Alex Schultz talks about Meta Ray-Ban Glasses and its 'big breakthrough' with the SuperBowl

Alex Schultz, Meta, CMO

Transcript

00:00It's not really that typical for us to be doing Super Bowl ads, and so we had to

00:06actually convince the leadership that it was worth spending the money in a period

00:10when we're just coming off the back of like massive efficiencies in the

00:13business. But we were able to convince them, we got it to happen.

00:21I mean I think that the big breakthrough that we had in the last 12 months

00:24weirdly was the forcing function of Super Bowl. The Super Bowl ad was great

00:29and doing a Super Bowl ad was great, but the forcing function of driving towards

00:32the Super Bowl to really increase awareness of the Ray-Ban meta glasses was

00:37huge for us to do the best work we possibly could, and that moment worked

00:41incredibly well. We created content that could be used in the Super Bowl but could

00:46also be cut into video shorts, could be used on billboards, could be a static

00:50social media post, and using the iconic celebrities actually helped a ton to get

00:55people to focus on them and be aware of our glasses. I promise I'm not shilling my

01:00book, but the boldest professional risk that I've taken this year is to choose to

01:06write a book, which is called Click Here and coming out in October. And what I

01:12learned from it was actually people were really excited. I was worried that it was

01:17going to look like self-promotion internally in a way that would not be

01:21supported by the company, but people have seen the vision of us saying, hey, we want

01:26you to do more online marketing, we want you to do it better, and we want to give

01:29you an asset that you can share with your colleagues who aren't necessarily

01:33marketers to understand how to do this well and understand why you're doing what

01:37you're doing. And that has really resonated internally as well as externally,

01:41and I'm feeling super hopeful. So one year ago here at Cannes we won a Grand Prix,

01:46actually, for our video about the Afghan women's football team soccer using WhatsApp

01:53to communicate secretly so they could get out of Afghanistan. That was something

01:57that forced me to rethink things that a documentary film could go viral, could

02:02drive results. And so we went bigger this year and we did something called The

02:07Seat, which is about Kimi Antonelli getting the most sought-after seat in

02:11Formula One, the Mercedes seat left by Lewis Hamilton. All the communication for

02:16that was done over WhatsApp, WhatsApp video, WhatsApp chat. It needed to be

02:19secret. It was totally aligned with our brand and we were able to work with our

02:23partners at Mercedes to create a documentary that made top 10 movies on

02:27Netflix in many countries and really spoke to our WhatsApp brand tremendously well.

02:33And that really forced me, the Afghan women's team, forced me to rethink it and the

02:39seat took that to the next level.