USA – Social media giant Facebook has named a new chief marketing officer, its vice president for analytics Alex Schultz.
Last August, the news on the resignation of then CMO Antonio Lucio made headlines with Lucio making the announcement on a Facebook post, revealing his desire to focus on advocating for diversity and inclusion.
Just like his predecessor, Schultz took to the platform the official announcement. He said that Lucio left a great team behind as well as some huge shoes for him to fill.
“Gracias, Antonio for being a great friend, colleague, creative leader and voice of experience and wisdom for this company. I am sorry to see you go and grateful for your support through this process,” wrote Schultz.
“You have strengthened our ability to tell meaningful, culturally relevant stories with our family of brands. I hope to build on this and bring my experience in segmentation, targeting, and measurement to bear as we work to reach people more meaningfully through our product,” added Schultz.
Schultz has been with Facebook’s analytics team since 2007, where he started as an analyst before eventually rising the ladder to become vice president. Prior to Facebook, he was marketing manager for eCommerce platform eBay.
In the post, Schultz took the liberty to make a deep backtrack of his background. He shared that his expertise has been specially built around direct response online marketing and analytics.
“My background is direct response online marketing and analytics. I did that as a hobby at high school, helped pay for college with it,” shared Schultz.
“I have grown up in online marketing and believe deeply in the economic empowerment it can bring, its ability to show people more tailored, relevant, less annoying ads, and the fact it allows us to serve everyone by offering our products for free,” he added.
Schultz also touched on the growing criticism towards technology and stands firm on Facebook’s positive mission.
“I believe deeply in the good Facebook’s products do. We have all seen it through this pandemic as billions of people have connected with family and friends socially online while staying physically apart and slowing the spread of the virus. At the same time, I think scrutiny of any new technology is appropriate and there are ways we can, and should, improve without losing all the good.
In the concluding statement of his post, the new CMO took the opportunity to reveal that he is “openly gay,” to which he said is something that he “couldn’t say” when he moved to America and joined the industry.
“Facebook is the first place I have felt truly safe to be gay and be open about it. I’m really grateful for that and the fact Mark [Zuckerberg] built a company where that was possible. The bar, of course, keeps raising on this but the difference from [15years ago] when I started out to today, is truly remarkable.”