>>> MIMI: Hi, I’m Mimi Forsythe, and I’m a Global Product Lead on Google Marketing Platform.
My team partners with large advertisers and agencies to plan, execute, and optimize their
digital marketing strategies.
The key question we’re hearing from customers today is how they can continue to deliver business
growth while adapting to a privacy-safe digital world.
In this video, we’ll share how leading brands and agencies are tackling this challenge and how we’re
evolving Google Marketing Platform to help you do the same.
Change in digital marketing is constant.
And while change can be disruptive, it can also lead to innovation.
We’re taking this opportunity to evolve our business, so that you can deliver business results while
honoring your customers’ privacy preferences.
All of this may seem daunting, but as an industry, we’ve navigated a rapidly evolving ecosystem
before with changes like the rise of mobile and the growth of programmatic.
With each change, the most successful advertisers were those who were willing to embrace
the power of digital.
These brands transform their businesses instead of maintaining the status quo.
They invested in the right talent, technology, and data to better understand digital consumers.
Take, for example, the global footwear brand Deckers, who invested in digital marketing
transformation prior to the pandemic.
They brought teams together across different marketing channels to shift towards data-driven,
customer-focused marketing.
Deckers’ goal was to better understand their customers by building direct relationships with them.
They did this by building a strategy to better collect, analyze, and activate customer data.
Because of this, they were prepared to respond to shifting consumer behaviors at the onset
of the pandemic.
Here’s their story.
>> MICHELLE: At Deckers, everybody has a voice.
We want to embrace individuality, diversity, and we want to make sure that we’re making products
that go out into the market and really reflect those values.
We needed to understand who our consumers were, how we could deliver a personalized experience
to them that really spoke to them as an individual.
Something was definitely holding us back from making our marketing more efficient and
more effective, and that was why we pursued Google Marketing Platform.
You can’t be a customer-centric organization unless you invest in a first-party data strategy.
2020 was unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Having that clear view of first-party data really allowed us to see trends take off in the past year.
When the pandemic first started, we saw that people were looking for at-home comfort.
We were able to speak to them with our UGG brand.
Then as people started to exercise at home, HOKA was really a great brand.
And then, as we moved to a new normal, Teva and Sanuk helped people who are ready to get outdoors.
We were prepared for this moment in time and were able to really adapt quickly.
People were going through a lot, and it felt like our brands were able to be there
for them during this time.
>> MIMI: Deckers had a competitive advantage, because they had the technical and organizational
enablers in place to get the most out of their first-party data.
Our research shows that advertisers that use first-party data for key marketing functions
achieve more than 2 times uplift in revenue and 1 and a half times increase in cost savings.
Your own customer data can help you adapt as digital marketing shifts away from third-party
identifiers towards a privacy-driven approach.
When we introduced Google Marketing Platform 3 years ago, our goal was to help advertisers
like Deckers and you better organize and activate your media.
We wanted to make it easier for you to use customer data, to get insights,
and improve your marketing.
While this goal hasn’t changed, the digital marketing ecosystem is changing rapidly.
As your teams are adapting to a world without third-party identifiers,
Google Marketing Platform is adapting too.
As Jerry shared in the ads innovation keynote, we’re building towards a future with durable,
privacy-safe technologies designed to deliver results, so that you’re prepared
for what comes next.
Here’s how we’re investing in the future of Google Marketing Platform.
First, we’ll help you stay ahead of the curve with new privacy-preserving technologies.
Second, we’ll help you build a future-proof measurement foundation, including making better
use of your first-party data.
And third, we’ll provide new insights powered by machine learning to help you close gaps in your data.
We’re committed to working with you to prepare for this new privacy landscape, but know that you
still need solutions to engage with your customers.
We’ll make it easier for you to reach people where they are, now and in the future, by investing in
exciting innovations like new channels and formats.
Now, I’d like to hand it over to Luke from our product team to tell you more about how we’re
building for the future in these areas.
>> LUKE: Thanks, Mimi.
I’m Luke Hedrick, and I’m the Product Lead for Advertiser Trust & Transparency across
Google Marketing Platform.
You can read the history of ad tech like the rings of a tree, just by looking at the skills section
of job postings.
Look, here’s the rise of mobile.
There’s the rise of programmatic.
But now, it’s no exaggeration to say that the skills you build over the next year will shape
your career for the next decade.
And my job is to build the solutions you need to become an expert in privacy-centric marketing.
Today I’m going to share a little bit more about what Google Marketing Platform is doing to help.
First, let’s talk about the Privacy Sandbox.
As mentioned in the keynote, privacy-preserving APIs are powerful tools to deliver advertising
without individual user tracking.
We know some advertisers will want to dive deeper on the technical nuances and implementation
details of the privacy-preserving APIs, and we welcome that.
But for the most part, we’re talking about a change to back-end technologies
that will happen automatically.
We’ll be able to do the heavy lifting for you.
With Google Marketing Platform products, you’ll be able to integrate these tools seamlessly into your
existing campaigns, or go under the hood to learn, experiment, and customize to what works for you.
Even before these tools are generally available, you can start having an impact today.
We’re building a durable measurement platform that you can depend on, even through future changes
in the ecosystem.
For example, we believe that asking for consumer consent before using any type of cookies may soon
become a world standard.
Last September, we launched Consent Mode, which automatically adjusts the behavior of Google tags
to respect user consent choices for ads cookies and analytics cookies.
And recently we shared that when advertisers use Consent Mode, we will use modeling to close gaps
in conversion reports for Google Ads.
We are now bringing this capability to Google Marketing Platform products, including
Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, and Campaign Manager 360.
And beyond conversion measurement, the new Google Analytics will have similar modeling
capabilities available in your reporting to help you preserve behavioral measurement in the absence
of cookies or identifiers.
It’s important to build your measurement foundation on first-party data and enable users
to make choices about that data.
But those insights from your customers can also help you build a more future-proof
audience strategy.
For example, with Customer Match, you can deliver relevant experiences while deepening your
relationship with your existing customers on Google search ads through Search Ads 360 and
on YouTube through Display & Video 360.
We’re also investing in audience APIs and solutions to help you connect and onboard your customer data
and then activate it across all of Google.
Our vision is to make it easier for you to collect, analyze, and activate your customer data,
with the ability for you to apply Google’s advanced machine learning throughout.
This will allow you to build differentiated, privacy-centric audience and measurement capabilities.
That’s the key.
We think the biggest opportunities lie in combining Google’s scale and machine learning
with your business understanding to fill in gaps in the data and give you powerful, unique insights into
customer behavior.
Here’s a great example: predictive metrics in the new Google Analytics.
Purchase probability is a metric that predicts the likelihood that users who’ve visited your app
or site will purchase in the next 7 days.
You can then build an audience of those users and close the deal with relevant advertising campaigns.
You can also use Google Marketing Platform together with Google Cloud’s machine learning to build your
own custom models, like how Deckers created audiences of shoppers that were likely
to convert on their site.
We make it easy to use the insights you uncover in Cloud to reach the right people with
Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360 and then to measure those interactions with Campaign Manager 360.
Finally, to truly be prepared for the future, you have to be able to reach your customers
wherever they are, even on new and growing channels.
We are continuing to invest in Display & Video 360 to give you more privacy-centric ways
and automated creative tools to reach viewing and listening audiences.
For example, we’re integrating more connected TV contextual signals in Display & Video 360 to help
you pick inventory by genre, length, or livestream content.
You can already use Google audiences to reach YouTube-connected TV viewers based on their
passions and interests.
But later this year, we will also expand Google audiences to all connected TV inventory partners
so that you can even more effectively engage with streamers wherever they are watching.
Brands also tell us they’re excited about the boom in consumer audio content, but creating great
audio ads can be a whole new challenge.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.
How can you justify a big incremental creative investment if you haven’t yet proven you can run
fantastic digital audio campaigns?
That’s where we can help.
With our new dynamic audio production tool, you’ll be able to build tailored audio ads,
quickly and efficiently, at scale.
This tool will allow you to use different segmentation rules, like location, schedule,
or audience, to create customized, relevant ads, all from trafficking a single audio creative.
We have a few customers testing these features already.
If you’re interested in joining, please reach out to your account team.
Otherwise, these dynamic audio features will launch to more advertisers later this year.
The next decade of digital ads will be the decade of the privacy-centric marketer.
You’ll have reliable, trustworthy insights from privacy-preserving APIs.
You’ll build unique and differentiated first-party data assets.
You’ll have groundbreaking machine learning at your fingertips to predict your customers’ needs.
And you will run campaigns across more platforms and formats than ever before.
It’s a time of great change.
Google Marketing Platform is here to help.
And we’re so excited to see what you do next.