Alex Schultz of Meta on The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising

(upbeat music) - This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall. - Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall. Today, we have Alex Schultz of Meta with us. He's got a new book coming out. It's called Click Here, the Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising. He has had an amazing path that has started all the way back with paper airplanes. And he's gonna tell us what that has to do with all of this. But Alex, thanks for joining us today. - Thank you for joining me. I'm afraid I have tea rather than coffee, but I feel it's okay 'cause I'm British. - You know, we've had Seth Godin and many others have showed up with tea and I'm actually already transitioned to water. So that's perfectly fine with us. So you're the CMO and VP of Analytics at Meta, overseeing global marketing and analytics, but let's start with the paper airplane thing. Like, what's that all about? - Oh yeah, I mean, paper airplanes, I had a website when I was a kid. My dad was an aeronautical engineer by training and he taught me a lot of paper airplanes as a kid. So for the website, which was on GeoCities, for those of us with gray hair or in my case, no hair, the GeoCities site had fun science experiments. It had paper airplanes, it had Formula One and the paper airplanes bit started doing well. And so that was very exciting. It did well on Alta Vista, Dogpile, all of those old search engines. And that started getting me into ranking and search engines. And so once I started doing that, I got into online marketing, I got into having my own website, coding my own website, I built a cocktail site, I built the largest butterfly tattoo site on earth, which was an experience all to do with online marketing. And that was how I got the passionate interest in the field. - Right, and okay, so this is classic. You were there at ground zero when this started. And so you were one of the first people that were able to get this understanding of how it works and where it goes. So at what point did you connect with, then was Facebook now meta? - Yeah, I mean, it was about, it was very early on in Facebook existing. I think 2004, 2005, Cambridge was added as a school. And so I was an alumni and you could join with an alumni email. So I joined in 2005. At that point, I just moved to the US to work for eBay in the US. And I just saw this thing growing. I started trying buying the Flyers ads that Facebook had at the time. And I just saw this thing was gonna be revolutionizing. It was both gonna grow, I knew that, but it was gonna revolutionize online marketing because you would have user IDs tied to people seeing ads, which let you do really interesting measurement stuff on incrementality. So that convinced me in 2006 to apply, I interviewed, I actually got hired, but I didn't have a green card. I was on an L1 visa that couldn't transfer between companies. And so I couldn't leave eBay and join Metta. So I had to actually Facebook as it was. So I had to get a green card. And that's why it took until 2007 until I joined Facebook as was. So it was really early on, I kind of latched on to Facebook. - Now, you've been credited by Mark Zuckerberg for having grown this to billions of active users. You've advised startups, including Airbnb. You've gone through this whole stretch, but like at what point where you're like, okay, I need to now write a book or did somebody come to you and say, hey, you've got to write a book? What was the genesis? - Yeah, I mean, Mark said I'm one of the people. Like, there's a lot of people who've done a lot of very good, there's a small group, but like there's a lot of people who are really important to the success. Yeah, the book, I decided I wanted to do it. So I thought for two reasons. One, I think it's a really good thing for the company. I'm asked continually as CMO of a company that sells ads to do thought leadership. And you'll laugh, the first time they tried to have me do it, they wanted me to be on stage with JLo. And it's just not very genuine to who I am, whereas a little bit more of a like, here's a how-to guide that's actually really thoughtfully written, there's trying to be thought leadership in the industry, that fits with who I am. So one is for the company. And the other one is, I just really, lots of people asked me for this book. And so that really triggered me into like, I should really just write it myself, I've got the thoughts. And so that was what kind of made me say, hey, I should write a book, when is a different matter? But that got me over wanting to do it. - Right, right. Well, tell us a little bit more about kind of the when though, where you, did you think that like, oh, the time will come for it? Or was there some kind of triggering event? Like what actually got it started? - The time will come, the time will come, the time will come, I kept thinking. And then I told my boyfriend that I'd done a little bit of an outline for a book and I might think about doing it. And he was like, that's amazing, you should do it. And that was, I guess a year and a half ago now. And that really pushed me over into, okay, yeah, I can start writing this. So I started writing it on planes when sort of he pushed me into it. And then there was a kind of initial resistance 'cause we don't have a good history with people writing books about the company. And so initially there was some resistance. And so then I said, well, it's okay, I don't wanna piss anyone off, I won't do it. And then my boss told me that he really thought I should write this book and it would be a good thing. This guy Xavier Olivan, our COO, weirdly in National Trust fell break tea shop in the middle of Norfolk on a holiday where him and my good friend Naomi were visiting me. And so that was the second big thing that pushed me over and said, okay, no, I'm gonna really push for it. If my boss is telling me I should do this, I'll do it. So it was my boyfriend and my boss and my very close colleague Naomi, those three people kind of pushed me over to do it when I did it. - Okay, well, I'm blown away when you said year and a half. I mean, 'cause I've talked to plenty of people to get, I don't wanna say stuck in a rut, but kind of because of the process they go through, it ends up being like five years or whatever. So you, once you decided to do it, you got it done. And I do, we hear over and over again, time on planes. When you have these weird four or five hour chunks where you can sit down and hand around, that's huge to have that. So you basically decided to do it and just started rolling? - Yeah, that's it. And the crazy thing to some extent of my life like this year, so editing was the hardest bit of the book. I knew what I wanted to say. I have the outline of what I thought, the basics, the infrastructure, the channels. I knew how I wanted to break down the channels. I had a really good idea of what I wanted to say. The hardest bit was the editing, that was stressful. And partly 'cause it's like, wow, I'm an idiot, when people give you feedback. And partly 'cause it was heavyweight. But because I was the corporate representative for the antitrust trial for Metta versus the FTC and DC earlier this year, I spent two whole months living in DC, but I had a lot of flights back and forth home to keep my home life going. And during that period, I was able to do a lot of editing, line editing, all of that work on the plane. So I got even more plane time this year, which sped up the process. - Yeah, I throw this line for almost every author we say, and listeners are probably tired of hearing it, but we see this where, the big thing with writing the book is when you think you're 90% done, you actually still have 90% of the work because of the editing, it's just so brutal. - The book increased by 50% during the editing. The editors were like, you should have an example here, you need an example here, you need an example here. That was basically, and there was also, you've missed an entire chapter on AI, please write a chapter on AI. And I was like, oh, okay. - To get that going. Now, another thing as you have a huge depth of experience, and I unfortunately, in a ton of gray hair too, you mentioned Ogilvy on advertising, which is just the touchstone in such an amazing book. So through the process, how much was that a guiding force for what you were doing? - Yeah, it really was, 'cause I want the book to be complimentary. I consider there's sort of three books that I'm building on. There's "Claude C. Hopkins," "Scientific Advertising," there's "Rossa Reeves," "Reality and Advertising," both of which were in Ogilvy's bibliography. And then there's Ogilvy on advertising. And so what I wanted to do is make sure that I was building on the stuff that had gone before and not trying to reinvent the wheel and doing stuff that people can't just answer already using another major marketing time. So it was a guide, but a big chunk of the guide was to not duplicate it and only do updates where updates made sense. So one area where I did an update was hiring a team and how to get hired, where Ogilvy covers a lot of that. I think that's a bit different now actually, because of the nature of the channels and technologies that you need to hire for. So I did an update there, but most of it, I just said, look, Ogilvy covers amazing stuff. I don't need to explain to people how to do billboards or television or radio. I can build on how his love of direct mail turns into email and SMS and push notifications, but the fundamentals are still there. And so what I'm trying to do is make it a compliment to those amazing historic books that I respect so much. - Yeah, no, that's obvious, 'cause it's just, there is a need for that. There's kind of some of those staple books that everybody reads. And yeah, I mean, I could see this becoming easily. We've seen a number of books that just go the college route. It becomes the digital marketing book. - That would be my dream. That would be my absolute dream for this book. It's not bestseller list, but if some professors that I respected it enough to use it in their courses, that would be like a dream for me. - Okay, so the big three parts, you've got basics, infrastructure and channels is the framework of the thing. Was that it from the start, or did you start writing and that kind of emerged as the way it should be put together? - So I wrote it essentially like that, but I didn't actually plan to have these big sections. So I just wrote the chapters in order. What it kind of said was like, these are the chapters I think that you need to write this book. And so I wrote out the chapters I thought that were needed. And then I think it was my editor, Alex Clark, but I worry I'm complimenting the wrong person, but he was critical to the entire thing. So I can't not compliment him. But Alex did just this like fabulous job of advising me throughout this and suggested that we do it in sections. Pretty sure it was him. And that was, that came from someone else. So I didn't come up with the sections. I named all of the chapters. And then someone else suggested, "Hey, you should do it in sections." I thought, "Yes." - Now the great thing is you've had a chance to do this at the highest level of volume. You know, we have tons of our listeners are at $10 million companies and a fair amount at 100, but you've seen the volume at the highest level. So you get a better view of things. And so under the basics, we've got conversion, channel, targeting, creative. I wanted to talk about targeting though, you know, both what works in targeting and the big one for me is untargeting. Like why don't we see more untargeting and why aren't companies doing this to make things work better? - Yeah, I mean, I'd say I've done, I've done big and small, right? Like my paper airplanes website, my cocktail website, my friends with a little bit in breakfast, like evenly startups, even basically Facebook when I joined were small to medium, not mega corpse. Yeah, I mean, I think untargeting is really important for big, big, big companies because you're in a position where if you're Google, if you're Facebook, if you're YouTube, if you're Instagram or WhatsApp, like most people use your service on earth. And so if you're buying ads to make someone aware of the service or you're buying ads to make someone actually click and convert working through the funnel, you should really be working hard to make sure you're showing an ad to someone who doesn't already know about your service or isn't already using it spending on your conversion action. So for the big, big companies, that makes sense. If you're a small business in a local area, you may well need to untarget as well because actually everyone already knows you. But if you're a small business in a very big area or a medium business or a growing startup, you're wasting your time and money. If you're focused on untargeting, you need to be focused on finding incremental customers. The only Delta I'd have on that is if the algorithm starts to learn to show your ad to people who are already your customers and you get a lot of feedback on that or you see the results are suggesting you're getting lots of clicks from existing users, then you really need to look at very hard, how do you get those users out of your cookie pool and only target people who aren't using your service right now. - And then a bunch of stuff on infrastructure that's interesting. The one thing that really hit was talking about lifetime value. And you're saying that when you're doing testing, you should be running for a year or more to kind of figure out what those numbers are and what affects it and what works and doesn't work. Can you just give us more detail on that and your philosophy on as you're measuring lifetime value and how that works? - Yeah. One thing I'm really happy with in the book is I've actually put in a real lifetime value chart that I used during my early days at Metta, Facebook as was, for advertiser value. And I think it's valuable 'cause there aren't that many of those charts out there in the public. So you can see it and you can see what the shape of that chart looks like for a company with at that stage, only a few hundred thousand advertisers ever signed up. And so it really lets you see how quickly the curve flattens out when you're calculating lifetime value. So look, my philosophy is ideally what you do is you look at for everyone who registered, how much money do they make you on the first day, second day, third day, fourth day, each day going out to 365 days. If your product has only been around for a year, so you're very early on in defining what your lifetime value is, obviously you'll have a very small number of customers for which you have 365 days of data. So the signal to noise will go down as you go through the year in terms of the lifetime value. What you should see is that initially, and you should make sure, by the way, it is all customers who have been active, who have been acquired 365 days ago, 364, not just active because the percent that stay active is part of what drives down your lifetime value. So you wanna use all customers who registered to find the lifetime value of the registration and then you sum the amount under the curve. Okay, classic lifetime value calculation, it's all in the book, you can follow it along. The thing that's really interesting in the curve I show in the book is it's not a theoretical curve, it flattens out after only about a month or two, and then it becomes very, very flat out. And that proves that for that curve, when you've acquired a cohort of advertisers, you can probably predict two months in, three months in, what their one year value will be because it's so clear that it flattens out. And I've seen that time and time again with different businesses, both clients of ours, startups have advised us ourselves. And so that's a really useful thing to understand. So basically what I try and do is I try and have a year of data to calculate lifetime value. If I can't get a year, I try and at least get to the point where the curve flattens out and then predict out to a year based on where the curve flattens out. And that tends to work, I've given a real world example in the book with real data. - Yeah, for folks that are at the highest level of marketing, like that's the gold right there. You're actually giving them something that's actionable and that they can dig in. And so in the same vein, you talk about marginal return on investment too. I don't see a lot of people getting that deep into it and drawing that demarcation of, they just kind of consider it a linear function. And it's just usually not. But I mean, talk to us more about that as far as from your experience across the board now, when do these things start to drop off and how rapidly does it drop off? Do you have rules of thumb now that you live by? - Yeah, I mean, this is such an important thing at the absolute core of online marketing, which is online auction-based advertising systems actually behave pretty close to perfect economic systems. They really do. So economic rules work very well for them. One of the most obvious ones is dimension return costs. So the first $100 you spend always makes you more money if you're competent than the last $100 you spend on pretty much anything. And so what you should see is that as you spend more, the return that you get for each dollar you spend should decrease. That works for Google, that works for YouTube, that works for Instagram, that works for Facebook, that works for TikTok in my direct experience and all of those channels. It's a little different when I say by TV or whatever because you're buying chunks, you're not buying it on an auction basis. And so I find the internet channels behave differently in my experience to the historic analog channels. What you then need to do is calculate at each point on that curve what your ROI is at the point on the curve. So what is your ROI for your $100, $1,000, $10,000, millionth dollar that you're spending in a given time period, in a given channel? And when you have that, you should make sure that ROI is greater than zero. And too many people I see just plot a direct line and do the average ROI and then they'll last like 10, 20% of their spend they're losing money on and they'd literally have a higher ROI if they cut the last 10, 20% off. I learned that very early days at eBay, we found allocating just deciding to allocate on marginal ROI so that Google and Yahoo had the same marginal ROI gave us something like a 40% increase in ROI, which was huge for our finance partners and obviously made us look like geniuses. So this thing about allocating based on marginal versus average ROI is very important. And the other thing people miss is they always do brand bidding, mushed in with non-brand bidding. And that really skews your numbers. - Well, yeah, and give us a quick plug on that too. Just basic stance on brand bidding. - Yeah, so I hate brand name bidding. I hate doing it. I think it's always bad and I do it. So I think it's a really interesting fact. So I literally was just reviewing this for 2026 budgeting for our advertising business. So we buy the keyword for Facebook ads. When you're searching for Facebook ads, we buy the keyword. So why do we buy it? We buy it because when you search for Facebook ads, you see LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok appearing above our organic search result. And people do actually click on those versus Facebook ads. And we have time and time again with testing proven that for Facebook ads and Instagram ads, we need to buy that keyword or else someone will go and buy on Pinterest or LinkedIn or TikTok instead. Fascinating. For Facebook or for WhatsApp as a keyword on Google, we don't buy it in the United States because you don't see that same effect. And so fundamentally I dislike brand name bidding. Your bidding and your claiming credit for something that all happened top of the funnel, people's awareness, they want to use you already. I believe always in testing and my team can always convince me to do something I don't want to do. If they test appropriately and they can prove to me and then back up with some level of logic that we should do something different to what I want. So I do do brand name bidding. I'm just very rigorous about test it and split it out when you're looking at the results because it skews the results so heavily. - All right, that's great. We just have to take another second. We want to thank NetSuite for their support of marketing over coffee and we thank them for their support of the show. You spend a lot of time talking about agencies and this is something, you know, it's kind of like how much do you bring inside? How do you go out and get talent who already knows? Like don't reinvent the wheel. And so one, just a nugget that I pulled out, you're saying that a lot of times you've got around three or four agencies that are doing stuff for you. Is that kind of a rule of thumb for when you get to a certain size? Tell us more about your decision on do it in-house versus bring in specialized help. - Not invented here are some of the worst words in business. I just think like there is expertise out there in almost any field where they will be able to do something better than you can. And so you should be very, very clear in your mind why you're not using an agency for something where there's an obvious agency solution or why you're not using a piece of software where there's an obvious solution. I go into this in a lot of depth in the book on making the decisions how eBay and Amazon decided to do affiliates in-house versus using an agency. And I run through examples of that so you can think through it in a lot more depth. But fundamentally like my rule of thumb and the story I use for this is when I joined Facebook what we do for tracking. So my rule of thumb is you should probably use an agency or a tool if there is a specialized tool for a purpose because they will have full industry knowledge in building out the tool and you will only have parochial knowledge for your company when you build out the tool. When I joined Facebook we were using an in-house tracking system to track our Google ads, totally custom built and home built. It didn't scrape out or didn't cut out Google clicking on its own ads to check your load times and to check you weren't cloaking and all the different things Google does with Googlebot on your ads. And it really skewed the data a bunch. They didn't cut out bots. They didn't cut out a bunch of things that meant the numbers on our internal tracking completely mismatched with Google's tracking of our paid search. I brought in at that time MediaPlex, that was the company I'd used at eBay and I knew how to use them, brought them in for years actually at the initially they were our tracking provider and instantly we solved all those problems overnight. I released all the engineering resources we were using to build an internal tracker when we were a 200 person company. So that was a waste of assets and it cost us a very small amount of money. And so like most things you're gonna benefit from an agency, there are a few places where you're gonna want the skill 100% in-house. I would argue SEO is an important area like that because in SEO, what really matters is getting things done inside your company. You can have an agency tell you what's wrong but fundamentally if they can't convince people of your company to do what you said, it doesn't matter. So maybe you employ an agency once you have someone internally who can take their answers and convince people to change. But most things I'd say agency, software, use them, they exist for a reason, I am very positive on them. - Now how about looking at the future? You do have, we'd mentioned the editor pushed you to do some stuff on AI, so that's covered in there. But what other tech are you looking at for like the next year or so? Is there anything that's on your radar that like, oh, that's interesting, I wanna play around with that. - Yeah, putting AI to one side and I'm actually enjoying that we're not just talking about AI in this conversation 'cause everyone is like, am I gonna add something to the 57th conversation about AI? Maybe not. Look, the stuff that I think is really interesting that isn't being used well enough right now, especially in the states and Western markets is twofold. One is click to messaging and in general business messaging and two is partner ads and essentially influencer ads. On influencer ads, we're seeing a lot of the Chinese dropshipping advertisers, a lot of the APAC advertisers having a lot of experience with shop attainment in Asia where influencers will post about their latest, team who purchase or they'll do a live video convincing you to buy a particular good or service. And the companies in turn are boosting the influencers that are doing well by using the partner ads with us or the partner ads with TikTok or other companies. And in doing so, they're getting the influencer to sell their product both organically and inorganically and from having the organic start point with the influencer they can pick through Darwinian selection the best performing stuff to promote. At the moment for me in selling these glasses, 20% of my direct response advertising dollars go to partner ads now. Like one fifth of what I do is partner ads and it's that because it's working so well, that's happened organically. We weren't playing it to be a direct response play. We were playing it to be a brand play. It's gone so well, it's taken over a fifth of my DR budget. We're gonna do more of that next year. So partner ads is one. The second one is click to messaging and in general business messaging. So if you go to Brazil or you go to Thailand or Southeast Asia, Vietnam, India, it's like, I don't know what numbers I'm allowed to say and I'm the head of analytics. It is very high as a percentage of our revenue in those countries, the people are buying click to messaging whether it's messenger, Instagram direct or WhatsApp ads. And what's happening is businesses are getting people to start a message thread with them and then they're selling to them over the message thread. And what's amazing is using agencies. One large agency I heard about from a very significant global advertiser is GupShup where they offer you AI bots that will actually using whichever AI backend you wanna choose. I think you can use Claude or GPT or Gemini or ours or any of those. The agent will do the first few conversations in a chat thread with a user who has started a conversation with you which therefore scales it and makes it ROI positive, not needing human beings. And that's working insanely well outside of the US. But inside the US and inside Western Europe, it's just not there. So in my opinion, the futures here it's not evenly distributed yet. I looked at Asia, TikTok came from Asia. Honestly, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, they were the first with the messaging apps, stories. KakaoStory was before Snapchat story. Happy Farm was before Farmville. Like a lot of trends in social media have come out of APAC. Right now, these are the two mega trends I'm seeing in APAC. Influencer marketing via partner ads and click to messaging or just business messaging without even buying an ad. Those two are huge. Using AI chatbots to enable it is gonna be even bigger. - That's really interesting to answer. What do you credit that to for? For so often we've just considered that the United States would be technology lead. But one of the things that strikes me is that because we have a number of established leaders, like there's not enough room for innovation but what's your take on that? - I mean, look, I think a ton of these things that I'm describing are happening within leaders. So it's Douyin and TikTok that are doing the shop attainment. They've been like in the lead in China for how long at this stage, like seven years. So I don't think that's actually the problem. I think if you look back, the US is weird. The US tends to be behind until it chooses to be ahead. So in Europe, we all had smart-ish phones for way before the US did. We were always already using WAP protocol to access the internet and we had apps on our phones, but they weren't the iPhone. And then the US went from flip phones, which we always took the mick out of in the Europe. Came to the US and we're like, wow, you guys are way behind on phones. We've got Nokia, have you seen this really cool phone and these games you can play and everything? And then the US suddenly launches the iPhone and it leapfrogs everyone. And so I actually think quite often, even on LLMs and stuff, the US was behind, DeepMind was in the UK. So the US was behind until it's ahead. So I think actually it's fairly common that the US in a new technology isn't the first, but then when it catches up, it rapidly becomes the best. - That's interesting. Yeah, 'cause we see the same thing too over on finance side. The whole rest of the world is just appalled that we use paper checks for things. There's things like that where it's-- - I still have my checkbook actually sitting just over here. My US checkbook is just here off camera. I won't show my checkbook, that's for sure. - Right, but yeah, like check 103 or whatever, like you never even start using those many checks. Okay, just as we wind down though, one thing going out the door. How about anything you've watched, read or listened to in the last month that you think that our community would be interested in hearing about? What have you found interesting lately? - Yeah, I'm problematic. I give too many book references. I started a reading club for our ALI teams 'cause I was referencing so many different books. Probably the one book in the last year that has really shaped my thinking more than any other book is a book called "Chip War". It talks about the history of the semiconductor industry. Weirdly, I trained as a physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the semiconductor department, focused on quantum working on Terrahertz imaging. That was my field. That's what I did my real masters in. I have a fake masters today. And that book really brought me back to that experience of being in that department 24 years ago and what we knew about the future of semiconductor chips and what we developed. And the interesting thing for me is it really mirrors where I feel we are right now with AILM development, which is we know the next couple of breakthroughs. We don't know three breakthroughs from now. Like we're trying to productionalize right now all the different tech companies have got stuff that's in hand that they're trying to productionalize. But there's lots of research going on and we don't know which one's gonna land for breakthrough three and four, which is very much where we were with chips. So that's one thing that I think is incredibly valuable as a parallel. And then the second thing for sort of situational awareness of where the world is right now, it really describes the semiconductor supply chain incredibly clearly. Like why is TSMC a choke point on the entire semiconductor supply chain globally? But we think TSMC is a choke point. What about ASML in the Netherlands? Like they make the machines and no one else can make a machine other than ASML. What about Zeiss? 'Cause ASML can't make their machines without the lenses from Zeiss. And nobody but Zeiss can actually provide the lenses ASML leaves. What about the intellectual property to actually design the chips? That all comes from America and that's concentrated in NVIDIA, Intel, ARM, very small set of companies. And so it really helps you understand a lot of what's going on right now if you understand the situation with the supply chain. And that in turn tells you a lot about Taiwan and this tension with China. And so I think the book is an incredible read for what's going on in the industry today if you think about it in the right way as you read the book. And it's something I recommend more than any other. - Oh, that sounds fantastic. Yes, we'll have to put that in the show notes. People can check that and run with it. And I can't resist those, you've drawn me in with this. So how did it work for you then? So you started with a physics background but you had so much of your own hobby stuff going on on the marketing creative side. Did you just feel like your hobbies were pulling you in that direction you had to go? Or was there ever, do you ever have that urge to get dragged back to hard science? - To have to be honest, like the cleverest physicists, the ones that actually change things, they're a class of their own. So like, yeah, I can get a decent physics degree. I got a two one in undergrad, which is just, you know, not the first class, but it's the next one down. Like I did pretty well. Post grad, I did less well. I was a bit distracted coming out as gay but kind of threw my year out a little bit. But the fact of the matter is I wasn't one of the smartest people in the room in the physics department. I'm good, but I'm not fantastic. Whereas with online marketing, I really am quite good at it. And it was somewhere where I could really make an impact. And so I wanted to focus on something where I could have an incremental impact that mattered. And I think in physics, I would have been, okay, useful, but I wouldn't have had a slam dunk impact. In this field, I think I had, you know, a better position to have a really meaningful impact. So I focused on the place I could be the most incrementally useful. - Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because you had the early success. You just get a lead that compounds that no one can catch. So yeah, you could be the best in the field. - I don't know if I'm the best. I'm reason, I'm pretty good. - I'd have a hard time picking 20 people that are killing it more than you are, that's for sure. The book is Click Here, the Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising. It's dropped October 7th. Go ahead and check it out. We've got links to that in the show notes. You can sign up for the marketing over coffee text line at 617-8125-494. But that's gonna do it for us for today. Alex, thanks for joining us. - Yeah, thank you very much for having me. This was a lot of fun. - All right, that'll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. - You've been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christenferspen.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Mellow G by Funkmasters. And you can find it at Musical.ly from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.