Meta is getting a new CMO.
Denise Moreno is stepping into the role as Alex Schultz, the former CMO, becomes Meta’s first chief data officer, the company shared Wednesday.
Moreno has had a lower profile, but isn’t a stranger to the top job. She temporarily stepped into the CMO role last year when Schultz was preparing for Meta’s FTC trial.
A 17-year marketing vet at Meta, Moreno most recently served as global SVP of consumer marketing and growth. Schultz called her his “quiet right hand on growth,” crediting her with promoting Meta’s products, including its AI glasses and Threads, while building its e-commerce capabilities.
In announcing her new role, Moreno said AI would be key to providing scale and speed to augment the company’s human judgment.
Schultz is moving into the data officer role at a time when Meta, along with other tech giants, ramps up its AI spending. In November, Schultz defended the sector’s investment level to Business Insider, saying it was “aggressive, but not crazy.”
In his new role, he’ll focus on everything from building data foundations to AI-powered analytics, experimentation, research, and decision-making.
“We’ve already made exciting progress — from Analytics Agent, now the most widely used AI agent inside Meta, to foundational work modernizing our analytics infrastructure — but I believe we’re only at the beginning of what’s possible,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
At Cannes Lions in June, Schultz told Business Insider in an interview that the key to avoiding AI slop is the same as avoiding bad results in any area.
“It’s only going to work if you are competent at using it,” he said.
Meta recently took heat for an REI ad made with a Meta AI tool that showed a bike with two sets of handlebars. Meta declined to comment at the time.
AI won’t be for all advertisers, Schultz said at Cannes Lions.
“When you think about AI, you’re going to have three categories of things in the future, and I don’t think these are particularly groundbreaking,” he said. “You will have AI-only content. You will have creators who are enabled by AI, and you will have people and advertisers who swear not to use AI.”
Schultz said he sees AI tools as an enabler of creativity and analytics.
“If you look at the most successful people in analytics, it’s the ones who think of the right question to answer,” he said. “And by the way, they can use the AI tools to turbocharge them.”
Lara O’Reilly contributed reporting.
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