Soul & Science : #97: Meta CMO & VP of Analytics Alex Schultz | Measuring the Unmeasurable
SHOW NOTES
What you can measure drives growth, but what you can’t often drives breakthroughs.
Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics at Meta (and author of the upcoming book Click Here), joins Jason Harris to unpack the soul and science behind decisions that move billions of people: the rebrand from Facebook to Meta, launching Threads to 400M MAU, the retention curve that signaled Ray-Ban Meta glasses were a hit, and why a great creative brief is the beating heart of iconic work.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Retention is the clearest signal of product-market fit—and the metric that decides whether to scale
✅ Separate goals from metrics to avoid chasing numbers at the expense of strategy
✅ Measure the measurable with rigor to earn credibility for the initiatives you can’t perfectly track
✅ AI will transform marketing in three ways: making current work cheaper, unlocking previously uneconomical tactics, and enabling entirely new formats
Memorable Moments:
💡 “The decision to change the brand was science. Everything else was art.”
💡 “We couldn’t test the Meta rebrand—we had to keep it secret.”
💡 “A metric can never perfectly describe a goal.”
💡 “Incrementality is everything. If I do something, I want it to make a difference.”
Brought to you by Mekanism.
Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics at Meta (and author of the upcoming book Click Here), joins Jason Harris to unpack the soul and science behind decisions that move billions of people: the rebrand from Facebook to Meta, launching Threads to 400M MAU, the retention curve that signaled Ray-Ban Meta glasses were a hit, and why a great creative brief is the beating heart of iconic work.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Retention is the clearest signal of product-market fit—and the metric that decides whether to scale
✅ Separate goals from metrics to avoid chasing numbers at the expense of strategy
✅ Measure the measurable with rigor to earn credibility for the initiatives you can’t perfectly track
✅ AI will transform marketing in three ways: making current work cheaper, unlocking previously uneconomical tactics, and enabling entirely new formats
Memorable Moments:
💡 “The decision to change the brand was science. Everything else was art.”
💡 “We couldn’t test the Meta rebrand—we had to keep it secret.”
💡 “A metric can never perfectly describe a goal.”
💡 “Incrementality is everything. If I do something, I want it to make a difference.”
Brought to you by Mekanism.
Soul & Science
Does marketing live in the heart, or in the head? Should you trust your instinct, or your integers? If the answer is both, should you lead with one more than the other? As a creative agency, Mekanism has been asking these questions of ourselves and our clients for over 10 years. Join co-founder and CEO of award-winning creative agency Mekanism, Jason Harris, on his quest to answer these questions with the world’s leading marketers from the brands we’ve all come to love. Named CEO of the Year by The Drum Magazine, Jason will draw from his experience during these easily digestible 20-minute episodes to explore the Soul of these famous brands and the Science of staying relevant, exploring how they’ve become culture defining emblems in our modern world.
Brought to you by Mekanism
Brought to you by Mekanism
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