At the recent Google Marketing Live, an annual conference for marketers, a group of local experts emphasized the role of trust in digital marketing, especially in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
During the event’s online session dubbed ReIMAGINE Advertising, hosted by Adobo Magazine on Tuesday, May 31, resource speakers were in agreement that the marketing landscape has changed tremendously because of digital technology.
The professionals who shared their thoughts were Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines president Digs Dimagiba, Spark Foundry general manager Cat de Leon-Vinuya, Globe head of marketing communications Crisela Cervantes, and Unilever SEA beauty and wellbeing integrated marketing and commerce lead Dennis Perez.
Increased automation was the first subject to grab the marketers’ attention. Google announced new features for its flagship automated solution, Performance Max. Performance Max campaigns started last year and they empower marketers to reach customers across Google’s different platforms with a single campaign.
Now, Google will be rolling out more tools for experimentation, goals to allow for optimizing instore sales, explanations to clarify changes in performance, and recommendations for marketers to improve their use of these campaigns.
The experts agreed that Filipino marketers have to leverage automation to keep up in the industry. Cervantes demonstrated this fact by detailing how Performance Max lowered the cost-per-lead in Globe’s broadband campaign by 48 percent. They took the first party audience signals they had identified and used Performance Max to locate similar audiences across Google’s platforms. In this way, their campaign expanded their prospective audiences and generated more leads.
“It would take manually someone to optimize by audience, by channel, so much more time. But you have these solutions now that allow you to automate it and allow the machine to do the work.” Cervantes concluded.
Maximizing YouTube
YouTube shorts are averaging 30 billion daily views worldwide this year. To help marketers take advantage of this medium’s popularity, Google revealed during the Google Marketing Live that Video Action and App campaigns will now automatically scale to YouTube Shorts.
The panel advised Filipinos marketers to stay updated on the newest tools available to them on the video platform because of its wide audience. YouTube reaches 56 million Filipinos according to Spark Foundry’s data.
De Leon-Vinuya added that marketers should consider YouTube an essential part of the marketing mix as it is where Filipinos, especially 18-to-25-year-olds, prefer to consume media.
“[Younger Filipino audiences] are becoming more and more elusive from the traditional channels, therefore TV may not be the right mix when it comes to trying to reach this audience,” de Leon-Vinuya stated.
“When it comes to choosing this video platform, you can use it either as a mode of discovery or as a means to educate or put more information on your product out there.”
Perez, however, noted that marketers must account for a fundamental difference between YouTube and traditional channels like TV. Unlike TV that has a finite number of channels, YouTube has a virtually unlimited amount of content.
So, it is no longer a matter of interrupting consumers with an ad. Marketers have to listen to their audience’s reasons for visiting the platform and from there, offer them content that satisfies them, according to Perez.
“Once you get that nice intersection of you providing a branded content but also you providing a value to the audience then that is the perfect intersection, where it is an ad and people know that it is an ad, but they don’t mind seeing that ad because it gives [them] so much fun,” Perez expounded. “This is where Filipinos have a very good advantage, we are natural story tellers.”
Balancing privacy
Lastly, as cookies are being phased out and concerns with privacy rise, Google teased several privacy products for release later this year. These include My Ad Center, which allows users to customize the ads they see and control how their data informs ads, and Privacy Sandbox APIs, which will enable marketers to explore privacy-safe options for interest-based advertising and remarketing.
The experts, though, do not see the thrust towards privacy as a problem. For them, it should have been integrated from the start.
“If all you do in your campaigns is product pushing, but you’ve never taken the time to actually talk to the customer in an open and transparent way and even let them know how do we use their data, what kind of data do we actually get from you, and not just you but your network… everything will collapse,” Dimagiba asserted.
Yet, with all the new tools at their fingertips, the panel maintained that it’s up to the marketer to make the final decision. They believe marketers must be willing to continuously learn and embrace new technology so marketers can figure out the ideal direction for their campaigns.
This opinion was evident in the discussion of another much-anticipated innovation, cross media insights. This data is part of Google’s planned upgrades for its Ads Insights page and Google analytics disclosed during its event.
Dimagiba said, “We absolutely believe [cross media measurement] is the Holy Grail of what we as digital marketers need. However, having said that, we also have to accept that no measurement is going to be absolutely perfect…it will not replace the judgement of a marketeer.”
“You’re going to be able to get as much data as you need, in all different sources that you have…if you’re able to have access to that to educate yourself and be with a community of people, your judgement will actually improve and you’ll be able to make better decisions,” he said.
