Meta's CMO Wrote a Great Book for People Who Have Meta's Budget

Alex Schultz has been at Facebook since 2007, runs growth, and is now Chief Marketing Officer. Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising landed October 7, 2025 from Little, Brown Spark, 379 pages, Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek on the jacket. It sits at 3.95 stars across 190 ratings and 29 written reviews on Goodreads.

That's soft for a book with that much horsepower behind it. The reason is right there in the reviews. Schultz's readers can't agree who it was written for. Half say too basic. Half say too advanced. They're both right, and that split is the most honest thing about the book.

The readers are having an argument, not a conversation

Start with the too-basic camp. One reader came in hot off Schultz's Y Combinator lecture and left cold: "It felt closer to a Marketing 101 textbook than a deep, experience driven playbook." A two-star reviewer quit midway. "Gave up. All felt very obvious for anyone with a career in digital marketing. A few nice stories but not enough to keep it going."

Now the other side. A small business owner who bought it because they run Meta ads for their own shop: "I hoped to catch something useful for myself since I use Meta Advertising for my tiny little business and the author works for Meta. Well, I think I need a Marketing for Dummies book before I can use this one." Another was blunter. "Even though this says it is good for start-up businesses I felt like it was not very helpful for a start-up. I couldn't follow most of the information as it is too advanced."

A three-star review put the whole mess in one line: "Difficult to work out who the book is for. Some sections assume a high level of marketing knowledge, while others spend too long explaining fundamentals that most experienced marketers will already know." A marketer of ten years landed in the same spot, saying "some sections felt like the book was for beginners while others felt like it was for advanced digital marketers."

Every one of them is describing the same book from a different chair. This isn't a pacing problem. It isn't an editing problem. This is what a book sounds like when the person writing it has never once run a campaign without a data science team standing behind him.

Where the book quits being useful, from someone who buys the ads

I run social and shoot content for food, beverage, CPG, and lifestyle brands. Salsa, tortillas, tires, boats. The people I work for have real products, real margins, and ad budgets that wouldn't cover a week of Meta's coffee.

Click Here tells you to measure incrementality properly. It's right. It's also asking for something most of my clients structurally can't do. The gold standard Schultz wants is the geo-holdout test: kill ads in one region, leave them on in another, compare. At Meta scale that's a rounding error and a clean read. For a regional hot sauce brand with a five-figure annual budget, going dark in Texas for six weeks isn't an experiment. It's a quarter you don't get back, and the founder is standing in the warehouse looking at pallets while you explain statistical confidence to him.

One reviewer with a paid media background walked into the same wall and wrote the paragraph I would have written. Schultz advocates "sophisticated nitty-gritty measurement techniques, such as heavy reliance on Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) and extensive holdout testing," which are "simply out of reach for the average marketer or smaller firm." That reviewer also clocked the thing nobody at a platform company ever seems to notice: "Most businesses do not need an MMP as they do not have apps."

Correct. My clients don't have apps. They have a Shopify store, a farmers market booth, and three grocery accounts. Their whole measurement stack is the pixel, a spreadsheet, and whatever the distributor says about sell-through, which arrives late and rounded. That same reviewer's verdict is the fairest sentence written about this book anywhere: for the everyday entrepreneur, it "serves better as a window into how the big players think rather than a practical roadmap for day-to-day operations."

A window into how the big players think is worth money. It just isn't what the marketing copy sold.

The parts that actually transfer

The North Star chapter earned its reputation. Small brands should steal it outright. Schultz's point is simple: pick one metric that reflects what the business actually is, then use it to kill ideas that would juice a different number. One reader's notes catch the eBay version the book uses. eBay started paying affiliates for people who actually bought or sold something instead of for confirmed email addresses. Total registrations fell. Revenue climbed. The book also runs a razor company that spent heavily on billboards aimed at men before finding out that roughly thirty percent of buyers were women shopping for a partner.

That second one should be tattooed on the inside of every food brand's eyelids. I've watched clients build an entire content calendar around who they imagined was eating the product, based on nothing, while the actual purchase data sat in an unread export. Beautiful plate photography that racks up saves and moves zero units is the most expensive habit in this category. Schultz's framework is a clean tool for cutting it.

The book is also good on the thing marketers dodge because it's boring. One five-star reviewer, all in on Meta, called it "the unsexy stuff no one talks about but I friggin live for." That's measurement discipline. Almost nobody writes about it well.

The Meta of it all

You don't get to be CMO of Meta and write a neutral book about advertising. Click Here doesn't particularly try. A three-star reviewer said the quiet part: "At times, it feels like a subtle promotion of Meta. An invitation to step into Meta's advertising platform." The paid media reviewer clocked "an obvious bias towards paid social (cough Meta) as a channel to run your ads on but that is not unexpected."

The sharpest critique in the pile is about what the book leaves out. "The absence of any ethical reflection makes Click Here feel as if it advocates surveillance-driven advertising," one reviewer wrote, singling out Schultz's line that strict European privacy rules have held back the continent's software industry. That reader's conclusion: the book "isn't for a privacy-concerned ethical marketer. It's gonna make you uneasy."

I don't fully land where that reader lands. Targeting isn't a moral position. It's a tool, and I use it every day for people trying to sell chile. But the discomfort is real. A book about the machinery of attention, written by the person who runs the largest such machine, ought to spend more than a paragraph on what the machinery costs.

Then there's the detail that made me laugh out loud. That same enthusiastic five-star reviewer mentions, in passing, how the book showed up: "I got recommended this by the small business group I'm in with Meta." The distribution channel is the argument. Meta recommends the Meta CMO's book to Meta's small business community, who then rate it highly on advice that mostly points back at Meta's ad platform. Nobody did anything wrong. It's just a very clean loop. It explains a chunk of that 3.95.

Who should actually buy this

If you have a growth team, an analytics function, and a budget large enough that a holdout region doesn't threaten payroll, buy it and make your people read it. Multiple reviewers with agency and enterprise backgrounds called it required reading, and I believe them. One went as far as "probably the only book on digital marketing that I'll ever need," which is overheated, but it tells you how the frameworks land when you have the resources to run them.

If you're the whole department (you shoot the product, write the caption, buy the ads, and answer to the founder on Monday), read the first section on principles and the last chapter on AI. Skip the measurement apparatus entirely. Not because it's wrong. Because you'll spend a month building infrastructure you can't feed. A reader five years into digital marketing found the right balance, noting the book "leans super heavy on paid ads, which probably in today's world is the correct ratio."

Schultz wrote an honest book about how growth works at companies that already won. The 3.95 is the sound of everyone else finding out they were reading somebody else's mail.

Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising by Alex Schultz, Little, Brown Spark, October 7, 2025. Reviews quoted from Goodreads readers. Ratings as of August 11, 2026.