Marketing Innovations

Each year the paid marketing geeks wait with baited breath to find out what the big G is going to announce about the future direction of, and innovations in advertising. At Launch Online we are like the kids who camp out a week before the latest Star Wars screening, and this time we weren’t disappointed.

Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads, Sridar Ramaswamy, hosted the 2018 Google Marketing Live event in front of 2,500 people, and live on the web. He and his fellow Googlers talked about consumer behaviour, privacy and the innovations in Google’s advertising and reporting platforms.

Takeaways

• “Advertising at its best puts people first”. Advertisers and websites need to respond to consumers who demand experiences which are relevant, useful, fast and consistent. If advertisers do not deliver this, they will surely be devoured by the competitors snapping at their heels.
• Machine learning (ML) and automation are not just the future of advertising; they are the present. Google has made huge leaps forward in ML with its Alpha algorithm in the last 12 months, and it was at the core of most of the new features announced. With our clients we are optimistically testing automated strategies within Google Ads, having been skeptical of the previously inferior technology.
• Rebranding of the AdWords platform saw the 18 year old brand morph into Google Ads. The new Google Marketing Platform combine to replace the enterprise advertising and analytics platforms 360 suite and DoubleClick. To us, it makes sense that ‘AdWords’ has become outdated; Machine learning and automation mean that the keyword is becoming less and less necessary and relevant as a way to target consumers. We predict that by the beginning of the next decade, Ads accounts built around keywords will have all but disappeared.
• “We feel the need, the need for speed!” We have been bashing our clients over their web developers’ heads for years now with the threat that if sites are not fast and mobile friendly, they will be neither profitable or competitive. This year Google moved to make ‘mobile first’ indexing a reality, and this summer they began exposing insecure websites on the Chrome browser. Ramaswamy drove home the point that “The more empowered people get, experiencing the possibilities technology offers, the reality is, the more they expect. They are frustrated with slow experiences, and annoying and deceptive ads. And they expect better.” Sridar, we hear you, and we will make sure our clients do too.
• A raft of innovations, tools and new campaign types were announced for YouTube, Google Ads for Search and Shopping and the new Google Marketing Platform.
• “Google is doubling down on small businesses”, they declared. Small enterprises have been somewhat neglected in the past by Google, but the tech giant went some way to address this by announcing new Smart Campaigns to assist.
• Local Campaigns in Google Ads were revealed with the aim of achieving offline performance goals for businesses with stores. Google are very keen to be able to attribute store visits to advertising campaigns, and so are bringing new campaign goal types for businesses with a bricks-and-mortar presence.
• We are disappointed, but not surprised, to have no update on the general release of Google Attribution which did not come in Q1 of 2018 as trailed. Announced with fanfare over a year ago, the platform still only remains available to a small minority of advertisers who are using it in beta. Now it’s all gone very quiet; will the platform ever be released to all, or will it become assimilated into one of the other platforms?

Keynote

In his Keynote, Ramaswamy impressed upon us that advertisers need, more than ever, to be there at the moment of search, and to be consistently useful for the consumer. He said that ads should be transparent and trustworthy, and add value.

“Ads should be valuable, transparent and trustworthy for everyone”

As expected, since the introduction of the GDPR in Europe, and the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal this year, he talked about the ability for people to be able to control their own data and what Google knows about them, and to mute ads. He promoted Google as a company which cares about trust, and lets people access their own data and control how it’s used to personalise the service. This said, there is still confusion amongst agencies and clients about exactly how to stay the right side of the law, and we can see a wide variety of interpretations from some of the world’s biggest companies.

“People have become so much more research obsessed”

Ramaswamy said that search habits are changing. People are research obsessed, and they are increasingly obsessed with what not to buy. They are impatient, so immediacy is also important. Searches for ‘near me’, have traditionally been used to find local services and businesses but is increasingly used for finding ‘things’ like food or clothing, and ‘things to do’.

Mobile and machine learning marks a step change for the consumer experience which will be faster, more intuitive and personalised. They have no patience for experiences which are not helpful, personal and frictionless.

“Consumers are more aware of how they’re being marketed to, and how their data is being used. And they want more control.”

Ramaswamy said that the dialogue around the industry has changed; digital is now a meaningful part of people’s lives and marketer’s spend.

For Google, valuable advertising starts with understanding and satisfying intent.

Ramaswamy talked about how today, searches are more helpful – providing images, prices, reviews and local store inventory in the SERPS. In YouTube, people researching a product will be given super-relevant and useful videos about that product, and the opportunity to take action like buying the product shown in the video. On Google Play, they will be shown apps related to the product or activity being researched.