Jerry Dischler, VP and general manager of Ads, shares Google’s vision for advertising.
I’ve been building products at Google for 16 years, and yet, the last 18 months have been more disruptive and challenging for all of us than I ever could have imagined. I’ve met with many of you over the past year to understand how the pandemic is affecting your businesses and what you need from a partner like Google.
Your stories of resilience, determination, and ingenuity have been inspiring. What I’ve heard and seen for myself are two massive shifts in how people are interacting with businesses. First, buying behaviours have changed dramatically, with people going online to explore, research, and plan more of their purchases. And second, there’s been a boom in video streaming, for entertainment, education, and, increasingly, discovery of new products and brands. These shifts have upended some of your plans and fast tracked others.
At Google, we’ve been focused on how we can help your businesses respond. For example, when we saw an increase in people shopping online last year, we realised that people weren’t just looking for things to buy; they were also looking for new, safer ways to shop in their local communities. In response, we accelerated our product road map for local inventory ads and launched curbside pickup, providing value to both shoppers and businesses.
Buying behaviours have changed dramatically, with people going online to explore, research, and plan more of their purchases.
There’s no playbook for navigating a pandemic that upends daily life, causes immense tragedy, economic upheaval, and widespread uncertainty about what comes next. But we want you to know that Google is here to help you grow and be ready for what comes next.
How we’re building for the future
It’s my team’s job to find the places where Google can innovate in order to create value and drive growth for your business. As we look to the future, we’re prioritising our product investments in three key areas: privacy, measurement, and automation.
People’s expectations for privacy online are higher than ever and will only continue to rise as they use digital tools to manage more aspects of their lives. That’s why we’re collaborating with others across the advertising industry to build durable advertising technologies that protect people’s privacy, while still delivering results and providing resilience in any market conditions.
With more people online than ever before, automation has never been more important.
It’s also critical that we future-proof your measurement. As cookies are phased out in the years ahead, the future of measurement will center on consented first-party data that you collect directly, modeling techniques that allow you to fill gaps in the customer journey, and privacy-safe techniques like aggregation. This is a monumental shift for our industry and one that I’ve heard many of you tell me you find daunting. As we think about a world with more privacy and less data, this will put a greater premium on being smarter with the data that is available — such as the data you collect from the direct interactions you have with your customers — and looking for opportunities to do more with this data.
People’s expectations for privacy online are higher than ever and will only continue to rise as they use digital tools to manage more aspects of their lives.
That’s why we’re doubling down on our investment in automation. Our data shows that automation remains the best way to unlock growth, by analysing millions of signals to help you show the right message to the right people in the moments that matter. In fact, with more people online than ever before, we think automation has never been more important. And we’re committed to building more helpful products like Smart Bidding and responsive search ads that make it easy for you to find untapped demand and drive growth for your business.
