Month: June 2018

by Marissa Aydlett, senior vice president marketing, Braze

In the wake of GDPR, marketers can be forgiven if they’re tempted to take the digital equivalent of pulling the covers over their heads and hoping that if they’re very, very quiet, the regulatory monsters will go away. But take comfort from the cartoon that Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker quoted at this year’s Code 2018: “Just because I hate you doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” Your customers value your services, and when you speak to them like friends as opposed to targets, they’ll be quick to return the favor by giving you their loyalty—and even their advocacy.

Yes, the Privacy Paradox that Meeker outlined is real: Customers value low-cost (or free) digital services powered in part by their own data. They ultimately spend more time on those services, which in turn triggers regulators’ interest in ensuring that consumers’ personal information is not misused. But Meeker tells us we’ve got to get out from under the covers: “It’s crucial to manage for unintended consequences… but it’s irresponsible to stop innovation and progress.”

Let’s face it: Humans are complicated. When sharing data to access a service they value (like yours), there’s an expectation that you will keep up as they respond to messages differently by channel, and as circumstances in their lives change. Technology systems are also increasingly complicated, offering marketers choices of their own. Your team can use technology as a canvas for creativity to orchestrate brilliant experiences that let consumers know they’re understood. As a marketer, when you’re confident of your customers’ identity—as in,who they are today, in the here and now, not yesterday or last week—you can take liberties with the personalization of messaging without fear of a misstep.

That’s the power of unbounded data. With decades-old systems that aren’t connected, your vision is limited to discrete views or snapshots of your customers that quickly grow stale. Stream processing fuels insight drawn from analysis of data within self-selected windows of time, knowing that the picture of your customer is always true to who they are at that moment. Let’s call it just-in-time marketing. It’s a fresh approach to strategic thinking based on the speed to market enabled by technology.

Are your teams ready to accommodate this always-on approach to strategy and consumer experiences? Committing to cross-channel messaging with a just-in-time mindset means that collaboration skills and processes are no longer nice to have, they’re table stakes. These days, if internal teams vary in their ability to test and learn, to iterate strategically in the here and now, your silos are showing out here in the real world. And make no mistake, your customers will notice and take you to the task. If your marketing organization is stuck in time, your business will get left behind.

At Braze, our new brand campaign is meant as a call to action to join consumers in the here and now. Customers are interacting with brands when they want, how they want. Every second that you hesitate, the value of your data deteriorates. Because, ready or not, shift happens.

Check out the Braze Cross-Channel Difference Report and learn how you can boost engagement by more than 800%.

The post Is your marketing organization stuck in time? appeared first on Digiday.

What’s agencies’ loss is consultancies’ gain.

Consultancies like Accenture Interactive, PwC and Deloitte Digital are all making one core tenet part of their pitch to marketers: If you want to take back more marketing in-house, we’ll help you do it. They’re buoyed by a stronger relationship that goes beyond the chief marketing officer and an overall perception that they’re objective partners, not simply vendors — putting them in a good position to remain top of mind for advertisers even as agencies can’t.

For example, an Accenture Interactive rep said inside the company’s newly launched Programmatic Services division, one of the core competencies is “in-housing,” which includes helping advertisers take back control of their media capabilities — building programmatic strategies, in-sourcing technology, changing operational models and creating internal capabilities.

Accenture is working with companies including HP and Radisson Hotel Group to help both increase return on media spending. For Radisson, it was a way to take back control of the customer journey from third-party partners — and feel comfortable that it would deliver what it wanted. 

Antonio Lucio, HP’s chief marketing officer, has been a loud voice calling for a serious internal cleanup of capabilities as part of an overall mission to take back control. Most of this, said Lucio, is driven by a change in mindset that the brand, not the agency, controls and must take ultimate responsibility for the customer. “To do marketing today … you need deep analytics and insight capabilities, creative content, programmatic buying capabilities. As a client, you have to build internal capabilities in four or five of those areas,” he said on Digiday’s Starting Out podcast earlier this month.

“The consultancies’ most relevant strengths in this case are organizational structuring or restructuring and digital transformation,” said Ann Billock, partner at Ark Advisors. “If companies take, say, programmatic, content or digital and production inside, the consultancies — with their C-level connections — can be called in from the top to help structure the organization and processes of the newly in-housed functions.”

The interesting question for the industry is this, said Billock: “Do the consultancies come in before the decisions to in-house are made, or are they parties to those decisions from the outset?”

One agency executive who didn’t want to be named because he is entertaining a job offer from a consultancy said it’s mostly the latter: Consultancies are buoyed by louder calls for transparency and control from advertisers and riding the wave of the bombshell Association of National Advertisers report from 2016 that alleged widespread issues in the agency business, plus ongoing issues of fraud in the digital advertising ecosystem.

Much of the pitch was on display at the Cannes Lions festival last week. At Deloitte Digital, which took over a suite at the top of the Majestic hotel, the talking points were clear: We’re not here to displace agencies, but we are here to service the CMO. “The message is: So, we’re here to optimize for the brands. We’re helping brands own capability sets like in-housing. We’re helping the ecosystem at large,” said Todd Paris, managing director at Deloitte Digital.

Deloitte Digital helps clients do more things in-house, including customer and audience data, augmented reality, media buying and event execution. Deloitte Digital CMO Alicia Hatch said this puts consultancies in a stronger position than agencies.

“Helping a client in-house marketing capabilities isn’t just about putting teams under one roof,” she said. “In-housing is a strategic business decision that can ultimately impact a company’s bottom line. We are able to help clients decide if in-housing is the right decision for them, identify the right technologies and talent, and undergo significant organizational restructuring to ensure in-housing efforts are successful and sustainable.”

Paris agreed that consultancies like Deloitte aren’t here to necessarily take on the role of agencies. But, he said, there has been a marked shift in companies realizing they need to control the customer experience.

“From an opportunity perspective, brands and CMOs understand now that ‘I’m the owner and the owner of the data, and of the customer experience,’” said Paris. 

Bill Duggan, svp at the ANA, said he expects about 65 percent of marketers to say they’ve taken some part of marketing capabilities in-house in the next release of a survey it does on the topic. In-house is attractive to companies because of cost and speed as well as transparency.

“Unlike agencies, consultants are more used to one-off projects,” said Duggan. “When it comes to helping brands figure out in-house capabilities, for example, they’re in a better place. Plus, they have their ear all the way up to the CEO or CFO, not just the CMO. They’re stronger in that way.”

Marketing services is also just one thing that consultancies do. They already count major marketers in their parent companies’ client bases, helping them sort out business processes, from technology to auditing to risk to even helping pick partners and manage agency review processes. That means they’re already often part of advertisers’ expenditure — putting them in a good position to take on projects like building internal programmatic capabilities, for example.

Paul Marcum, co-founder at Big Finish Digital and the former president at Truffle Pig, said consultancies often win because brands see them as being more “objective” and results-oriented. That means a chief financial officer can get behind a CMO’s decision to use them. “And all of the key components to in-housing, like IT, systems integration, workflow optimization, training are core competencies for consultants,” said Marcum, who is making it a point to provide more of a services model at his agency and recognizing that a shift must happen to compete in this new mode of working. 

Consultancies, to brands at least, place a higher premium on business analytics and return on investment, as well as data. So, whether a marketer wants to just understand more about what’s happening with their spending or take back control of some of it, consultancies are seen as more trusted and capable of doing that, said Marcum.

Dan Salzman, global head of media at HP, told Digiday that even though HP is focusing on building internal capabilities and working with Accenture to do that, agencies remain important to HP, especially in creative. “We believe that deep creative capabilities will always sit outside of brands,” he said. “And that this is not a strength of today’s consulting firms. So, we are asking our agencies to return to their roots and invest deeply in creative.”

“We want to make sure we’re free to optimize for the brands,” said Paris. “Our incentives are directly aligned with the CMOs’. We can listen and work in the marketing organization.”

The post As brands take marketing in-house, consultancies cash in appeared first on Digiday.

The duopoly is under threat in Europe on several fronts, including a new move by the European Parliament to overhaul European copyright law to require sites to monitor copyrighted material and make them legally liable for any sharing of copyrighted material. The proposed changes would also give publishers the right to charge platforms for displaying snippets of their content.

The outcome of the vote has sparked outcry from various camps, anti-censorship and free speech campaigners among them. Pouring more fuel on the fire recently was Google, which faced criticism for wrangling publisher members of its Digital News Initiative to lobby against the proposed changes. But the proposed changes could end up hurting some segments of the publishing industry just as much as the platforms.

Part of the purpose of the reform is to give publishers the same legal rights online as film and music producers, according to Angela Mills Wade, executive director at the European Publishers Council. Under the new proposal, aggregators and platforms don’t necessarily need a copyright license to display publisher content, just some form of contract with the publisher, like a revenue share, she said.

“Publishers will have their right and their own legal standing. It’s up to them what they do with it,” said Mills Wade. “It boils down to whether you want an internet where those who invest in production are incentivized to continue to invest in production, or a law that facilitates free riding and allows companies in this gray area of scraping and reusing content to continue.”

The concern is that smaller publishers, those who rely on news aggregators and platforms for a lot of their audience, will get cut by the tech platforms that will be wary of breaching the law. Those standing to benefit would be large publishers, those with recognizable brands and engaged direct audiences, which have an ax to grind with platforms like Google and Facebook sharing their content without receiving their fair reward.

“It’s hard to find anyone in favor of it,” said Struan Bartlett, founder and CEO of publisher aggregator NewsNow, who has been campaigning against the directive for over a year. “Publishers we talk to aren’t; users aren’t calling for it; web pioneers aren’t in favor. It’s bizarre it’s being pushed forward.”

In Germany, where publishers have flexed more muscle with tech platforms about copyright, Bartlett acknowledged there have been difficulties in enforcing specific publisher rights, but opponents feel expanding this to the EU level may not be the answer. “It’s European medicine for a German problem,” he said. “Article 11 is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. These sweeping new powers are overkill.”

There have been criticisms of the reform: Opponents think it’s too vague about how “digital use” will be measured so publishers can levy fees, although the exact wording of the mandate will be more fully defined later. Earlier, similar laws were implemented at the national level in Spain and Germany, but unsuccessfully. Largely, said Mill Wade, this was because the laws were leveled too narrowly at news aggregators.

“It isn’t practical. In Brussels, there’s no clear process or understanding of how the internet works and how that comes into the political decision-making process,” said an independent publishing consultant. “They are in their own filter. They have their lobbies, pressure groups, data activists and publisher organizations. But the outcome is far from adequate to daily business. They behave like aliens from a publisher perspective.”

There have also been misconceptions. On June 26, European Parliament member Giorgos Grammatikakis, sent an email, seen by Digiday, to other parliament members debunking myths surrounding Articles 11 and 13 of the copyright reform. In it, Grammatikakis outlined what the reform would not do: censor users from sharing links, filter the internet and, thankfully, kill off memes.

As with all legislation, a new law won’t be passed tomorrow. Sources say the reform — which was first proposed in 2016 — could be agreed on by the end of this year, giving member states 12 months before they need to amend national law. “[Last week’s vote] was an important hurdle for the legislation to get over, but it doesn’t tell us what the final text will be,” said Robert Guthrie, partner for international law firm Osborne Clarke. “That will have a big impact on how much power is given to the press publisher.”

“There’s the big challenge in terms of how you regulate the internet. It’s very fast-moving. Process at the EU level is very slow,” he said. “By that point, the product might have moved on. The commercial strengths of the parties might have moved on.”

The post The EU is targeting platforms for copyright violations, but could end up hurting publishers, too appeared first on Digiday.

Thrillist is getting into the travel business in an effort to grow the revenue it makes from events.

Last weekend, 10 people went to a movie screening at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, on a morning hike through Malibu and drinking in West Hollywood, all part of a Thrillist-organized weekend. The Los Angeles trip is the first of 10 planned with For the Love of Travel, in cities including Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; Vancouver, British Columbia; and San Francisco. Tickets, which do not include airfare or extra drinks, cost $699 and include a bed in a shared room. Thrillist and For the Love of Travel are sharing the revenue, though details of the split are private.

This summer, the publisher is holding a branded weekend created with Club Getaway, Camp Thrillist, which is a summer camp for adults in Connecticut where attendees can do everything from zip lining to ax throwing. Tickets start at $527.

Thrillist said events account for a small but “meaningful” share of its revenue, but it sees opportunity to do more of them, saying that 85 percent of its readers take actions, like make purchases or visit businesses, based on its recommendations.

“Our audience comes to us because they want advice,” said Ocean MacAdams, Thrillist’s president. “We see it [events] as a big chunk of revenue going forward.”

Thrillist has been throwing events since 2010. They include one-off events at bars, restaurants and other small businesses, and recurring events including Best Day of Your Life and Hotel Thrillist. Advertisers including Axe, Bud Light and Take 5 have been sponsors.

But where most of Thrillist’s past events were monetized through a mix of ticket sales and sponsorships, the upcoming programs will be monetized purely through ticket sales. The events’ attendance is capped — 18 for each For the Love of Travel getaway, for example — so there is a limit on how much revenue each event can earn.

The events are managed by an eight-person events team at Thrillist’s parent company, Group Nine Media, that also handles events for Thrillist’s sibling brands, like The Dodo’s Best Dog Day Ever.

“It would make sense for us to have started by doing everything ourselves,” MacAdams said. “But as you move into things like summer camps, you want to partner with people who really know what they’re doing.”

Thrillist has a long history of trying to turn its recommendations into new streams of revenue. It acquired JackThreads in 2010 in a bid to meld content and commerce before spinning it off in 2015. As part of Group Nine Media, Thrillist aspires to move into TV and other long-form video content.

The post Thrillist eyes weekend getaways to build its events business appeared first on Digiday.

E-commerce company Zulily, which sells discounted clothing, toys and home products at zulily.com, is now seeing 70 percent of orders come from mobile, both from the mobile website and Zulily app. It’s an increase from 55 percent of orders coming from mobile in 2015. Zulily would not disclose the number of mobile orders or total orders it receives, but it now has 6.1 million active customers (those who have made at least one purchase in the past year) and made $1.6 billion in revenue in 2017.

Zulily is targeting customers on mobile by personalizing the type of Zulily messages, images and video content customers see as they scroll through their social feeds on their smartphones. For example, customers who have indicated that they have young boys through past purchases on zulily.com will automatically see more marketing content that advertises Zulily products for boys.

Kevin Saliba, svp of marketing at Zulily, said it takes between six and seven minutes every morning for the technology to determine the highest-converting image or creative shown to each audience segment. Saliba said this approach has increased Zulily’s mobile conversion rate “significantly,” although he would not share specific numbers.

Last year, Zulily also began using machine learning data to develop personalized messages to send through push notifications and through a new platform: Facebook Messenger. These direct messages are either updates on items being shipped or promotions for daily deals on zulily.com that fit what a particular customer might be looking for.

Zulily works with other retail companies like Boxed, Cuisinart, Dolce & Gabbana and Spanx to promote deals. The company launches around 100 72-hour sales daily and therefore has a challenge when deciding which deals to push to which customers. The machine learning technology determines which deal would most likely turn into a sale when presented to a certain audience segment. For instance, if a person had previously clicked on a Boxed product on zulily.com, the company might show them a deal the site is hosting for Boxed products through Messenger. Zulily would not reveal the audience segments it targets.

“Our unique business model requires an extreme need for access real-time, accurate and actionable data, which is where our machine learning model comes into play,” said Saliba.

Zulily operates with an internal marketing team of more than 100 people, split into different teams such as customer acquisition, creative, social and a new data science team the company established last year as analyzing data from the machine learning technology began to take precedence. With Zulily’s new analytics team studying the results of machine learning data, the company determined that launching 30 to 50 video ads a day across platforms like Facebook and Instagram is a perfect balance. This has driven a 20 percent increase in ad spending efficiency, according to Saliba. Zulily would not say how much it cost to implement machine learning and build a data analytics team.

Zulily’s latest feature might also drive more mobile orders, although machine learning doesn’t come into play. In June, Zulily introduced a feature that allows people to choose to pay for items in multiple payments, like they would through an infomercial. For example, a customer can choose to pay two payments of $10 for a $20 lipstick.

The post For Zulily, mobile is now 70 percent of orders appeared first on Digiday.

The New York Times might be known for its nonstop coverage of the Trump saga, but it quietly getting a big readership boost from the more prosaic world of service journalism. It’s been two years since the Times launched its Smarter Living initiative, which gives advice and tips on quotidian things like how to do laundry and how to exfoliate.

Most important to the Times, Smarter Living not just grabs eyeballs but also subscribers by building loyalty. Today, the Smarter Living newsletter has 360,000 subscribers, with an average open rate of over 80 percent, and Smarter Living articles have reached a readership of 22 million people in the past year. This year, 33 percent of the 100 things people saved most on the Times iOS app were original Smarter Living stories, according to the paper.

“It was a gap in our news coverage,” Smarter Living editor Tim Herrera said of the initiative. “So the idea was to make that more robust. There’s a lot of service journalism out there. A lot of it is shitty.”

The Times wouldn’t give specifics about how well Smarter Living coverage gets people to subscribe or renew, but said that overall, the 6 to 10 percent of people who read the guides return to them, while some of the subscriber-only guides published this year under the banner “A Year of Living Better” have had return readership of as high as 11 percent.

Unlike hard news, which some advertisers shy from because it can be controversial, service journalism also is ad-friendly. Smarter Living guides drew 12 sponsors in 2017.

The Times’ digital ad revenue declined 6 percent in the first three months of the year, but subscriptions now account for two-thirds of overall revenue at the Times, and it’s looking to products and programs like Smarter Living to continue that growth.

Smarter Living is a great way for the Times to get new readers with stories that are often pithy and easy to digest on mobile devices without straying from the Times’ voice, and it’s a “good, safe option” for advertisers, said John Wagner, group director of published media at PHD. “I think they realize their reader sometimes wants a break and to give them something a little softer is OK,” he said.

Initially, most of the service journalism the Times published was dusting off older articles and redistributing them.

Herrera said since then, the content has become almost all original. (Not repurposing old articles also avoids the problem of confusing readers.) Herrera has several people working on Smarter Living, but around six desks in the newsroom, like travel and real estate, create most of the articles.

The Times’ how-to guides and programs also are popular, and it sees those as an area of expansion. But Herrera said where the Times can set itself apart is in coverage that strikes an emotional chord, like a personal piece he wrote about burnout and another about impostor syndrome.

“We’re talking about topics no one else can go after, and we’re doing stories people can’t find anywhere else,” Herrera said.

The Times is also honing its approach in other ways. Herrera said he plans to do more stories that don’t fit the traditional service model and are about what he calls the “ecology of life,” but with a service element, like this article on the value of quitting.

The Times is known for speaking in a particular institutional voice. But the service journalism has expanded the idea of what a Times story is. When the Times early on did a story on how to travel as a solo woman, many readers wrote in that it was patronizing. So the Times took reader feedback and turned it into a follow-up article.

“That is very Timesean, and we’re leaning into that because no one else is doing that,” he said.

The post ‘No one else is doing that’: The New York Times builds loyalty with softer lifestyle content appeared first on Digiday.

Customers visiting HSBC’s flagship New York City location on Fifth Avenue will now be greeted by a robotic employee called Pepper upon arrival.

But while Pepper can help with simple questions and greetings, it’s not about to take over tellers’ jobs quite just yet. It’s actually being deployed to make the banking experience more human, ironically with a robot.

“The death of the branch has been touted for the past 10 years, but what we find is the branch is still one of the most important reasons people chooses a financial institution,” said Pablo Sanchez, regional head of retail banking and wealth management for the bank’s U.S. and Canada operations. “[Pepper] educates and gives people awareness of other ways to transact or to get human interaction — we don’t want to lose the human touch.”

With the growth of digital banking, the industry has been grappling with what to do with physical branch spaces. Branches are becoming less transaction-focused and increasingly turning into relationship centers, or anchors for human-centered banking experiences. While Pepper is a robot, it acts as a concierge that can direct customers to bankers who can help them. It can answer simple questions, and doubles as an online banking station, with a tablet screen where customers can get more information about products, log into their mobile banking account, or just “have fun” by taking selfies or dancing with the robot.

HSBC is testing Pepper at its flagship New York City location, but isn’t saying more right now about plans to deploy it further. The bank is focusing on getting customers comfortable interacting with it.

“What we expect from Pepper is not to replace humans, but to actually build the business so that we can hire more people here at 452 [Fifth Ave.] and across our network [and] help customers fulfill their financial needs,” he said.

Adding robotic employees will let bankers focus on more complex tasks, said Aite senior analyst Tiffani Montez.

“It’s looking at the things a consumer does in a branch and focuses on using technology to take the non-value-added activities [away from bankers], allowing employees to focus more on truly building relationships,” she said.

Since robots are already being deployed in retail locations  — for example, Lowes’ LoweBot can find products and navigate inventory throughout the stores — it’s natural to expect customers to demand similar types of service offerings from their financial institutions, she added.

Pepper was developed in 2014 by Softbank Robotics. It’s designed to mimic a human with inbuilt abilities to recognize the presence of humans and their emotions. It has the ability to capture customer-specific data including names and appearances. While bankers and retailers may find this useful, HSBC said it has no plans to roll out that capability right now.

Despite Pepper’s potential as an engagement and task efficiency tool for bankers, it also has its limitations. At this point in its evolution, Pepper still needs to escalate complicated questions to humans, and unlike Amelia — the robotic “cognitive agent” used by some banks and insurers developed by software company IPsoft — it’s unable to think on its feet and must be trained in advance.

“The Pepper platform isn’t very rich in terms of integration,” said J.P. Gownder,  principal analyst at Forrester. “Most of the deployments haven’t been very sophisticated; it’s mostly about finding out ‘where do I go in the store’ and answering very simple questions.”

What would give Pepper the muscle to go beyond a novel engagement tool, said Gownder, would be to add more “thinking” capabilities like natural-language understanding. For now, its effectiveness doesn’t go beyond being a “way finder” — an engagement tool that helps customers navigate and reach humans when they require more assistance. It could have a positive effect of drawing people in the branch and generating excitement about the customer journey, but it could backfire if it’s not seen to be adding value to the experience.

“If Pepper’s artificial intelligence is sufficient, it may even be helpful in helping guiding the consumer’s retail experience,” said Gene Pranger, CEO of POPin, a company that helps financial institutions with customer service technology solutions for brick-and-mortar branches.”If, however, the first experience is simply novel and doesn’t serve the interest of the consumer on an ongoing basis, the technology will quickly fade into oblivion.”

The post HSBC is using a blinking, humanoid robot to add the ‘human touch’ to banking appeared first on Digiday.

The damning Association of National Advertisers report on agency transparency in the U.S. in 2016 and the domain-spoofing scandals at the Financial Times and News UK illustrate the lack of transparency in programmatic media buying in the U.S. and Europe. That murkiness allowed unscrupulous practices such as media arbitrage and data arbitrage to flourish.

Buy-side marketers are finally realizing arbitrage’s harms and starting to take action. In a survey of 98 marketing executives at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summits in New Orleans and Portugal earlier this year, the majority of U.S. marketers and European marketers — 62 percent and 80 percent, respectively — agreed that combating data arbitrage and media arbitrage is important.

The post Digiday Research: European marketers are more concerned than Americans about data arbitrage appeared first on Digiday.

So long, DoubleClick. Google is doing away with the DoubleClick name, 22 years after launch and 11 years after the tech company acquired the ad tech platform, as part of the company’s rebranding of its advertising suite.

Google executives announced the change on Tuesday during a press event at YouTube’s creator space in New York. While the changes to Google’s ad products are minimal, Google kicked off its an hour-long presentation with one of the big reasons why it was hosting it in the first place rather than just publish a blog post.

“It’s the first time in 18 years that we’ve changed the names of our products under new product lines,” said Google’s comms director Chi Hea Cho.

The tools within DoubleClick aren’t disappearing. Rather, they’re being worked into two out of the three of Google’s new buckets of ad products. It’s simply the name and the brand we’re losing now after more than two decades.

“We’re sunsetting the DoubleClick brand. We believe this will bring together the best tools to help them optimize,” said Dan Taylor, Google’s managing director of platforms. “We’ve seen marketers get the most value of our products when they use ads and analytics solutions together, our best customers are doing that on a regular basis and seeing results, but we can’t take credit for making that easier.”

Jonathan Bellack, director of product management for publisher ad platforms, was at the event and shared he joined Google after its acquisition of DoubleClick, having joined that company in 2004 in product management. As Bellack said, the advertising world is evolving, and now so must Google’s brands.

“We live in a shifting ecosystem. Content consumption is on new surfaces, programmatic across deals and platforms. There are higher standards for transparency, control and ad experiences,” Bellack said.

Now, Google’s ad ecosystem has three buckets: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager. Here’s what that looks like:

Google Ads

• Formerly called Google AdWords
• Buying ads on Google.com, other Google properties (YouTube and Google Play), partner sites and apps

Google Marketing Platform

• Formerly DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 Suite
• Helps marketers plan, buy, measure and optimize campaigns on Google
• Introducing Display & Video 360 that consolidates Google’s display advertising products

Google Ad Manager

• Formerly DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange
• Tool for publishers to monetize content across connected TVs, Accelerated Mobile Pages and apps

The update is a “set of solutions for agencies, advertisers, publishers that offer transparency, that offer real value and that offer choice. The first principle we always believe in is relevant advertising that works with our users,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vp of ads at Google.

Ramaswamy said the move was not about favoring direct relationships with advertisers over working with agencies. The change also has little effect on the user experience.

The only update to ad formats was designated for small-business owners. Google is launching “Smart Campaigns,” a new term for the default experience when new advertisers sign up for Google ads, said Kim Spalding, Google’s gm and product lead for small-business ads. These Smart Campaigns will include auto-optimized landing pages, where the landing page to a website matches the ad that led a user there. Later this year, Google will launch Image Picker, a product that makes it easier for advertisers to select images for ads.

“We’re doubling down on small businesses because when small businesses grow, so does our community,” Spalding said.

Indeed, Facebook and Snap have focused on growing its small-business customers over the last few years. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, touts the success of small-business advertisers during her company’s quarterly earnings calls. When it comes to the products, both Facebook and Snap have worked to make it easier to create and to buy ads in minutes. Of course, for Facebook, some of that ease has been restricted in light of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election via its platform.

During the event, Google executives also emphasized the company’s focus on privacy. A slide from the presentation simply read, “Privacy first platform.”

“At Google, we take [privacy] very seriously across all of our products, and Google Marketing Platform is no different,” said Dan Taylor, Google’s managing director of platforms.

Yet Google didn’t reveal any updates to privacy settings for users or for advertisers. Google did share that it was one of the early adopters of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab’s ads.txt initiative that helps ensure transparency and prevent spam.

Advertisers will start to see the new brands and the sunsetting of DoubleClick over the coming days and weeks. Google said it will announce new campaign types at its Google Marketing Live event on July 10.

The post End of an era: Google is ditching the DoubleClick name appeared first on Digiday.

Google is kicking many of its product names and acronyms to the curb – including the 22-year-old DoubleClick brand. Google is rebranding its products into three groups: Google Marketing Platform for enterprises, Google Ads for small and medium-sized businesses and Google Ad Manager for large publishers. The transition will begin in mid-July. This transition will… Continue reading »

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