The idea sustainable growth requires both short-term tactics and long-term brand building is widely accepted. Yet the industry often draws a line between the two, calling the former ‘performance marketing’ and the latter ‘brand’.

Alex Schultz, CMO and vice-president of analytics at Meta, the company often credited with driving the rise of performance marketing, wants to retire that terminology.

“For an industry and at a company level, it’s just demoralising to call one performance and one brand,” he explains. “It hurts the one that’s not being called performance in loads of different ways.”

Schultz, whose background is in direct response marketing, argues splitting the organisation into brand and performance teams undermines the notion of brand building altogether.

“If there is a part of your organisation that’s called performance and a part called brand, and you bring that to the CFO…which one is the CFO going to put money on? The CFO is going to put money on the one that’s called performance,” he explains.

Instead, Schultz prefers to use the terms “direct response” and “brand” on the basis that “everything performs”.

This is one of the most competitive moments in the tech industry there’s been in my career.

Alex Schultz, Meta

As an example, he points to Meta’s Super Bowl campaign earlier this year for its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The campaign, which starred Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt and Kris Jenner, not only lifted awareness but also increased US sales by a third compared to the year before.

“We directly drove sales with a pure brand campaign,” he says. “So to say it’s brand and performance would be a misnomer, because the brand stuff performed. It drove brand metrics, but it also drove sales.”

From direct response to CMO

Schultz first joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2007, tasked with integrating product and direct response marketing across the company. Over the following years, he played a key role in scaling Facebook, Instagram and Messenger to more than 1 billion users.

In 2020, he assumed his current global role, overseeing marketing, product, analytics, global experience, insights and creative.

As vice-president of analytics, Schultz also leads Meta’s data-science and data-engineering teams, setting strategy, providing business intelligence and driving user growth and engagement. He recently authored the book ‘Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising’.

Notably, in 2021, Schultz and his team led the company’s rebrand from Facebook to Meta. This background gives him what he describes as rare credibility.

“You don’t have that many marketers who’ve grown up the direct response route to be the CMO,” he notes.

Finance has three main dialects, not one uniform language

Nearly two decades inside one of the world’s largest technology companies has also taught him how to build strong relationships internally, particularly with finance.

“When I became CMO, I didn’t know what terms like ‘timeless’ or ‘iconic’ or ‘moving at the speed of culture’ meant. Now I’m using those terms natively, because I’ve spent five years working with the creative teams on brand advertising,” says Schultz.

“But I do always remember that my partners elsewhere in the business don’t know what I mean when I’m saying these words.”

He stresses the value of empathy for finance teams, speaking their language and understanding the CFO is often the second most powerful person in the company after the CEO.

“You should just recognise [finance] is a more powerful function and that really means you need to do the running. They don’t need to do the running,” he adds.

“Think of them first and then you have a good hope of working with them. If you do that consistently, then when you get to an impasse and a difficult point, you can put your foot down and nobody can say you were unreasonable. It’s more likely to go well for you with the CEO or board if you’ve got a good track record of always going to finance, and not being pugnacious and an ass when dealing with them.”

Meta’s AI ambitions

Despite differences in language, AI is an innovation all functions in business are grappling with.

Meta has been investing heavily in AI, pouring billions into recruiting top researchers and building the infrastructure needed to pursue what CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as “superintelligence” – an AI system he hopes will eventually surpass human capability.

Zuckerberg has also teased his ambition for a fully autonomous AI advertising platform capable of creating ads, managing budgets, setting strategy and hitting performance goals with limited human input. AI-driven advertising sits at the centre of Meta’s evolution. In 2024, advertising accounted for more than 97% of the company’s total revenue.

In its latest Q3 earnings, the tech giant earned $51.24bn (£38.5bn) in quarterly revenue, $50bn (£37.5bn) of that from advertising.

You should just recognise [finance] is a more powerful function and that really means you need to do the running. They don’t need to do the running.

Alex Schultz, Meta

Much of that revenue comes from small and medium-sized businesses. Schultz argues AI will give SMBs “superpowers” traditionally reserved for large brands.

“It used to be that if you wanted to target certain demographics, or if you wanted to target people who might be interested in your product, you had to buy out a slot in a magazine or a slot in a TV show. That wouldn’t be accessible to a small business,” he says.

“With internet advertising, they can buy bite-sized amounts of media that’s targeted to exactly the right people. Now, AI takes that to the next level.”

According to Schultz, AI enables far more granular targeting both on paid and organic, and lowers the barrier to advanced creative and media tools that once only big brands with big budgets could access.

“The general trajectory is small businesses are being given these powers that before you could only afford if you had the scale where you could build a creative team or you could hire a top-tier agency,” he adds.

A role for humans and agencies

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg made headlines after sitting down with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson to discuss the future of advertising.

“We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out,” Zuckerberg told Thompson. “I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

Despite Meta’s AI ambitions, Schultz promises there is still a role for humans and agencies.

“You need humans in the loop,” he says. “Agencies help big companies adopt tools, whether that’s new media buying, whether that’s new creative tools, whether that’s new channels. The agency business has reinvented itself two or three times in my 25 years in the industry.”

More importantly, Schultz says, agencies remain important for cross-platform measurement at a time when no platform is able to provide that.

“You’re not going to trust Google to determine what Meta did. You’re not going to trust Meta to tell you what Google did. You’re not going to trust either of us to determine what Snapchat, Reddit and TikTok did,” he says.

“So the agencies will be there as a layer that can actually be independent and look across companies. The agencies can help the business adopt the tools and actually, obfuscate that complexity for them.”

Meta claims new tech ‘redefining’ advertising as an ‘AI agent’

Meta has also recently come under fire for claims that the company earns about 10% of its annual revenue – roughly $16bn (£12bn) – from ads promoting scams and banned goods, as first reported by Reuters on 6 November.

According to Reuters, Meta’s internal documents show the company had, for at least three years, failed to detect and block a surge of ads exposing users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to fraudulent ecommerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and banned medical products.

Schultz claims these figures are “inflated and misrepresented”, adding that Meta has reduced user reports of scams by 50% in the last year. He explains that the quoted numbers relating to ads promoting scams are what could be at risk, rather than the total number.

“The fact that we have large numbers of what might be at risk, which is bigger than what the real number is, is because we’re trying to find it and drive it down.”

He acknowledges AI has given scammers new advantages, but insists Meta does not “benefit from this in the way that it’s been said we do”.

“We lose users when they get scammed and they blame us for it. It’s actually really important for us to drive it down,” he says.

He describes it as a “continual arbitrage battle”, which the company plans to continue to “fight back” against.

Meta to introduce paid ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram in the UK

So, what’s on the priority list for 2026 for the CMO of one of the biggest companies in the world? Firstly, it is to understand Meta’s competitors from TikTok to Google to OpenAI.

“This is one of the most competitive moments in the tech industry there’s been in my career,” Schultz explains. “My number one focus area is to be really good at competitive intelligence and understand what’s going on in the industry. Like really deeply understand that.”

His current priorities also include supporting Meta’s emerging businesses, including its AI agents, which enable businesses to automate customer engagement and provide product recommendations, as well as to “sell a lot of glasses”.

In September, Zuckerberg revealed three new pairs of AI glasses to the world. These include new top-end AI-powered glasses, the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which have a display in one of the lenses, an updated version of Meta’s popular budget tie-up with Ray-Ban and a new sports version designed by Oakley.

“A priority is to help the new businesses, because I do think a lot of our core have good leaders and I don’t want to get in their way, but we need the new businesses to get on their feet,” Schultz adds.