The Update: Why clarity on marketing objectives is critical in the age of automation

Hi, I'm Jason Spero.

I lead global commercialisation efforts for Google's performance media products.

So we're talking about search, display, programmatic, our GMP platforms, measurement etc.

We're the voice of the customer in Google's product development process.

We bring the markets to product and we bring products to market.

In this episode of The Update,

I will talk to Jason Spero

about why clear marketing objectives

are critical in the age of automation.

I've heard you talk a lot about

consumer transformation on mobile

and the rapid behaviour shift

we're seeing today.

So, can you share the parallels you see here?

So much of the challenge marketers face today reminds me of what we saw 10 years ago.

My first job at Google was to help Google and our partners understand and navigate

the dramatic change that came from consumers’ adoption of mobile devices.

For Google this ultimately meant

transforming our products pretty fundamentally.

For marketers as you know, Marie, this meant

rethinking user engagement and user empowerment.

It required huge changes to their marketing

in order to succeed.

I'm seeing a lot of the same disruption and need for adaptation today.

Whether consumers are interested in a car or a new pair of shoes,

we're watching the rapid shift

toward a much more nuanced and complex customer journey.

And we're seeing the accelerated importance

of digital marketing.

The good news is we see innovation everywhere.

In some ways, we're ready for this moment.

The industry is growing quickly

and there are digital tools that have become incredibly powerful.

But in other ways our marketing

and marketers are extremely stretched.

So Jason, what do you think is the biggest challenge that is faced by marketers today?

I think I'd point to complexity.

There are just so many different places to engage

with consumers today.

I hear this from marketers in just about every conversation I have.

That to address the evolving customer journey,

the industry has come up with all these specialised media and formats,

so teams have to be expert

in dozens of different point solutions

for each point along the journey where they want to invest.

Then marketers need to invest in the post processing to stitch that all back together

to have one unified view of the customer.

This is a ton of work

and it's not at all scalable.

And in many cases we lose our goals in the translation.

Each of these media strategies and buys is an approximation of our business goals.

In the end, marketers are struggling to keep their media

aligned with their marketing objectives,

and we're losing fidelity to what really matters to the brand.

So, goals getting lost in translation…

what does it look like in the real world?

You know, one of the things I see most often

is I see people lose sight of what the original marketing goal was.

So many marketers

limit their strategy

to focus on one particular part of the customer journey.

They say I want to make the sale

so they focus mostly on media that they believe is close to the purchase.

Maybe that's search or remarketing or something else.

Or they want to drive awareness

and so they buy high reach video or social.

But all of that media is then managed to these proxy metrics so, as you will remember,

everyone spends the next two to three years of their lives optimising to these proxy metrics,

but they may have lost track of the original goal,

which is to sell a product, or get people to try a product, or to become more aware of a product

and the actual media goals

get separated from the marketing goals.

Sometimes I've seen marketers

losing track of the business goal…

so did you see that too?

Yeah, you're so right.

Sometimes the marketing goals and these proxy metrics,

as you say, come out of alignment with the business goals and I would point to things like

ROI which is central for so many marketers

and a valuable tool, but it can detract from what's most important

and maybe I'll give you an example.

Take a scenario where you can invest $1

and get $10 in return

or invest $100 and get $300 back.

On a strict ROI basis the ten for one wins,

but it might lead you to refuse to invest

more, even when you know

that you could get sort of this larger return on

revenue and profit and growth.

and a marketer who's focused on profit or overall growth

just missed out because

they run their marketing off that ROI proxy metric.

Across both these examples we just talked about

we think a marketer should be able to state a marketing goal

– customer acquisition or driving footfall to a store

or a business goal, profit or growth –

and that all of their marketing in their media

should work in service of that goal.

What can we at Google

do to help marketers become more successful?

I think the first thing is agreeing that the complexity is a big part of the problem.

We believe the answer to the complexity lies in automation.

With the right tools,

we can align the bids,

the budgets and creative

with the marketers' true goal

and this can work across media.

So instead of optimising search or display

or feed or video ads in a silo,

automation can remove that fragmentation

both at the media level

and at the user journey level.

Automation can work across campaigns

addressing some of the bigger questions I get from marketers.

So one of those is:

how do I get out of managing so much media across

so many different campaigns?

And I think you can see Google's vision

in the innovation around app campaigns,

which we also put into local campaigns and smart shopping.

We built cross media solutions that are optimised to achieve the marketers' goal

whether that

is customer acquisition, or overall basket size, or lifetime value.

The second big question I get is: How do I understand

the effectiveness of different campaigns relative to those goals that we've been talking about?

And I think the question of how to give credit is at the core of this fragmentation.

I know so many marketers invest tons of time

trying to manage this and put it all back together.

We believe that cross-media multi-touch attribution is the answer.

We've been clear on that.

We've already made marketers' lives easier with data-driven attribution,

which dynamically assigns

partial credit, journey by journey,

so that you don't have to go through and sort of guess about what the impact was of all those different media types.

How can we help marketers navigate these metrics?

Yeah, it's a pretty significant pivot

and we think the centre of the answer lies in planning.

So we've invested in planning tools

that will allow marketers

to sort of see

the impact of their media and optimise for the business metrics

rather than focusing on maybe cost per acquisition

or ROI averages, which can constrain campaigns

because a lot of this is about,

which I'm sure you remember,

what matters to the CFO, not what matters

to the person who's managing the individual campaign.

So in my previous roles as a CMO,

maintaining line-of-sight to achieve the business objectives

was always a priority

but honestly not that easy.

Many teams naturally silo the world between brand and performance or

digital and television

or linear and OTT.

But this creates more complexity

without providing solutions for this new consumer journey. So

Jason, the question is how do we resolve these tensions?

As you asked that question, I just realised again how hard the CMO’s job is

with all those things to sort of navigate.

I guess the advice I would give, and the first part is the obvious one,

which is set clear goals.

As much as you can,

quiet the media, and the vendors, and the noise

and focus on two areas.

First, and all marketers do this, gaining a deep understanding of your customer.

And second,

talking to your CFO,

talking to the people that you need to consult and understanding

what is your business trying to accomplish?

If you can get to that level of clarity and simplicity,

then you can rally your entire organisation

around what you want your marketing to do in service of that.

This ultimately provides the levers

for setting and achieving the objectives as you balance geo priorities,

breadth versus depth,

growth versus profit,

and maybe short-term versus long-term.

So the first thing is to understand what goals you're after.

Second, and this is where things break down,

connect those goals

and you can cascade the business goals down to the marketing objectives

and build back with the right KPIs

to capture those marketing objectives

and then give them out to everybody you're working with

so that third

you can manage your media to achieve those business and marketing objectives.

As I said earlier, we believe automation marshalls all media,

targeting, budget allocation, all of it,

to optimise things to achieve a central KPI,

but automation is only as good as the goals that you set.

What role should Google play

in this

and what does a good partnership look like?

For our part, we want to build better and better solutions

to help you

optimise and achieve these goals.

To do that Google is organising itself,

our products and our go-to-market

in a much simpler way.

We're mapping all of our products and tools

to five to seven of the most common marketing objectives.

You can see sort of the beginnings of this

in our approach regarding apps

where advertisers can buy and optimise activities across channels.

So app campaigns

streamline the campaign process for the marketer

making it easy to promote your apps

across Google's largest media properties

including Search, Google Play, YouTube, Discover

and AdMob and the Google Display Network.

So all you have to do is bring a few lines of text,

a goal

that you want to optimise for and your creative, your assets

and the rest is automatically optimised to help your users find you.

We do that same thing that we do in apps

to help drive online sales as a marketing objective,

VR smart shopping campaigns approach

and we do the same thing with driving offline sales through local campaigns

to try to make all of that easier for you as a marketer.

Google's product vision is to bring more of this

into our tools

so that you can give us a goal

and we will bring forward the products

that can work and serve that goal

in an automated way.

Does this really work?

Can you share a real world example of how clear

shared goals and automation are fuelling

actual business growth today?

Yes, of course.

We have a number of these products

that I've been describing in market.

So we've got the app solution, the driving online sales solution,

and local

maybe I'll pick one from driving online sales.

Last year in preparation for the holidays,

a partner of ours, an online handbag company called Dagne Dover

was looking for an efficient way

to sort of drive their overall sales and maximise its overall advertising spend effectiveness.

Together with their agency

called Mason Interactive,

the brand launched on this Google smart shopping

campaigns experience.

And they let machine learning decide

where and when to show products for customers

who are more likely to buy.

The result of this sort of went right at their goal

was that they saw more than a 300% increase in conversions, their overall goal

of driving effectiveness, and then all of the

proxy metrics which are still relevant

fell out of that.

And so you saw

a more than four fold improvement in return on ad spend

and a dramatic increase in conversion rate because they found the right customers

and overall that drove a decrease

in their cost per acquisition and improvements in ROI.

So all the proxy metrics

were successful,

but they were secondary to that overall top-line growth

that we're able to achieve by unifying all of these efforts

and serve the true goal that the marketer articulated.

You mentioned earlier that

we are packaging products

to align with the top marketing objectives.

Can you tell me what it means

and what the practical takeaway is for our audience here?

Yes, we put together a marketing objective series

focused on practitioners, and marketers, and agencies

to help you understand how to make some of these changes we've been talking about.

It includes stories like the Dagne Dover example,

so you can learn how to transform your business

and rethink your goals,

especially in light of COVID-19.

It will also help you understand the levers you need to get right

for common marketing objectives.

And it'll help you

effectively use Google products in combination together

to reach those goals that you've worked so hard to set.