Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Creators Will Guide SMBs Into the Metaverse

Alex Schultz became Facebook’s chief marketing officer last September, named as the successor to Antonio Lucio, who revealed his departure the previous month. But despite the sheer size of Facebook—Meta is huge—small and midsized businesses have been a key part of his tenure at the company since coming on board in 2007 as a data analyst. Schultz told Adweek growing out the pages product has been his job throughout his time at Facebook, and he discussed how Meta will market the metaverse, as well as the augmented reality and virtual reality products that are already released or being developed, to SMBs. Technical innovation after technical innovation was on virtual display during Meta’s Connect 2021 event Thursday, in various stages of availability and development, and while it would seem to be more of a playground for larger companies and overwhelming to SMBs, Schultz believes creators will serve as the bridge to connect them. “SMBs are really, really important to us,” he said, sharing his vision of a “hybridization where consumers and SMBs are coming together through creators.” Schultz pointed to the $10 million Creator Fund the company introduced earlier this month to encourage more creators to work on renamed experience Horizon Worlds. Funds will be distributed through competitions, a Creator Accelerator Program that will kick off early next year and by partnering with the company for funded opportunities. The role of the Spark AR platform figures to expand, as well, with more than 700 million people using effects created via Spark AR each month. “The hardware experience is a long way away, but the software isn’t,” he said. “Tens of thousands of people are creating AR filers, and we are building tools to help them do this.” On that note, Meta previewed Polar at Thursday’s event, saying it will be a free iOS application that will roll out in closed beta later this year, with the aim of enabling creators “to imagine, create and share AR effects and filters, directly on your mobile phone,” as the company explained in a blog post. For SMBs, “Creators are the biggest way in,” Schultz said. He also addressed speculation that the company’s name change was timed to deflect attention from the trove of leaked internal documents that has dominated the news cycle in recent weeks. Schultz pegged March 25 as the exact date when the company decided to move forward with the name change from Facebook to Meta, pointing out that the company’s accounting team was heavily involved and tasked with “a ton of infrastructure work, filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, reporting numbers.” He cited two key reasons for moving to Meta, with the first echoing comments by CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he revealed the name change Thursday regarding excitement about the future of computing, the social aspects of the metaverse and Facebook’s mission to be part of building out the metaverse. The second was the confusion caused by the company’s move in November 2019 to extend the Facebook name to its properties while differentiating the corporate entity from its flagship app. Schultz explained in an internal post to his team, which he shared with Adweek, “In 2019, we rolled out new branding that linked together all of our products, but still kept the Facebook name for both the company and our original app. But over time, it was clear that the shared Facebook name could cause confusion, not only with people using products such as WhatsApp or Instagram, but also with constituencies we work with. Helping people have clarity when something is coming from the company versus the Facebook app is an important reason for this change.” He said that while brands like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are not being eliminated, their splash screens will indicate that they are “From Meta,” and the aim is to “drive association and distinction.” Schultz contrasted consumers’ perception of products from Meta as compared with those of brands such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, saying, “Given the scale and breadth of what we do and the fact that the corporate brand has to be something consumers interact with, it’s different than Coke or Pepsi. It doesn’t matter to them, but it does for us.”