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Google Marketing Live: 3 Trends For Forward-Thinking Marketers

Jun 05, 2022

How do you innovate when you already own the world's largest search engine and digital ad platform? You find more ways to connect consumers with the products and services they need and give marketers more tools to reach them.

Google Marketing Live is an annual event hosted by Google and streamed to marketers around the world. Multiple speakers take the stage to announce new products and share the latest trends and insights.

We watched hours of coverage to bring you three trends worth knowing about as you plan your marketing strategies.

Trend 1

Ads will become even more visual

It is estimated that over 50% of our brain's processing power is involved in vision and image processing. It's no wonder that pictures and videos typically get a higher response rate than text. Naturally, Google is expanding how marketers and consumers can create and interact with image and video ads to consume more content and create stronger relationships.

Marketers need to invest in creating richer experiences and more engaging content to stand out in Google Shorts (their TikTok competitor), interactive and augmented reality shopping ads, and YouTube. Here are just a few of the new products and enhancements that the Google team teased at Google Marketing Live.

Trend 2

Consumer privacy matters more than ever

Protecting user data becomes even more challenging as Google engages more shoppers across more channels on more devices. By 2023, 65% of the population will be covered by modern privacy regulation.

How we measure our efforts must change in a privacy-focused future. So, how does Google balance two competing priorities? By giving consumers more choice over how their data is used and using machine learning to help marketers analyze results at scale without access to an individual user's identity.

Trend 3

Automation and insights require greater transparency and testing

The digital marketing community is split over Google's push to automate bidding, keyword selection, ad creative, and audience selection. What's left for a human to do? A lot, it turns out!

We can drive even greater performance by training the machines with better data and testing multiple strategies to determine a winner. Google announced new tools to help us understand more about how their models are augmenting, not replacing, our human ability to generate insights from data. If successful, it may help minimize objections to the "black box" systems that Google has pushed in the past.

....and much, much more

Google Marketing Live was a full day event with dozens of speakers. There's no way to capture the entire event in one post but you can watch the replay videos or read the official recaps to get the full scoop.

We're watching these three trends (and many more) as Google brings new products to market. Our job is to stay on top of this stuff and "trust but verify" that the benefits are real. Until then, we take everything with a large grain of salt.

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