• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 4, 2025

As far as advertising and media industry insider books go, there's something telling about the soon-to-be-published one by Meta CMO Alex Schultz, its title: "Click Here."

Simple enough, right, but when I received the pitch to write something about it from the Meta communications team, the first thing that hit me was that it is a truncated version of the title of a book written by long-time agency media chief David Verklin and late industry journalist Bernice Kanner:

"Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here."

The reason Schultz's new book is telling is that it signals that 17 years after Verklin's and Kanner's, we have effectively dropped the watch and listen part and gone straight to what clicks.

Sure, digital media still is something people watch and listen to, but it's become all about the performance of driving clicks to the destinations those form of content reside on.

That seems apt given the author's areas of expertise, especially the fact that before being named CMO, Schultz was head of analytics for Meta, a role he had since joining the company formerly known as Facebook the year Verklin and Kanner published their book.

The Meta team didn't provide a review copy or galleys of Schultz's book, which will be published simultaneously in hardcover, ebook and audio download on October 7, but the subtitle -- "The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising" -- provides a glint that it will be an analytics insider's view of the current state of the art of digital -- including the rapid emergence and deployment of AI tools -- for developing, testing, executing and optimizing click-based marketing, advertising and media planning and buying.

I'll come back and review it in depth when I obtain an actual copy, but based on the initial details, as well as a blurb from one of its publishers, it's already being compared with the ad industry's best known gospels:

"Alex’s book will be the 'Ogilvy on Advertising' for the digital age," touts Alex Clarke, publishing director of Hachette Livre's Wildfire U.K. unit, which along with Hachette Livre's Little, Brown & Co. U.S. unit, which are publishing Schultz's book.

The blurb, of course, is an allusion to the ad industry gospel penned by legendary ad man David Ogilvy 40 years ago.

By the way, there already was an "Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age" -- a sequel published by long-time Ogilvy & Mather agency exec Miles Young -- in 2009.

Needless to say, a lot has changed since both 1985 and 2009, so I for one am looking forward to seeing how Schultz describes the current marketing universe, and especially why non-digital media appear to have been completely deprecated in the media mix.

Then again, the more things change in media and marketing, the more they may remain the same? If you go even further back -- as early as the 1960s when Ogilvy wrote his first book, "Confessions of an Advertising Man," was championing the importance of analytics and real-time ROI, though he called those things "testing" and "direct response" because, well, real-time digital click-based marketing didn't actually exist yet. But the concepts, techniques and direct response mediums did.

"Direct response was my first love and my secret weapon," Ogilvy famously said.

Now substitute the words "click here" for "direct response."