Meta has named CMO Alex Schultz as its first ever Chief Data Officer and promoted Denise Moreno to CMO. Moving marketing's leader into a data role signals how central analytics has become to the business.
When the CMO becomes the chief data officer, the message is that marketing and data were never really separate.
Meta has named Alex Schultz, its chief marketing officer, as its first ever chief data officer. Denise Moreno, the vice president of consumer marketing and growth, steps up to CMO. The company framed the move as pulling analytics and data infrastructure directly into executive leadership rather than leaving it as a support function beneath another role.
Read the swap carefully. Meta did not hire a data scientist into a new box. It took the person who ran marketing and made data his mandate. That is a statement about where the two disciplines are heading. At a company built on measurement, the marketing leader and the data leader are becoming the same job.
Why it matters
Most Australian businesses still treat marketing and data as different rooms. One makes the campaigns, the other keeps the spreadsheets, and they meet at the quarterly review to argue about attribution. Meta just collapsed that divide at the top of one of the most data-rich companies on earth. The lesson is not to copy the org chart. It is to stop pretending the marketer who cannot read the numbers and the analyst who cannot read the market are doing separate jobs.
Meta had never appointed a Chief Data Officer before this. Its first one came from the marketing seat
What to do about it
Meta collapsed the wall between marketing and data at the highest level, and every business still keeping them apart should ask why.