Meta just moved its top marketing executive into a newly created chief data officer role — signaling that the surveillance apparatus built to police your speech is now being repackaged as a product for corporate advertisers.
Alex Schultz, who served as Meta's CMO and VP of analytics, will become the company's first chief data officer, according to Business Insider. Denise Moreno takes over the CMO title. The shift happened days after the 2026 Cannes Lions advertising festival, where Schultz was pitching brands on how AI will reshape their marketing.
This isn't about creativity. Schultz said as much at Cannes: chief marketing officers are "measured by results, not creativity or awards." Translation: Meta doesn't care about art or expression. It cares about moving product — and now that product is AI built on the data harvested from billions of users.
Schultz laid out three categories of brand AI use: pure AI-only content, creators enabled by AI, and holdouts who swear they'll never use it. He predicted the middle category — humans augmented by AI — will dominate. "Pure human makes sense for some brands, but that middle bit of brands and humans enabled by AI will be the biggest," Schultz told Business Insider.
Notice what's missing from this framework: you. The user. The person whose posts, searches, messages, and behavior fed the data machine in the first place. Meta spent years building systems to monitor, flag, and suppress speech it deemed problematic. Now that same data infrastructure gets a fresh coat of paint and a new revenue stream. The censor's ledger becomes the advertiser's playbook.
The title change matters. Schultz wasn't just CMO — he was VP of analytics simultaneously. He sat at the intersection of what Meta knows about you and how it sells that knowledge. Now he's the chief data officer, a role that didn't exist before. That's not a reorganization. That's a declaration of intent.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, for its part, had nothing to say about any of this — running a feature on Shore home window placement instead. While one of the most powerful companies on earth reorganizes its data harvesting operation, the local paper is worried about ocean views. The establishment press sleeps.
The question isn't whether AI will transform advertising. It will. The question is who pays the price when the same infrastructure that decided which of your posts were acceptable now decides which ads get served to which demographics — and at what cost to your privacy and autonomy.
Meta built the machine to watch you. Now it's renting it out. Same surveillance. New customers. Your data, their profit.
