Alex Schultz
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Alex Schultz

Alex Schultz

I’m Chief Data Officer at Meta, the company’s first, and the author of Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising.

I joined Facebook in 2007 and have spent nearly two decades at the centre of how the world’s largest social platforms grow, measure and market themselves. I built the company’s data science and analytics teams, led growth through the billion-user era, served as Chief Marketing Officer from 2020, and took on the Chief Data Officer role in July 2026 to lead Meta’s transition to AI-led analytics.

“If you joined Facebook at any time over the past decade, Alex Schultz probably had something to do with it.”
Financial Times, 2019

In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg publicly marked my ten-year anniversary at the company, writing that I was “one of a small handful of people that I can say without his work, our community would not have connected more than 2 billion people around the world.”

Career

  • eBay (2004–2007), Marketing Manager, leading global targeting for eBay’s onsite merchandising.
  • Facebook / Meta (2007–present), joined in 2007. I built the data science and data engineering teams, and as VP of Growth played a key role in scaling Facebook, Instagram and Messenger past one billion users. I rose to VP of Analytics, became Chief Marketing Officer in 2020, leading the company’s 2021 rebrand from Facebook to Meta, and was named one of the world’s most influential CMOs by Forbes in 2024. I became Meta’s first Chief Data Officer in July 2026, leading analytics, data science, data engineering, competitive intelligence and user research.

Boards and academic roles

I’ve given guest lectures at Stanford, Berkeley Haas, Oxford, Kellogg/Northwestern and Nanyang, delivered a keynote for Fundación Rafael del Pino, and I’m the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

Books

  • Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising (Wildfire / Little, Brown, 2025). A field guide to modern digital marketing, from goal-setting and channel selection to creative testing and measurement. All of my royalties go to education charities.
  • Making Paper Planes (Parragon, 2005), from paperairplanes.co.uk, the paper aeroplane website I founded and ran for twenty years.

Profiles

Education and honours

I have an MSc in Natural Sciences from Magdalene College, Cambridge, specialising in experimental and theoretical physics. I’m an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, and a Member of the Guild of Benefactors at the University of Cambridge, in recognition of my charitable giving towards education.

In the press

Latest thinking

I write notes on marketing and measurement — shorter, evolving pieces behind the cheat sheets. Most recent: What happens in an AI Agent first marketing world (29 September 2026).