Picture this: a gathering of brilliant minds, industry leaders, and an abundance of acronyms like SEM, P-Max, ROI, ML, and AI as far as the eye can see. Now, add a ton of futuristic AI advancements into the mix, and you’ve got yourself Google Marketing Live 2023.
In this edition of the company’s annual event showcasing their latest innovations and thinking around digital marketing, Google kicked off with a reality check. Today’s customers are smarter, exhibit increasingly sophisticated shopping behavior, and continue to expect greater privacy and ad relevance. They are digitally savvy researchers assessing more options through more channels on more devices than ever.
Consumers are moving faster than marketers, for whom the challenge is mounting to achieve the ultimate objective of “reaching the right customer at the right time with the right message.”
In many ways, Google is positioning AI in its technology to come to the rescue. I’ll highlight a few examples of product updates I was most excited to hear about:
- AI-powered assets based on search queries. Based on user intent behind individual search queries, Google AI will generate assets for ads to improve their relevancy and effectiveness.
- Product Studio and AI-generated images. Google’s Product Studio tool enables merchants to manipulate product photos. Dynamic backgrounds are possible, unappealing elements can be removed, and low-resolution images can be sharpened with greater production speed to ensure more variety and relevancy.
- The Display & Video 360 Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR) Protocol: Although this is not a brand new solution, PAIR provides publishers and advertisers with a secure and privacy-safe way to connect the dots between interactions on both sides without cookies. This protocol, in combination with a partnered clean room, enables all parties to gain better visibility and audience capabilities in the new era of digital marketing.
We’ve spent more than a decade using technology to maximize our control and visibility of campaigns. In the cookie-less and privacy-first future, many of the capabilities we’ve built will be limited.
Fortunately, we will be able to rely on fast-evolving AI-powered technology to give us new capabilities to drive performance with better, smarter campaigns. It creates endless possibilities for solving complex challenges that no individual could ever overcome manually.
The key to AI is understanding that input is the most important driver of output. The data going into a system will determine performance. The technology behind both gathering data and activating it can supercharge results.
Google has both sides covered impressively. Amazing input is made possible thanks to rich first-party data across the extremely popular properties like Youtube and Google Search the company owns and operates. And Google has industry-leading platforms for content delivery, media buying, and results measurement. All the solutions come together in an incredible vehicle for AI that works seamlessly to optimize input and output.
Google has a long-standing reputation for delivering excellent business results – the only things that matter at the end of the day – for brands of all sizes. I see these new AI-based solutions as the centerpiece of the next chapter of this ongoing success story. I look forward to testing them out and exploring their possibilities in this new era of digital marketing, and I encourage you to as well. Google said it best: the competition isn’t AI – it’s other marketers who are using AI.