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THINK WITH GOOGLE | SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 | ADWEEK
If there’s one thing that’s important
to remember when we talk about an
automated future, it’s this: Machines
are only as good as the data we feed
into them.
For brand marketers, that can
be tough. After all, the goal of brand
marketing is to boost people’s
perception of your company or product.
What real-time data points can
possibly help you measure something
so nebulous? That’s the exact question
we’re constantly seeking to answer, as
we deploy creative and media for our
own campaigns.
When it comes to our creative,
we’ve put in place a structured
approach to learning. We take creative
from campaigns, develop a bunch
of hypotheses and then produce
variations of the ads to isolate key
performance variables before testing
them in the lab. The team of people
that does this isn’t involved in day-to-
day campaigns, so we’re completely
focused on the task at hand. If we see
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creative best practice and disseminate
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We’ve taken a similar approach with
our media campaigns. For example,
a couple of years back, we mapped
out all sorts of variables we felt
increased the chances of an ad being
effective—everything from video
completion rate to the presence of
audio to viewability. And because we
measure our brand campaigns on an
impression-by-impression basis, we
were able to test how effective each
variable was.
It turned out that many of
the things we had been optimizing
for—video completion, for example—
were not predictive of brand lift. What
we found was that when an ad was
both audible and visible on completion,
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in brand awareness. In other words, a
data point that predicted the results
we were shooting for.- Find data that
predicts results
Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made
a bold prediction for the not-so-distant future: Thanks totechnological advancements and the resulting productivity
gains, we’d all be working 15 hours a week. Almost 90
years later, the average American is working more than
double those hours.
Does that sound familiar to any marketers? For years
now, the message has been that marketing automation
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freeing people up to focus on more creative work. That
vision has also yet to materialize.
So, a short while back, my colleagues and I at the GoogleMedia Lab—the team that manages the media strategy
for Google’s advertising campaigns—laid out and started
enacting a plan that we think will make that vision a reality.
These are the four steps that can make it happen.4 Ways to
Plan for an
Automated
Future
Marketers have been promised that
technologies like programmatic will make
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to focus on creative work. Can that
promise become a reality?
By Michael Bailey,
Digital Media Director, Google