At this year’s SMX Advanced Julie Bacchini, President of Neptune Moon, moderated a roundtable discussion with three other experts on the topic of the recent Google Marketing Live 2022.

Included in the panel were:

• Cory Henke, CEO / Founder of Variable Media
• Jyll Saskin Gales, Marketing Consultant at Jyll.ca
• Michael Henderson, VP Performance Marketing of Paytient

GML2022: Thoughts & reactions from the panel

One of the underlying thoughts from the panel was this GML2022 was a very different Google Marketing Live event than past shows.

“So this year’s Google Marketing Live was all about commerce,” Gales said. “Commerce was the star of the show and I don’t know that I was expecting that.”

Bacchini highlighted the point that this year there was a lot of talk about auto-generated creative and speculates that we will see more of this in the future.

“In the keynote, they said ‘Let’s build the future of marketing together’ and then every mention of the future of marketing was AI and automation,” Henderson said. “It felt a little over the top.”

The consensus was also that folks were expecting more about some of the newer campaign types like Performance Max, but real news on the topic never materialized.

All agreed that the lack of talk around keywords and bidding was surprising, and unique, for a Google Marketing Live event.

Reaction to Amazon & Tiktok

The panel thought that the event felt more “reactive” to Amazon and TikTok with announcements aimed at taking market share from the ecommerce and social media giants.

Everyone on the panel also agreed that this year’s event was the most ecommerce heavy event to date.

Gales was most excited about the new vision for the search experience. She said:

• “We always think of search as more bottom of funnel, demand capture with people looking for exactly what they want and finding a solution … and instead this new vision informed by shopping features, by video features was really about discovery and engagement.”

She also went on to state that this vision may be a longer-term play and that not all of the plan will come to fruition immediately.

“In previous Google Marketing Lives I was always looking for more video and in this year’s Google Marketing Live video had its place,” Henke said.

Henke also praised the efforts of Google in competing with the likes of TikTok and Instagram with the creator funds and full adoption of vertical video on Google’s biggest stage.

There were also questions about how video will actually fit together with the new story ad types.

Other positives from Google Marketing Live

Some additional GML2022 elements that the panel liked were:

• Shareable asset library. Henderson noted that he wasn’t expecting the new shareable asset library, but that he was delighted at the prospect of it.
• Google tag. The panel had high hopes for the new Google tag that was announced but are still hungry for more information.
• Connected TVs. Henke made an astute point that you can currently target TV-only campaigns, but with new partners like Hulu this is yet another way to “step on more turf” of competitors.
• Geo-experiments. Henerson was excited to test the geo-experiments feature around conversion lift.
• Discovery campaigns. The panel was excited about the ability to bring video into discovery campaigns and on the continued buildout of that campaign type.

Potential concerns from Google Marketing Live

One main element of concern for the panel was the risk posed by uploading user data.

Bacchini made it clear that while Google wants advertisers and agencies to upload first-party data, there may be a risk associated with that, which falls directly to the advertiser/agency.

She made a plea to consult with your legal team before acting on some of the first-party data uploads.

Bottom line

Whether you like or dislike the changes announced at this year’s Google Marketing Live, they will be coming to your accounts soon. This roundtable gives a fair look at how four ads experts are planning for these changes.

Watch the full SMX Advanced roundtable

You can view the full discussion at no cost until Aug. 31, along with all of the other sessions from this year’s SMX Advanced.

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