This year, Webtmize was fortunate enough to be amongst the 27 Canadian agencies invited to Google Marketing Live 2023. With the rise of AI, in particular with ChatGPT, Google announced a series of products under the brand banner Google AI that will definitely redefine the landscape of digital marketing for the next couple of years.
AI will supercharge your ability to keep up with speed, demands and unpredictability of consumers like never before. This was the main theme of the Google Ads Keynotes. Customer connections, creatives and confidence were the three main pillars in Bayview and how AI could help marketers to be more efficient and drive more results. Especially today, customer journeys’ are moving targets and becoming more complex. Indeed, 50% of users look through 4 sources before buying a product, showcasing their research obsession. Shorts are also exploding with 50 billion daily views globally making YouTube the #1 streaming content platform for all sorts of content (Connected TV, streaming on demand, and quick entertainment content).
Finally, consumers want and care much more about their privacy (80% are concerned about their privacy), favour brands that are centred on privacy, but still want to be shown relevant ads. Google AI aims to address all the issues and the firm is confident that their new products will be able to deliver the same results at the same scale if you opt-in with their AI products. Marketers will not be competing against AI, instead they will be competing against other marketers who are using AI.
With the disappearance of cookies in 2024 – also known as the cookie apocalypse – marketers who possess strong first-party data will be able to strive and deliver better results. Google is introducing a new product called “unified first-party data”. This product will allow marketers to connect their CMS (Shopify, Salesforce…) and CRM (Klaviyo, Segments…) directly to Google Ads and feed in the audiences on a daily basis, to provide more information to the bidding algorithm. This will be an important advancement in the data pipeline that will for sure benefit your advertising performance and prevent a lot of headaches stemming from connecting Google Ads to other platforms. On DV360, PAIR will help the publisher and the advertisers (if both agree to share) to reconcile their first-party data within cleanrooms (while following all the privacy requirements).
The most exciting news of the conference revolved around the AI powered solutions for the creative process for PMAX and GMC. Product Studio is a tool that will be available in H2 in the US and it will allow advertisers to change backgrounds of product feed and customize it based on an AI text conversation. Generate fresh visuals to meet evolving marketing demands, be it seasonal, campaign-oriented, or exploratory, all while circumventing the expense of organizing additional photoshoots. The example given was a skincare brand aiming to emphasize a unique seasonal edition of a product. They could achieve this by requesting an image of the product encircled by peaches, complemented by a backdrop of tropical foliage. These assets can be uploaded directly on Google Merchant Center or you can download the asset and use it on your website or other ad networks!
Search AI will be able to assist users in creating new campaigns, ad groups, keywords headlines, and descriptions through a conversational chat called Google Ads Conversational experience. Search AI will bring creativity to your search by auto generating text for your search campaigns based on the content on your site. Furthermore, if the results are not satisfactory, you can ask the AI to make it funnier, more scientific or professional. Here the goal is to be able to be unique, out of the box and try to adapt to all the consumers in the market for your products / services and drive better performance.
Search Lab is the name given to another experience happening within the discovery feed of users. This new experience based on generative AI will be offered to users who are searching for a particular service or products. The example given in the conference was to look for activities in Maui, and some articles would appear as part of the conversation. The user can then respond and look for backpacks and PLA ads would appear. This product is in beta in the US currently to understand the user behavior and how it can benefit advertisers.
Video ads are also benefiting the new AI turn operated by Google on its ads products. The tools will upscale the resolution of your video, allow you to add text overlay / voice over, crop one format perfectly for square formats and shorts and also create high quality video ads from your assets. The tool will ultimately be able to slice and dice your creative to many formats to be able to provide an ad depth. These changes are game changers for brands and creative agencies who needs to create multiple formats for each placement. Moreover, it will help advertisers drive more results as conversions on performance video increase by 20% when all formats are available. All the above is reviewable before you can launch the ads allowing advertisers to have control on their brand.
On top of the different new products announced, there will be new additions to PMAX including the ability to target users who have a high lifetime value, or target users who have not engaged with you in a certain period of time. The insight section of PMAX will also become more transparent with more depth on creative, keywords, audiences that are performing well as well as the ability to go back in time to review all insights (currently an advertiser can only look at 7 and 28 days lookback). Images for Performance Max will also be available where you can ask the system to provide you images from a bank of your content and image banks, this feature is also conversational.
To conclude, all these new products are an important shift of what digital marketing will look like for online advertising. While all these products may be relevant or not for your business, you should definitely consider testing and learning which one would be the best fit for you and your brand. As mentioned earlier, we are not competing against AI but against other marketers who are using AI. Therefore, we should always use a test and learn an approach to refine our advertising mix. At Webtmize, we embrace evolutions in advertising and prime ourselves to be early adopters of these new technologies, should you want to chat more feel free to reach out to us!