London Area, United Kingdom
Hi, I'm Alex (he/him). I am really proud to be openly gay at work and my personal life and to have a successful career at a couple of big name internet companies. I'd like that to act as an example to other lgbt people out there that it's possible to get to the top of your field and be out. I am CMO of Meta and VP of Analytics. I have been working in analytics/internet marketing/growth now for 10yrs+ and I love growing stuff. I think I am best at taking a good product and helping it grow faster, I certainly find that most exciting. I also hope I am good at hiring a great team (based on our results) and we have had great upward management feedback in every anonymous feedback survey run on my team. In my teens and at university growing my websites via SEO and then analyzing the traffic was my hobby. I ended up doing affiliate marketing and paid search arbitrage too to help pay for things. I used to love how back then every military base had its own IP range and one week I saw NORAD was visiting paperairplanes.co.uk a lot and I could imagine everyone bored looking for inbound Russian ICBMs throwing paper airplanes at each other. I even built a cocktail recommendation engine based on browsing behavior I called something like "cocktails you may like". Making sure there wasn't a positive feedback loop ended up being simple but fun to think through. I don't believe there's a better job out there for a direct response marketer and analyst than mine and I feel insanely lucky I got to make my hobby and passion my job. I also have to say that being on the board of Lindblad is a real honor and the challenges of helping bring digital marketing & analytics skills to selling expeditions to remote parts of the world is really interesting and cool.
Running all data intelligence for Meta. Data science, data engineering, user research, competitive intelligence, demographic and survey science and more. Focused on transforming how we learn in this new AI world. I am having so much fun doing analytics with agents and our great teams!
I am lucky to run marketing, analytics (data science & engineering) and internationalization for Meta. My main roles at meta have been/are: 1. driving self serve advertising business through in product promotions partnering with product. 2. accelerating user growth through Notification marketing (email/sms/push), SEO, Online Paid DR, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and generally just product optimizations. 3. Accelerating important products with optimizations of flows and onsite merchandising. 4. Analysis of people's behavior to deliver better results with everything from M&A to optimizing product flows. 5. Managing our external metrics since 2017: Everything from in product metric monitoring and validation to earnings call stats/SEC disclosures. 6. Improving our brand, developing a tight brand strategy, running the Meta rebrand, WhatsApp's amazing privacy campaigns, our brilliant public affairs marketing and more. 7. Building amazing teams & hiring/growing awesome leaders who now do the above for me. I also spent 8 years as exec sponsor for (and longer as a contributor to) Meta's global LGBTQ group Pride@meta and very proud of that. I got involved originally as a junior IC when Jason Min and Clifton Tay set up the first version - an anonymous mailing list - in 2007/2008 and I wasn't openly gay at work. I feel this community has done a lot of good for LGBTQ users of our service by bringing the perspective of our community to the company and I hope (and believe) I've played a role in that. I think this link describes our approach to our work very well: https://www.fastcompany.com/40432085/how-facebooks-growth-team-used-science-and-empathy-to-reach-two-billion-users and I am very proud of this note by Mark: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104242980739381
Became VP and took on responsibility for analytics full time vs. helping out.
I am a trustee for Wessex Archaeology for the charitable trust! The hope is I can be useful on marketing/comms/technology for us to fulfill our mission. Since being a young child and travelling the UK in a 2 wheel caravan with my mum and dad I have loved archaeology. I joined the Young Archaeologists Club as a child and having this job as an adult is a dream come true.
I am a non-exec director on the board of Lindblad Expeditions. This is an amazing company with really wonderful expedition vacations and a meaningful mission and purpose. I feel very lucky to be involved and you should book a vacation with us if you can at www.expeditions.com
Authored two books Planes that Fly (2005) - how to guide on making paper airplanes. Sold ~150k copies at M&S in UK. Click Here (2025) - digital marketing guide that was marketing best seller on amazon in India, UK and USA
I ran some websites which had (at their peak in 2011) over 1/2MM unique visitors a month. My proudest moment was when my cocktail site went down due to too much traffic :). Also have a YouTube channel for my paper airplane site which has around 9MM views all time! The cocktail site no longer exists and I don't really maintain the paper airplane site anymore but keep it up for nostalgia. I also wrote a book on paper airplanes that sold 10k's of copies (it was a Christmas gift at Marks and Spencer) and through my brilliant business acumen I made $3k from the whole project :)