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- [00:00]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. Now, one of the parts of the industry that has transformed more than any other in recent years is search. AI is transforming the power of search and how we use it and how brands get the most of it. Now, I'm joined in this episode by Dan Taylor, who runs search and Google Ads over at Google, to tell me more about what they're doing and what they're bringing to market and how brands can get the most out of search. Really fascinating conversation. Dan brings a lot to this. I know you love it. Here it is. Dan Taylor from Google, welcome to the show.
- [00:36]
B
Great to be here.
- [00:37]
A
It's great to have you and thanks for. I was going to say thanks for flying in to see us here.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But let's start on flying, actually, because I recently discovered that you've got a flying license or pilot's license.
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B
Right.
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A
And it's funny, actually, my wife, when I turned 30, bought me a flying lesson. So I've got about two hours of flying experience. So not a lot. But one thing I did know is the experience, taking off and landing is completely different. I mean, taking off felt, I shouldn't say, it's relatively easy, right? You know, pull back, off you go landing. Oh, my God. That was. That was an experience and a half. But, you know, you've got a bit more experience.
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B
I mean, taking off and taking flight is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Right?
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A
Yeah.
- [01:19]
B
Freeing and everything like that. I had a friend of mine who wanted to go for flight and small planes are a lot different than big planes. And I asked her how she felt after it was over. She goes, well, the taking off was great, but I really didn't enjoy the landing so much. And of course, pilots have all these great little chestnuts. And I said, well, takeoffs are optional, but landings are mandatory. So we have to land the plane, but you don't have to get in the plane and take off.
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A
It's true. And it's so much more complicated, isn't it, adjusting the altitude, the angles and the wind conditions. There's a lot to take off.
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B
Yeah, well, the ground doesn't move.
- [01:55]
A
Yes, exactly. And you have certain amount, number of seconds before you're going to hit it successfully or not. Basically, yeah. The other thing I noticed as well, being up in the air was quite disorientating, like in terms of the horizons, where the horizon is and isn't, and whether you're going up and down. I did a flyover past my house and was taking photos of My house, I was saying out the window. Obviously, I wasn't out the window because a rather different thing, but. But again, kind of knowing where you are and adjusting yourself is also quite a skill to it.
- [02:24]
B
Yeah. They make a big deal out of what's called situational awareness. Right. So which is there's a looking out the window or looking outside of the plane and understanding what traffic is around you. And do you know where you are relative to the horizon? Especially where are you relative to the ground? Where are you relative to other planes? And then looking inside the plane, do you know how fast you're going? Do you know whether you're going. Whether your attitude? Meaning are you going up, are you going down? And what altitude you're at? And so there are pilots who can get fixated on their instruments, and there are pilots who can get fixated on looking at the horizon. And if you get fixated on any one thing, that's when things start to go wrong.
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A
That's interesting, isn't it?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I love the post you did the other day, just picking out some of those lessons from that experience in terms of, like you say, taking off is optional, landing is mandatory, but also balancing instinct with data, which is a bit like that experience, isn't it, flying as well.
- [03:19]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [03:20]
A
Another point you made as well, which I thought was brilliant, is strive for success and train for failure. And I think the airline industry is very good, isn't it, at learning from failure? I remember reading an amazing book called Black Box Thinking by Matthew Side. I know you've read it as well. And he compares the airline industry to, I think, the medical industry. And in the airline industry, he makes the point that if a plane goes down, the black box data is shared across all airlines so everyone can learn. And in fact, the pilot has immunity from prosecution, which makes so much sense because the pilot's gonna confess to what happened. Right. And what went wrong and their role in it. And I thought it's really interesting for corporate culture that. Because when things go wrong, everyone is literally like, wasn't me, wasn't me. You know? Whereas actually, if we had sort of immunity from prosecution when something goes wrong, it'd be great for corporate culture.
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B
Yeah, for sure. I think. Actually, I think I heard this on your podcast, Right. Like, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. I think that was from.
- [04:15]
A
That was. Yeah, yeah, I quote that rather. So there's a fairly good chance of that being on there.
- [04:19]
B
But also there's this huge manual you get when you first start taking Flying lessons. And again, pilots have like gallows humor and they call it the Book of Blood. And basically it means that every regulation that's ever been written has based on something going wrong during a flight. And so it's really all about recognizing that everything is never going to go perfectly well. Every time I took a lesson and landed, we would go back into the training room and say, what do you think went wrong on that flight? And I said, well, I thought it went pretty well. He goes, it's okay. There's no such thing as a perfect flight. So let's talk about what went right and what didn't go right. And so having that grace and that permission inside your organization to talk about what went well and what didn't go well, I think it's really important to have some constructive feedback and some safe to fail conversations.
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A
I love that. I love that so much.
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B
I don't know that we always offer that, but I think it's important.
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A
It's a great aspiration, isn't it? It's so powerful. I know in the book he compares it to surgeons, where if a surgeon makes a mistake, then it's catastrophic for their reputation, for the hospital's reputation, for the medical profession. So the incentives are the opposite. They're to kind of COVID up disaster rather than learn from disaster. So definitely be more pilot than surgeon. Now, one of the fascinating things about your career is that you've been at Google, I think almost 20 years now, haven't you?
- [05:40]
B
Going on 20 years in August. Yeah.
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A
You must have seen some change. I mean, what percentage of Google employees have been around that length of time? That must put you in a rare category.
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B
Well, I'm not a founding father, but I think I qualify at this point as a village elder. We have a little tracking thing inside of the company where you can see how long you've been there relative to other active employees. And I think I'm in the 99 percentile at this stage.
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A
That's fantastic.
- [06:04]
B
We were a smaller company when I joined and now we're a large company, to be sure. And we've certainly seen a lot of change during that time.
- [06:10]
A
So I checked the data on this one. Obviously I asked Google to give me the data turnover in 2005. 6.4 billion today, over 400 billion. This was interesting. Search number of searches was already 140 billion in 2005. So there's already a big number, but over 5 trillion today, which for the mathematicians out there is a 3,445% growth. That is a phenomenal change, isn't it, in kind of how we use search in 20 years. What was it like when you started?
- [06:44]
B
I came from the traditional broadcast media background, so it was quite a change. I was wearing suits and ties every day. It took me a couple of years to stop wearing sport coats. Actually it took me several years to stop wearing sport coats. But it was this feeling of uncharted territory. I mean, when I first joined the company, we were having conversations with big brands and agencies about why it was important to consider search engine marketing as an opportunity to reach consumers. And so it wasn't an easy sell. And we certainly had established Google AdWords at the time as a business opportunity. And there were lots of marketers having great success, but we had a lot of work to do. We knew that we had a big opportunity in front of us. We knew that consumers had shifted to spend more and more time online. And we were excited about the opportunity. Also just incredible amount of innovation, collaboration and excitement. People working across the metaphorical aisle with each other to try and figure out how to get problems done. And that still happens to agree today just happens at a much larger scale.
- [07:46]
A
I mean, one of the less recognized successes I think that Google's had is the power of simplicity. Because I remember like back in the day when you had dial up and the page was full of kind of multiple links and text and it was all very kind of hard to navigate. And Google was brutally simple, you know, in terms of your just the white page, the search bar and the logo, that was it. But I think there's something quite powerful in actually making it easy to do. I mean, and you've always been at the forefront of making something easy. And I think ease is a big competitive advantage.
- [08:19]
B
Well, I think the most important thing to me when I joined as an ads guy is the relevance of the ad to what people were searching for. Again, coming from the broadcast space where we were selling on cpm, we were selling adjacencies to content the search business was really built on. The best ads are really just answers to a question. If we're going to monetize the the search engine in a way that's differentiated for our users. The ads have to be relevant to what's being searched for. And that was the kind of aha moment for our business, why advertisers got great success out of it. And we even built our pricing model around that. And I think that in addition to the great consumer experience had a multiplying effect.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
And I think that really helps those
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A
two things combined is very powerful. So in 20 years, what have been the biggest breakthrough moments that, that you've seen?
- [09:11]
B
I think they all follow shifts in consumer behavior. Certainly we touched a little bit on consumers spending more time online, discovering more content. As the web grew, people needed a way to discover all this great content. The advent of broadband and online video was certainly one of those. And YouTube becoming a great place to discover content and just video proliferation in general. I have to say that mobile was one of the biggest inflection points for us. And I think about that in the context of the consumer business, of course, where consumers were spending all this time suddenly not on their desktops and laptops, but on these handheld devices. That was like a painful moment for the advertising industry. I'm sure you were in the midst of it yourself, right? The formats weren't fit for purpose, the screens were too small, the tools didn't work. It was really hard to measure. It was almost like the early days of search was like, I don't really want to get into this. This is too hard and too complicated. But once we kind of built some tools and embraced the consumer shift and technology shift, it unlocked this whole period of economic innovation and opportunity for everybody. And so that was a huge shift for us in the early 2000 and tens, I would say. And so that was a really big moment for us. And we talked about this. We had a whole initiative called Go Mo and then there was FOMO for gomo. And we talked about companies, when was their mobile moment, when more of their traffic was coming from mobile than not, and making sure that they had the right assets and the right marketing strategy for that. That was a pretty big shift. And certainly the programmatic landscape was another one where there was real time bidding and people trying to apply data driven decision making to the practice of websites and apps. And reaching consumers at scale almost combined with the difficulty of doing that across devices, and when changing privacy standards and devices and browsers, changing cookie standards and all of that kind of happening at the same time, which gave rise to a lot of privacy preserving technologies and the ability to model conversions and be able to model reach when you couldn't have all those things, was another moment where it's like, okay, precision is good, but prediction is important as well. And so I think that laid the ground really well for a lot of the analytical and predictive technologies that AI had been building. What I would say quietly in the background before generative AI kind of became the foreground. And of course, the moment we're in now actually feels a lot like, I would say that mobile transition, except that number one, it's happening much faster. The pace of innovation is much faster and marketers are embracing it much faster as well.
- [12:06]
A
Yeah. And it does feel like we're right in the middle of a series kind of shift in the environment and what's possible. I wanted to put your brains on the interface because obviously you're in a commercial function, the interface between commercial and products. Because as obviously Google started out like every business does, very close to its customer and innovating, but you're now a massive organization. How do you ensure that the customer's needs are always at the heart of product development?
- [12:32]
B
Yeah, the organization that I'm in today, which I've been doing for about a decade, is focused on encapsulating what the market and customer needs are and ensuring that it shows up in our product roadmap and our feature launches. The most successful product launches are the ones that are very highly adopted as soon as we launch them and that the loudest person in the room problem is not what dictates our roadmap. We source a lot of data from our frontline sales teams, we meet with a lot of customers, we're at all of the industry events. Of course, increasingly we're using AI to understand insights from our customers, using a lot of intelligence to understand where are the pain points, where are the broken user journeys in our ux. Right. Or where are the biggest issues coming from a tech support standpoint. And that also informs our roadmap. And so we really see our role in amplifying the voice of the customer and making sure that shows up in our roadmap. And as you mentioned, that was a lot easier to do when we were small and all kind of sitting in the same room. But as the company has gotten bigger, we really see it's important for us to be a conduit to make sure that the roadmap and the engineering is aligned with the customer's highest priorities day to day.
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A
And practically. Any top tips on how you make that work in such big organizations? I know many marketers find that the hard thing, navigating the organizational structures and incentives and that kind of thing. So practically any advice on how to make sure that wherever decision gets made, the customer insight's always at the heart of it.
- [14:07]
B
We're very lucky, I think, in that our head of ads and commerce, Vidya Srinivasan, is very much focused on making sure that we're meeting customer needs. So that's a good Starting point, along with Philip Schindler, our chief business officer. On a regular basis we get together and make sure that we're solving the most highest priority problems. But people aside, the processes that we put in place there are relatively simple. We pulse the marketplace on an ongoing basis, both data driven and anecdotal. I think about it this way. There's the highest paid opinion data point, which is like, what are our sales leaders telling us and what are our most important customers telling us in meetings? Then there's the data driven piece, which are like, what are our support cases telling us? What is our customer churn telling us? What are our product adoption numbers telling us about what things are going well and what things aren't going well. And then there's all the steering data and meetings that we're having with sales teams in between. And so synthesizing all that on a regular basis to evaluate that against our roadmap. We do bi weekly steercos to make sure that we're understanding what's going on in the field. We compare that to the data that we get and we update our roadmaps quarterly. So it's an ongoing pulse check.
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A
I like that. People, data and process to make sure that all three are connected.
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B
Yeah, I mean we publish our roadmaps at the end of the year for the coming year and then we update them quarterly. So we're always updating.
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A
Yeah, that's quite cool.
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B
That's one of the good things about being in the software business is that we get to be nimble.
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A
I've noticed that comparing CPG and software, actually that that is the difference. I mean, when I worked in cp, I mean you'd have a one to three year roadmap would typically be the normal timeframe and then whenever. Now I've got to know a lot more software companies. It's amazing how they work on such a shorter turnaround time. A quarter is what would be a year in CPG terms typically.
- [15:59]
B
Well, actually AI max for search campaigns, which maybe we'll talk about at some point, is a great example of that. And so we were seeing how consumers were searching longer, more complex queries, especially with the advent of generative AI. Right. People had higher expectations of technology. They were coming to Google to ask things that they weren't asking before. And we didn't have a strategy for a lot of customers where they were ready for that change in consumer search behavior. And so we had to pivot pretty quickly to build an offering to help them take advantage of that change in consumer behavior. AI Max for search campaigns. Went from concept to launch in less than six months. Been our most successful search launch in over a decade.
- [16:43]
A
That's incredible. It's funny like that, isn't it? Sometimes the things you spend years over deliberating and over engineering and testing on this life, you know.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You know, you think you're going to be the big things and then something that's small, nimble and responds to a market need can blow up. And I've definitely seen that in my career. I'd say it's the quick turnaround, responding to market need in the moment. Bets that have always beaten the long term. Try and, you know, try and do something. Incredible bets. Yeah. That's so fascinating. I love that. Talking of Google trends, what what are you seeing in terms of search trends at the moment and what can we learn them?
- [17:16]
B
Actually, the most interesting trend is what I was speaking about a moment ago, which is we see 5 trillion searches a year and 15% of those searches every day are new. But over the last year plus they're getting longer, they're getting more complex. There are multiple searches in one, they're visual. So we see 25 billion searches a month on Google Lens, which is people searching with their phone, camera. And as a traditional search engine marketer, you can't build a keyword list for these searches. Your campaigns aren't elastic enough to adapt to this kind of search behavior. What we're finding is that advertisers need to build some flexibility into their search engine marketing strategies to capture this new opportunity. You layer in these new AI powered experiences like AI Overviews and AI mode and that increases the urgency to adapt to these new behaviors. So that is the trend that's on everyone's mind and everyone's lips right now.
- [18:26]
A
I can imagine. Now for anyone who doesn't know what circle to search is, because Sophie Neary taught me this last year and I have to say it's quite amazing. But just describe how it works for anyone who hasn't yet discovered it.
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B
Sure. So on Google Pixel phones and many Android phones, any screen that you're on, I'm holding an imaginary phone. You push and hold and you circle anything that's on your screen and it will conduct a visual search for you. And so if you're watching a YouTube video, for example, and you like a blazer that someone's wearing, you can circle that. It's the same technology that works like Google Lens where you can take a picture of something and circle to search it. It's very impressive and so, you know, a good example in my own life. You know those storm door, that tube on your storm door that keeps it from slamming? Do you know what you call that?
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A
Yeah, no one knows what it's called. No, I don't know. The thing that stops it bashing against the wall is. It comes all the way out. Yeah, yeah.
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B
I don't know.
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A
Rubbery plug thing that bounces. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have no idea.
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B
So that's something that you wouldn't search for because you don't know what to call it. But you can take a picture of it and you can get it online. As soon as you take a picture of it, right? You take a picture of it, it does a search for it and I bought it. That's the kind of opportunity, commercial opportunities that come from things like lens and circle to search that didn't exist before.
- [19:44]
A
It's funny how connecting the two things brilliantly in terms of people are searching for such deeper level of detail than they were. And this helps to simplify that process. I was adjusting, so I like to go cycling. And on the bottom of your shoes you have this thing called cleats, which basically attach you to the pedals, right? And the cleat is very important. The cleats are in exactly the right position. I was trying to just adjust the cleats, but I realized yesterday it was a non standard screw that had been used to put the cleats in. I'd never seen the type of fitting that these, these shoes had. So I literally was like, what on earth? What, what, what? You know, what tool do I need to try and adjust my cleats? So I did the same thing. Like, right, what is this? Circle it. What am I? What am I? What am I looking up? I didn't know what to order. I'm like, what is this thing? You know, it's a star shape rather than the cross shape, which most of them are. So it overcomes that barrier of ignorance that so many of us have and then connects it to being able to buy it as well, which is so handy.
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B
I think the other piece that's gotten a lot of marketers to move to an aha moment is with these longer searches and with experiences like AI overviews, it's creating new opportunities for brands to get discovered perhaps earlier in their journey. And so maybe a personal example. My wife has a cat. She thinks the cat gets lonely when we travel. We don't really know if she's lonely or not. The cat that is. And so we're like, oh, Maybe we should bring the cat with us to London. And so what does it take to bring a cat on a plane and overseas? Right. In the traditional days of search engine marketing, that's not something that a brand would necessarily bid on, but it does trigger an AI overview and it gives me tips on, well, you know, maybe you need to give your cat a sedative and perhaps you need a cat carrier. And in the uk, do you know that you need like a medical certificate?
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A
No, I didn't know that you do.
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B
Or if you don't have one, you have to quarantine your cat for four months.
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A
Wow.
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B
And so we're not doing that as part of that AI overview. The mention that you might need a cat carrier creates a commercial opportunity. And so there's an opportunity for a brand to put a product that is relevant right in the moment that maybe didn't exist before. These are the kind of opportunities where brands are like, okay, these longer, more complex queries actually do create commercial opportunities at the same time.
- [22:05]
A
And actually one question I was going to ask you about, which I think this helps to answer, is the opportunity for smaller, more nimble brands to create demand. So in that situation, presumably a smaller brand, by being much more targeted about the circumstances in which they show up, like a cat carrying business, you know, could probably take advantage of that rather than the previously, the bigger brands would have dominated the search outcome.
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B
I'll give you another example, actually a real one from yesterday. So I wanted to get a new pair of jeans to wear to today's podcast. Not that it'll matter since we're sitting.
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A
Imagine lazy. Imagine that. Exactly.
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B
And I typically wear Levi's. And so I did a search for Levi's, you know, waist size 30 near me, couldn't find any. And that's sort of like a typical search engine marketing way of searching. Right. Like very specific, the brand location. Right. Search like a search engine marketer. I said, well, okay, let me think more expansively here. And I said, I want a pair of dark wash jeans, slim fit. I want to be able to try them on in store this weekend. I'm going to be in London and I see an AI overview and I see an opportunity for rag and bone. So I end up at rag and bone.
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A
Brilliant.
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B
Yeah. And so that's a brand that I wouldn't have thought of before.
- [23:19]
A
Love that. I've got a funny story actually coming onto the impact that AI has had on search. So about maybe two or three years ago, a YouTuber did a seven minute kind of takedown video of this podcast, right? Of this podcast, of this podcast. He did a ranty video for seven minutes. I got called tyrannically British bullshitter and this kind of thing. He gave me a two and a half, two and a half star review, which I thought was quite, you know, generous of him given he spent seven minutes, you know, telling me how bad this show was. And anyway, I thought, what do you do in this situation, right? You can either get upset or you can kind of engage with it and see the funny side. And I reached out to him on LinkedIn and just said, oh, you up for a chat? And he said, yeah, yeah, of course. And I found. Oh, so there's a really important bit of information I forgot to tell you. When I first launched the podcast seven years ago, I'd read this book called it's not how good you'd are, it's how good you'd want to be by a guy called Paul Arden. And the subtitle in the book is the world's best selling book by Paul Arden. And I thought, what a genius subtitle. So when I launched the podcast, I just, as a joke, I just said, the world's number one marketing podcast by John Evans. You see, so I'd said this like seven years ago. Anyway, so I phoned him and I said, dude, why'd you pick on me? And he said, well, I went to AI. I asked AI what the world's number one marketing podcast was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I'm kind of getting to, I'm getting to make the claim real, you know, gradually. But, but it was just a bit of a. But I'd obviously, you know, trained the AI. AI had searched out there and looked for the world's number one marketing podcast. And there it was. So talking about AI, then what? How much is AI changing search? I think everyone listening is going to have a perception that everything's changed. We're all going to AI. So how much are search volumes impacted or are they still going up or how many people are now using AI to search for things?
- [25:10]
B
So the volume of searches that we're seeing on Google is actually going up year over year, including the number of commercial queries. And a lot of that is driven by the innovations that we have made in AI. Not only the new AI powered experiences that we have, but the expectations that consumers have about what they can ask technology. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, people are realizing they can ask Google more and different types of questions and we're also able to improve upon the types of answers that we give with things like AI overviews and AI mode that's created new opportunities for better discovery, including of brands. And so we're really excited about this, what I would call a really expansionary moment for the entire industry. And so that's been great.
- [26:02]
A
But do you see the other AIs as competition to search in terms of people going to other AIs to look for answers to what they might have used Google for?
- [26:10]
B
Well, we don't see it as a zero sum game. I think it's expansionary for overall discovery across the web. We see the overall searches going up, we see an opportunity for everybody in the game.
- [26:24]
A
I had fascinating experience just before Christmas. I went to Semrush's conference and met their CMO and they did this report about digital brand visibility. They were basically tracking. And what I thought was fascinating is that actually Google is the main source of information for the LLMs. So even if you're searching on another AI, it's using Google to inform it. So from a brand point of view, you need to be showing up in Google as well as showing up in LLMs.
- [26:49]
B
Well, one of the things that's been interesting is we talked about AI overviews and AI mode and one of the questions that we get is how do I optimize for these new AI powered experiences? Our core SEO guidance has not changed. You still want to build for people first content. You still want to think about multimodal capabilities, images, videos, you know, where are people discovering and hearing about your brand on, you know, review sites or content creators and social and all the rest. Like all the places where you would think about your brand presence, earned, owned, right, et cetera. All of those things still are true. Now we have started to think about what are some things we can help for discovery on some of these new AI powered surfaces. So for example, you know, we recently announced in merchant center the opportunity to add a bunch of new attributes like frequency, frequently asked questions about your brand or accessories that might go with products that you sell and make those available in merchant centers so that AI can more easily pull those things into things like AI overviews. But overall the core guidance is going to be the same.
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A
Yeah, in fact, actually my conclusion from the report they did was it actually just reinforced the importance of building a brand, getting other people to tell your story, getting loads of reviews, getting content out there that people engage with, because that's what every LLM is learning from and so is important to get all those things in place. Talking about AI mode Then are we going to see paid search appear? Will I be able to buy ads in AI mode?
- [28:20]
B
So today we're showing ads in AI mode to 2 billion users in about 200 countries and territories globally. And we are testing ads in AI mode just in the US today. And so we are thinking about the right consumer experience in AI mode and where in the journey of using AI mode it makes sense to introduce advertising opportunities. Taking half a step back, when advertisers are asking me how do I take advantage of these opportunities? In addition to that keyword construct around, you can't take advantage of these new search opportunities when people are searching longer, more complex queries without tools like AI max for search campaigns or performance max. But what you don't have to worry about is as these new AI powered consumer experiences, whether it's AI overviews or AI mode, start to light up within search, your campaigns are automatically extensible into these new surfaces. So with all that aside, we're only testing as an AI mode because we want to get that consumer experience right and we're only testing them in the US today. What I found most interesting as we look at that, so AI mode is a total re imagining of search, right? It's a place where people are diving deeper, it's conversational, it's longer. What we're finding is it's not about the format per se, it's about where in that consumer's journey of discovery does it make sense to introduce a commercial opportunity. In what you call maybe traditional search, you might be closer to a commercial opportunity than not. And in AI mode, you might be more in a research place. And so slapping an ad for shoes if you're a runner, but really you just want to research how do I get started in running? I just started running last year. I'm at the 5k stage, I'm not at the marathon stage. But I need to know what kind of clothing do I wear and do I need a different kind of nutrition setup? Don't try to sell me a bunch of gear the first time I'm starting to ask these questions. But as I get closer to a commercial opportunity, where are those ads going to show and where are they going to be? Where ads are going to be the right answer. And so that's really what we're learning. A good example of that is we announced at the National Retail Federation in January direct offers, which is when we have a good understanding of where a consumer is in that journey and a specific exclusive offer just for that consumer would be the right thing to get them across the line, we introduce a direct offer and a shopping ad and they can redeem it right there. Those are the kind of things that we're experimenting with right now to try and see if that's the right model for AI mode.
- [31:09]
A
Yeah, that's clever that. My experience of it similar is I love the AI overview because it's, it kind of teases a question I hadn't thought of and I sort of read and go, oh, I'd like to know more. And then of course, I'm straight into AI mode asking a question. So it's quite, it's quite a good tease into going deeper with the product or it helps me refine what I really wanted to know. You know, it kind of refine the question. You go back and forward. So it's very clever how it kind of, you know, the overview almost gets you into the AI mode almost without you realizing. And then suddenly I'm literally in AI mode. Hadn't even, hadn't even realized.
- [31:41]
B
Yeah. It's one of the things that the consumer team is experimenting with to figure out when is a traditional search engine result. I keep saying traditional, but search is constantly changing. When is a regular search engine result the right answer? When is an AI overview the right answer? And when is moving someone in AI mode for deeper research going to be the right answer? And that'll change for every query.
- [32:02]
A
I think you must give brands a lot of advice about how to optimize their search performance. What are your two or three top tips to brands for getting the most out of search?
- [32:12]
B
The top thing that I give advice to brands is to start thinking about those opportunities to be discovered earlier in the journey. And I'll give you a couple examples. So Aviva Insurance, that's a brand here in the uk, insurance is a longer research play. It's financial services. It's not an impulse buy, but people search for it all the time. So with things like AI overviews, that's going to have a little bit more information that's going to come up more often in the financial services category. But many financial brands aren't necessarily investing in these kind of more exploratory queries. And so Aviva invested in AI Max for search campaigns and in doing so, we're being exposed to some of these longer, more exploratory queries and it generated 22% more quotes for them as a result. So that's a good example. That's like the kind of lowest hanging fruit for these new AI powered experiences is to make sure. You're thinking about people are researching more with these AI powered experiences and are you thinking about that as a search engine marketing strategy?
- [33:13]
A
That makes sense because you tend to think about a purchase way before you get into specifically asking details about you with your genes, about availability of a size and a color and a location. So influencing higher up the funnel makes a ton of sense, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah.
- [33:30]
B
And again, I think with AI overviews, it's giving these brands the opportunity to get discovered earlier than before in search.
- [33:36]
A
So you can pick up the signals that somebody might be starting to think about a journey towards a purchase that you're in the category you're in.
- [33:43]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [33:44]
A
Yeah. That's really smart. I was going to link. Actually it might be a good time to ask you this is what the link between kind of YouTube and Google is. Obviously, you know you own both, right? And it must.
- [33:53]
B
Google owns both.
- [33:54]
A
Google owns both, yeah. We wouldn't be chatting here, would we, if you own both or, or you'd be flying your plane back. But what's the potential to bring those two things together from a brand point of view? Because one does kind of higher up the funnel, doesn't it? And one does more conversion.
- [34:11]
B
Well, I mean we're finding that YouTube and or Google are involved in two thirds of consumer purchase journeys when they discover a brand, a product, a service or a retailer. And so we know that when it comes to discovery and decisions that YouTube and search play a role. Often they play complementary roles with each other. And so one of the things that we launched earlier this year, actually it was 2025 now, because it's only February 2nd, is a metric called attributed brand searches, which allows brands to understand once they have an ad that has run on YouTube, let's say, did someone conduct a brand search as a result? And it really starts to help brands understand the connection between ad exposure on one surface and search volume later on. And then we can start to have a conversation about like, okay, these things are complementary and how do I optimize some of my campaigns in a way that makes sense and the role that it's playing across the funnel.
- [35:13]
A
That makes a lot of sense because I might be looking at kind of car review videos, like just looking at, just thinking about my next car. It'll be months, maybe even years before I'm actually in the market to buy one. And then suddenly I'll be googling my nearest dealer to try and buy one. But it will be months and months of kind of like looking up different YouTube videos. And reviews that would have gone on before. So I think connecting those sort of upper funnel and bottom of funnel things is, is critical. Talking about, you talk about measurement there. How do you measure, you know, the impact of search because you're, you're literally, you know, how do you ensure that what you're capturing is incremental to the brand and not just what someone might search for anyway?
- [35:50]
B
Well, I mean we have a, a whole suite of products to help customers measure the thing that they want. I think increasingly customers are moving towards. You hit this with your question. I don't just want correlation, I want to understand causation. Increasingly customers want to see we're using programs like Conversion Lift which is a study that you can run within your Google Ads campaign to understand how much lift that I get from the search campaigns that I'm running and which of those searches and conversions that happen were incremental. We also have geox which is a study that you can, it's a relatively time tested technique to run a test here and a holdback experiment in a different geo to see how that's happening and then apply those best practices to optimization. So we're continuing to do that. We're also putting to work incrementality studies and working with third parties so they can test those results with their own sources of truth.
- [36:48]
A
Yeah, I mean that sounds critical. That's always my question is how much if I'm sponsoring a search how much of it's capturing what was there already versus how much is getting in front of people that are new customers that wouldn't have been thinking about me prior to that point.
- [37:01]
B
Yeah, one of the bigger investments we made in 2025 we launched a first party marketing mix model called Meridian which allowed us to help inform customers own internal business intelligence because a lot of our large customers build their own BIS to understand what's working versus not but also third party mmms. There's an entire industry out there that does that to help understand how to look at paid search relative to organic search because a lot of the methodologies don't do that very well. And so we open sourced that and made that available and it's been a real breakout hit. And so that's a pretty big investment and it's been really helpful to help people understand the incremental value of Google
- [37:39]
A
search because I think any marketer needs to be able to justify how much they're spending.
- [37:44]
B
Yeah, one of the things I think that's been both really interesting and healthy and again we talked a little bit about the 20 years that I've been at Google again coming from traditional media, which is really hard to measure and we're like, wow, I can measure clicks. That's amazing. Well, we're so far from those vanity and proxy metrics. We're now at a point where it's like I don't want to just measure clicks and visits or even leads. I want to measure which leads converted. I want to measure profit, not just conversions or e commerce transactions. I want to measure incrementality, not just total sales. I want to be able to look back and make a marketing mix model investment based on a six month look back. And so modern measurement has really become this view of like I want to understand what's incremental. I want to be able to make a marketing mix decision. So like return on ad spend is required, but it is not sufficient today. You need all these other things in order to do it. Well, that's become a real cmos challenge today is how do you manage all of those things? I am hopeful in some places where we're investing is I think that AI and some agentic capabilities will start to be able to make sense of some of that faster than we do today. Because today it's kind of, I mean you're juggling a lot of reports and trying to make sense of it all. And I think that we have a real opportunity in an agentix space to get that time to insight to move a bit faster. And that's a big area of focus for us this year.
- [39:12]
A
That could be huge. I mean I remember it's been a few years since I was a CMO spending the money, but I remember the MMMs would be months, I'd have to wait months and months and months and then the insights were helpful. But by that point I'd already spent 20 or 30 million and everything had changed. So the ability to get real time measurements and intel that you can action straight away I think is huge.
- [39:34]
B
I sort of think about like, you know, attribution helps your hands on keyboard today. Right. Incrementality helps your media Planner tomorrow and MMMs help your CMO in two months. Right. And how do we munge all that together into something that you can make decisions on a regular basis when you're sitting down with your CFO to talk about growth, not just expenses. Right?
- [39:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's exactly the way to position it. Flipping to the other side of it. So we talk a lot about media optimization and what AI is enabling us to to achieve. What about the creative Side, what are the implications of all this advancement on the media side, what are the implications for how we do the creative?
- [40:15]
B
I personally think 20 years at Google and a little bit more in media, okay, maybe a lot more, that we're really just scratching the surface on creative. We spent so many years optimizing audience selection and inventory and even how much we're willing to pay for a conversion, et cetera. I feel like we're just getting started with creative, and so those tools are really going to help us a lot. One of the things that I think I'm worried about is AI is the how, it's not the what. And I think a lot of the concern is like, oh, well, is AI just going to create AI Slop Creative? Right? And it could. Right? But much like I think YouTube empowered creators of all sizes put the power of a Hollywood studio on their mobile phone, essentially, it showed that great ideas given the right tools can be knockouts. Right? Great hits. I think the same is true with creative. And so the idea is actually going to matter more than it used to, not less. And so I think that's getting a little lost in the conversation. And so if you can productionize and improve your scale and reduce your budget on a great idea, that's an equalizer, right? And so your idea better count. I think that is getting lost a little bit.
- [41:43]
A
It is, again, lost. I'm strangely optimistic on AI I was very worried about it to begin with, thinking everybody is going to rush to make lots more, 10 times more, 10 times cheaper, and we're just going to see a race to the bottom. But I think the fact that it must be the word of the year, AI Slop, for some reason, like every other post, is some AI Slop. The fact that we can name that as the problem, and then we get over that and go, right now, let's focus on the idea. And the tools are just getting exponentially better. The quality of tools to be able to produce great creative in a short period of time. Funnily enough, actually. I don't know if you saw this, but the Pepsi super bowl ad. Have you seen the Pepsi super bowl ad?
- [42:20]
B
No, not yet.
- [42:21]
A
It is hilarious. They've got the Coke polar bear doing a blind taste test of Pepsi versus Coke and preferring Pepsi. And then the polar bear's so shocked by the result that the polar bear goes to therapy. And then you see him walking the streets forlorn, looking at everyone drinking Pepsi, and then meets another polar bear. They go to a concert and they appear on a kiss cam A bit like the kind of Coldplay concert.
- [42:43]
B
And he's doing like this.
- [42:44]
A
Yeah, yeah. And he's like, oh, no, I'm so embarrassed. It's very, very funny.
- [42:48]
B
Yeah.
- [42:48]
A
But what the reason I tell you that is not is, well, they've come up with a very good idea and they're playing with the whole history of the Pepsi taste challenge. But 10 hours later, Coke had come out with a response. 10 hours?
- [43:00]
B
Yeah.
- [43:00]
A
They were already out there with as well produced. Very funny. You know, the polar bear basically kind of claiming back the real taste of Coke, that kind of thing. It was just brilliant. And I had 10 hours like even two years ago. There's no way Coke would turn something like that around in 10 hours. No way. But they've done that. But again, like you said, it's the idea because someone who came up with a really clever idea got it produced and AI has enabled it to live and get out there on social media in a way it couldn't done before.
- [43:29]
B
Yeah. One of my colleagues, Josh Spanier, who does marketing for Google, he's got a podcast too now, it's the Frontier cmo. He talks about this notion of a concept in the morning, ship it at night or that night. And we're really seeing that there's a company called Loop Earplugs in Belgium and they created a series of video campaigns using VO3 and five days, 10 markets using VO3 and AI dubbing, and they were just out to market in five days because they had a great idea.
- [44:01]
A
Yeah. And your point is so spot on about if everyone's got those tools and everyone can do the same thing, the equalizer as you describe it, is going to be how good is the idea? Yeah, that's where it comes back to, isn't it? In a way it makes the idea stand out more because that's the only way of cutting through, is to have a better idea.
- [44:16]
B
Yeah, I really believe that to be true. I have a similar analogy when it comes to AI and overall media campaigns. And so one of the things I've been focusing a lot more over the last couple of years is data driven strategy. And so if AI is doing much more of the media decisioning and inventory selectioning and figuring out what's the right return on investment, a lot of that is being automated these days, Right? Well, AI is only going to automate towards the outcomes that you tell it you want or the outcomes you tell it that you're getting. And so I'm investing so much of my team's time now. In getting the data foundations and the data strategy right, AI will see her to the outcomes that you want. It's not going to tell you the outcomes to get similar. On the creative side, it's not going to come up with the best creative for you. It's going to scale your great ideas.
- [45:06]
A
Yeah, yeah, that resonates. I've spent so much time the last year, 18 months, talking to big tech companies who are investing in AI. And off the record, they all tell me exactly the same thing, which is the technology is so advanced, the issue is the quality of data it's being trained on.
- [45:23]
B
That's right.
- [45:23]
A
And that literally is a universal thing. I hear absolutely everywhere. So whoever's got the best quality data and can connect that data to other data sources is where the big leaps are going to happen. Yeah.
- [45:33]
B
It goes to the same point that you made earlier. If marketers all have the same tools, then the data that you bring to bear is going to be the difference.
- [45:39]
A
It's going to be the difference, isn't it? Yeah, it's true.
- [45:41]
B
And the creative.
- [45:42]
A
Exactly. Maybe a tough question to end on, but I've got a new newsletter out called the One Thing I'd like to Ask Everyone.
- [45:49]
B
Subscribe.
- [45:49]
A
Please do. Yeah, yeah. And anyone listening and watching. Yeah. Go to the uncensoredcmo.com 20years@google, Amazing time. Pick out one thing that you Learned in that 20 years that you think could be most useful to people listening and watching.
- [46:06]
B
One thing that could be most useful after 20 years. Don't wait. Someone told me long ago, when you're faced with a fork in the road, choose the bolder path. And I think in times of technological change, there's always more people that take a wait and see attitude instead of an experimentation and a move quickly approach. And that never works out. The wait and see approach never really works out. I think we're in a place, especially in the software and the media and technology industry, where the pace of innovation is so fast, the opportunity to experiment and innovate and iterate is there. So you may as well get started. I don't think there's enough opportunity to pivot and tweak along the way that waiting does not help you at all.
- [47:04]
A
I love that answer. And you learn so much from trying, don't you? The feedback loop you get from actually trying sets you up for success in the future, whereas the wait and see,
- [47:12]
B
it hasn't served anyone.
- [47:13]
A
You won't learn anything by waiting and seeing. That's a great answer. Love that, Dan. Thank you. Very much, mate. Really appreciate you coming in and chatting and yeah, good to see you.
- [47:22]
B
Thanks.
- [47:23]
A
So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now by the way, I've got a new newsletter so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the One Thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOS. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast, it would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.