that's for all of you to see and judge there you go hey yeah let's let's go back to the ai question which is, you know, you have a huge team probably using a lot of AI.

17:55If you're out there and you do not have a lot of AI usage or you need help with AI or a consultant, what advice would you give somebody to say, are these people or is this candidate good at AI or not? Yeah, I mean, we're seeing for candidates versus an agency or whatever. for candidates we're seeing a barbell distribution basically so right now people coming out of college who've used ai for the last three years basically the people graduating now chat gpt happened in their first year um so the people coming out of college right now who have used it natively in any space the whole way through college they're coming in with a totally different way of working yeah totally different expectations and they are really doing amazingly think about I mean, like people who came in mobile native, people who came in digital native at each generation, it's the same thing.

18:49So first thing I'd say is if you're hiring people out of college, it's important to like get them to tell you what they did with AI and tell you in detail what they did with AI. But if you get people who have been doing stuff, that's going to be amazing for you. The second place we're seeing it really work. So barbell distribution is also very senior experienced people. so like individual contributing engineers who are vp level who are the top kernel expert in linux those folks are just they're such experts in their field they know the right questions to ask the ai and we're watching lots of those folks adopt things like clawed code or gemini or whatever for coding um and they're just absolutely doubling their productivity if they are those very top end people and so first thing i'd look for that i i would expect that pattern to hold the people in the middle of their careers who are like super super busy who are not the world experts in their space and also haven't natively used ai because they haven't had time for the last three years they are aren't as good on average as the people in those ends of the barbell there are exceptions to every rule right um and then the last thing i'd say is so look at those two different classes and then the last thing i'd say is this this question i asked of like ask them what they did with ai like really ask them what they did with it and and and then say you know the five whys comment just how tell me more details oh my god what's a really good prompt for that how did you deal with hallucinations like actually you know ask a bunch of those questions to probe whether they're just saying that they used ai or they can throw out examples of like oh yeah no it hallucinate and it did this crazy thing and what I actually did was I put it in a loop or you know blah blah blah I agree with this well I'm teaching college now and one of the things you have to think through is I let them use as much AI as possible but you have to give them homework that doesn't have an answer yes if it has an answer they will just get to the answer so you have to leave it unstructured and then they can use AI to get to choices or to get to stuff but they can't they have to they actually have to think on top of the answer um yeah and i think as a professor it's actually hard to think through the homework and get it exactly right um and i don't know how you would teach certain things in like accounting or finance where there is an answer well and should you or should you just know there are tools now like we don't ask people to write out spreadsheets by hand we don't ask people to be a typesetter before they can do desktop processing anymore like some things are obsolete and you should expect that the person will use one of these tools in parallel i mean as someone who studied physics everything but thinking through the proof could be done better by a computer exactly but you got to figure out can you actually think or you know you have to you have to push on the thinking front without the grunt front i guess and so the way they did is they pushed on the thinking front in the exams and then for all the coursework and classwork you were just expected to be really good at using computers they just expected you would it wasn't like oh you're going to go and in paper you're going to figure out the gravitational pull of the earth in this particular location no you're actually supposed to be able to write the damn computer program there you go yeah i was doing that gravitational pull thing the other day just for fun hey um so what things should marketers be doing right now to prepare not for 26 but for even for 27 and beyond yeah i mean this is the right question this is the exact right question because i think too many people are preparing for where the world is right now yeah and with ai in particular being this threshold technology that crosses thresholds of capabilities that it's this hill climbing all these different areas if you don't skate to where the puck is going you are going to be really left behind so it's the most important question for everyone to ask i think um you know number one thing i think you need to be doing is get in the flow of information um because how can you know where the puck is going to if you don't actually have the information coming in about decisions people are making where people are moving towards and so on and so forth so you know follow the ai leaders whether it's alex wang on our side whether it's sam whether it's carpathy whether it's other accounts like Rune or whatever but like actually get in there and follow the people posting when you pay the information you're talking about basically the progress of AI around the world that that's that's what you mean by that so that's getting the information large yeah yeah look I mean you can go and you should you should definitely be adopting tools internally using them drilling yourself like I don't know I'm not adding anything to you to tell you to do those things you're intelligent listeners they know that but like I actually think the thing that lots of people are failing to do is get in the information flow even internally um you know when as it happens alex wang who's joined us to lead um meta super intelligence labs i invested in scaled at ai like i don't know seven years ago personally um and you know when he came on board conversations that i'd been having around like the thanksgiving table or hanging out with friends or whatever you know back gaze of silicon valley like yeah i know a lot of people in that in that set right like um sam and and others like that and and suddenly became conversations we were having at work that we hadn't actually been having um in the rooms i was in um and that was really an interesting and enlightening thing for me because stuff that i thought was like very standard actually a lot of folks i worked with didn't know and so that really opened my eyes and I did this with my leadership team I did this with the comms leadership team and there were things like you know um whether you're talking about AI 2027 which is obviously a max doom scenario or whether you're talking about machines of loving grace from Dario or you're talking about Sam's gentle singularity essay you know or all of these different things there are certain just texts that are worth reading that everyone talks about and everyone reads i think there's a really big point here you're making which is ai is not just the tools it's the thinking about how the tools are used and how and the and the the wrong it's the wrong word but the philosophy behind the tools yeah and how people are the philosophy yeah but what's going to be built next that's the question you're asking is what's the future if you're not in the flow of the literature and by the way literature does actually mean literature it means things like ian banks it means things like hen heinlein and the moon is a harsh mistress so it means books as well as these essays as well as what people are tweeting about you'll get the feel of the philosophy exactly what you say and the direction that this industry is going and i know there's 100 200 people probably who matter in this industry and that's it and i'm not one of them um and like if you follow them you can really learn where they're going and therefore you can predict where the technology is going.

25:57I have not heard of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I just like the title, so I'm definitely getting that as soon as we're off. Hey, let's talk about, you know, you're sitting in the center of a lot of B2B interactions too. We have a huge amount of B2B listeners. Give us some thoughts on how the B2B market is evolving and what you see coming down the road yeah and i mean this is another one where the book that the click here um is actually kind of covering it pretty kind of pretty heavily actually because like well you can open and tell us tell us a little bit about the book and then we'll go to the question if you want no i mean it's more like the tools aren't changing that the tools are changing a lot but the principles aren't changing okay which one of the absolute core things for me in the book so you know what's happening with with b2b marketing um i mean a lot of it's staying the same so you need to promote to people in product and you need to actually say to them hey use my product for this please use it for this so whether you're google whether you're us but bluntly whether you're booking.com talking to their their hotels or expedia talking to their hotels like you need to get people to adopt the new tools what are the new tools they're ai they're agentic ai they're getting people to communicate over messaging with their clients um their customers but use not just use whatsapp use whatsapp plus ai agents on top of it you know not just use salesforce but use salesforce plus digital sales reps on top of it but even that's very similar to the past because what's messaging apart from like a faster form of database marketing yes but here's we've had a bunch of uh guests on like john miller and some other folks um you know and who have said look the old marketing funnel and b2b is dead it's it's all like now it's all about product use customer service and relationships do you do you buy that no tell me tell me what you're thinking i think the old funnel isn't there if nobody even knows you exist so if awareness doesn't isn't there well you have to have awareness yes yeah yeah right you know and then you've got to actually manage them fully through the funnel so they've actually got some feelings that they want to use your thing and then you need a button and like i just feel everyone reinvents the wheel and says oh the funnel's dead what you need to do what how did you put it there you said um customer relationship customer experience relationship that uh marketing qualified leads does this sound like nurturing leads to you if you're giving people experience and you're building the relationship.

28:45Doesn't that sound like pretty standard lead nurturing in the middle of the funnel? On CMO Confidential, we try to have all points of view. So we will have a bookend show for this. So I want to flip over to the transition. You led that transmission, or I think from Facebook to out of from a marketing standpoint just give us the inside story on that is that logo right there yeah i see it it's very tastefully played three dimensions by the way yes i have logos everywhere i i they're always there nice very nice actually the guys who did this zach stubenvall is at open ai now and um uh andrew sterk is an anthropic it's like nice and they did this this logo um yeah i mean the rebrand was a really exciting experience um you know i came in the cmo and i said look it's really difficult to be the company facebook and the app facebook and i know there are companies like that um like estee lauder or whatever but the magnitude of facebook as an industry-defining thing like you say social media the first thing you think is facebook yeah you do and it's so industry-defining that it was overwhelming the rest of the products like facebook inc was not getting any credit for building whatsapp into what it's become facebook inc was not getting any credit for instagram yeah and certainly nothing for the innovation that was happening with reality labs whether it's the the whether it's the glasses or whether it's the the headsets like we weren't getting we're doing great on product placement by the way i mean the way you have brought all this stuff out physically it's true yeah you might as well hold up the book there you go excellent well done well done alex um but no like i i think um the corporate brand was blocking people to understand we were doing anything else and also it was hugely confusing so like when we do a privacy update for whatsapp and we said facebook inc blah blah blah blah blah people saw the word facebook and they're like well i don't want facebook involved in my whatsapp reasonably um and it was facebook inc and so i feel for the confusion even on podcast or press when you're talking about facebook our partners journalists others wouldn't know if we were talking about the company or the app a lot of the time and it was really confusing so for me i felt we needed a distinction between the corporation and the app um i was thinking something more like PepsiCo or BMW Group.

31:18I wasn't going the whole way to a full rebrand. So I was like, FB Inc. Or you know what I mean? I was, yeah, like a little holding, a little holding company thing. Totally. Yeah. Alphabet. Um, and Mark was like, no, I actually, I really agree. And I want to do this. He actually, I was in the, I was in the shower when I got the, when I got the call and my phone was just the other side of the glass. And I saw it was like, and I was like, so I jumped down the shower and and he literally was like how quickly can you rebrand um and and can you do it in seven months because we were going to do this um financial segmentation of reality labs oh all right yeah so it's driven by reporting yeah nice okay yeah um and i said yes before talking to anyone on my team like then thought i was insane um but yeah so it was it was really driven by that get rid of this confusion between Facebook corporation and Facebook app and allow the news of all the other stuff we're doing to be actually attributed to the corporation.

32:17And so that has worked really well. Well, thank you for sharing that story. I want to take a stroll further down memory lane and talk about eBay. You know, you were at eBay. We were at eBay together, you know, well over 20 years ago, I think. tell me about lessons learned there and things you've taken away and any other things you want to share yeah ebay was just an incredible in my opinion like university for me um so so i think there are probably as many stories from ebay in the book as there are from facebook yeah that's how important it is to me 20 years on um things i really learned about from ebay i think the number one thing that eBay taught me was incrementality measurement in marketing.

33:11eBay was really good at this. Whether you talk TV and doing DMA-based segmentation and regional analysis of the impact of television, which is one of the first measurement things I worked on at eBay, actually, or you're talking about online marketing, direct response, paid search, and eBay was very smart at actually testing paid search by turning it on and off and not just trusting that the last click data was the correct thing and was really ebay was on the forefront of all of that yeah and honestly all of those principles that ebay taught me are valid today when you buy social media about i mean search hasn't changed search is still last click wins in terms of how and obviously that's exactly what i i do like my colleagues at google and i wouldn't have my career without google but it is in their favor to optimize for last click winning that's just like not just in their favor like completely in their favor it's it's like you start the match up two nil yeah absolutely so i mean look more credit to them they're doing exactly the right thing strategically but ebay taught me about incrementality measurement do you remember when we turned off all of paid search yes i do right and what happened was the numbers moved differently to what we expected based on our post-click tracking and we had to turn them off because uh google was launching google pay and they had bust they had put buses to take all the people away from meg whitman's speech at ebay live in boston i was there that wasn't that was that was it was like the tea party incident that was so insane and so we retaliated by turning off our ads yeah and we were such a bidder in google what was crazy is google learned from this too because we were a low price bidder on every keyword basically at google and google saw their revenues drop more than they expected on losing us because we dropped out the auction on all these auctions and we saw that google was actually more impactful than we thought it was right because the numbers went down more than we predicted and that taught us about incrementality and so it was actually like just the learnings i had on incrementality so many things like brilliant people, talent, organizational structure, rhythm of business, you know, communications, dashboarding.

35:26But if I was to take one thing away, it's eBay taught me how to do incrementality measurement in large scale online marketing. And that is one of the two core pillars of my, of my book. We'll talk about that in a second, but that was also when frenemies fight. Yeah. I mean, that was like, you know, it's such a huge relationship and have that fight break out at an eBay live event. I mean, that was quite - And also, all the people involved in paid search on both sides had nothing to do with the fight. Yeah. Right? They were just like, we just want to sell you ads and we want to buy ads. But like the rest of our companies have just gone to war.

36:02Yes. And it was. Any other lessons from eBay? Because eBay had at the time a hugely dominant position in tech and it's moved from that position now. When you look back at it, any observations i mean there's so many so two other lessons that i throw out one is ebay's when i joined right after i joined ebay stock dropped i don't know if it was half or a third but right when i joined ebay stock fell off a cliff and with the stock falling off a cliff um a bunch of people left and it was actually like a challenging time and whatever and the people who made it through who stayed through the stock drop and who saw eBay through some of the turnaround to get it back onto a good path were some of the best people I ever worked with and some of the people who saw the stock drop and hit the doors they were not as effective um and so it really did it really did sort of say to me hey you need to look for people who have been at the company and have gone through a dip and and if they've gone through a dip made it through and been successful that's a good way to get signal that they're competent and really effective.

37:12Doesn't mean they can't be otherwise, but that was a lesson. Well, that toughness and resilience and the ability to handle, you know, tough times, which almost every company has a tough time. Certainly every team does. What? Every team, for sure. Oh, we got it done. Even if a company doesn't, you know? And every leader does, too. So, hey, tell us about your book. We've referenced it a couple of times. You held it up. You can hold it up again if you want. It was a great prop placement. You were doing great on that. There you go. Tell us about your book, why you wrote it, what's in it.

37:49Yeah, look, I mean, I think there, I personally think, and maybe that's not fair, but I personally think there aren't, there isn't a great guide to digital marketing, the basics, like how to do paid search, how to do social media, how to think about organic versus display, how to do product-led growth using in-product promotions what the basic infrastructure is you need from a martech stack from an agency stack from a team you know stack and so like what i wanted to do was do a good book that would be a good reference book for anyone who you know maybe they are um maybe they're new to the industry maybe they're from not the marketing team but they're from say finance and they want to understand how to talk to marketing about marketing or how to judge it maybe they're a new business group leader and they've been sales or product and they want to now learn the marketing function you know or they're a marketing leader who's been in i don't know out of home and now wants to transition to do more digital there are lots of different things but like a guide where you can pick up the guide and it just helps you get from zero to one i'll say 0.5 to one um in this field because people were always asking me for it and the one didn't exist so that's the fundamental reason i wanted to write it the reason the company let me write it is this point i made earlier like the world of internet marketing is well it's sort of two things one i'm the cmo of a company that sells ads there you go our team want me to do thought leadership on ads which is not unreasonable and for me appearing on stage with jlo as a thought leadership moment is not my vibe but like writing a semi-academic text on how to do online marketing that's very me and so that was that was that was one part but the second part is this point around incrementality like i believe it's a strategy credit for us that we want people to do incrementality measurements that we that it actually favors us when people look at incrementality measurement over post-click tracking you and i both know that like that's the right way to measure things not just take credit because someone clicked you should actually say i ran the ad i didn't run the ad what happened to my results but it is a battle we're fighting in the marketplace especially against google but the rest of search in general and so getting out there and talking about incrementality measurement is like really important and so that's motivation for me i want to give something back to the industry all the money's going to charity i'm not taking a penny of royalties from it it really is just a gift to the industry from from my perspective for the company it's actually aligned with what we want from me as the CMO to do thought leadership on ads and in general we're fighting a battle to argue for incrementality measurement over post-click tracking.

40:33Yeah my thing was always like why did they do it it's one thing to know they did it it's why and the why almost always explain the incrementality so you can't just oh the why is very valuable and you can really get to what drove the increment like oh I didn't know that thing was available great that's a great reason you know what I mean right you know for example well this brings us to our traditional last question it's a two-parter you can take both or one but you must take at least one practical advice we haven't talked about yet or funniest story you can share on the air you can take both or one but you must take at least one

41:15uh maybe both uh as one answer talk yourself out we love both so i love affiliate marketing it is my first love it is like how i paid for college it's awesome at the same time affiliate marketing has a lot of fraud and a lot of what isn't necessarily fraud but isn't exactly what you're trying to pay for so when i was at ebay with you um and i'm not going to talk about the big affiliate fraud case i'm going to talk about something smaller because that was a big one oh i was sure it was the defining one for the industry and i i do write it up in the book but when i was at ebay we changed from confirmed registered users which is you registered and you confirmed your email address to activated confirmed registered users you registered you confirmed your email address and you bid on something you bought something you listed something you activated and we changed all the payouts for that and in general it was a massively positive move it changed our landing pages we were landing people on the registration form it changed us to use the search landing page it put us in a place where we were incentivizing the right behaviors and it produced great results for ebay however in affiliates we got a new we got we had a class of affiliates uh who were called incentive affiliates and they would incentivize people to do things and one had a computer game and in the computer game you would get extra lives for doing things by clicking on affiliate link and doing what they asked you to do and so they did this they said we would like you to sign up for ebay and we would like you to activate we would like you to place a bid and so their users did that on mass and we paid out a bunch of money to this affiliate and by the way completely inside our terms this was not in any violation of our terms yeah yeah yeah and so they did this and then what happened was chargebacks spiked and people kept winning auctions and then saying well i didn't want to win it i was just doing it for the extra life in the game and so they were like charging back on their cards they were like not paying they were you know doing all these different things and so it caused a big spike in what we considered sort of fraud or bad behavior on the ebay site because this affiliate had done exactly what they're incentivized for and what was completely inside our terms the unintended consequence of compensation is always there and there it is number one rule of affiliates is affiliates will do exactly what you pay them for exactly better look very closely at what you're paying them for.

43:41Well, my other rule is if there's a hole in the logic, the marketplace will find it and exploit it to pieces before you even know it's there. So you better test it all. Okay, you said you had two things you wanted to say. No, that was two in one. I think that's a funny story. That was two in one. Know what you're paying them for. All right, so thank you, Alex. I think that's a great way to end the show. and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you are enjoying the show, please like, share, and subscribe. New shows drop every Tuesday. We have over 150 shows. They're on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

44:24And they include Why Can Can't? Is Your Next Best Customer in AI Bot? The Unfairness and Disparate Impact of Privacy Policy and Dissecting Compensation. understanding negotiating and managing pay hey all you marketers stay safe out there this is mike linton signing off for cmo confidential