Media Takeaways from Google I/O

Heather Riexinger: I’m Heather Rexinger, back again today. I’m joined by Danny Maloon from our media team. So Danny, there’s a lot that’s been going on this week with Google. Google I-O was happening. I know you sat in on a lot of the sessions. So we’d love to hear your take on what’s been going on and kind of high level what you’ve heard.

Danny Meloon: Yeah. I mean, the highest possible level for the entire keynote was AI, which is kind of the biggest high level of the industry in general is just– a lot of other industries, I’m sure, is just AI, AI, AI. So that’s the highest level.

Heather Riexinger: Yeah. Well, from your perspective, what were the two things that stood out with– everything’s AI, but not just headline-wise– what should we be paying attention to in the marketing world?

Danny Meloon: Yeah. I think an interesting one has been just them talking about how much Google and Google products are integral to the purchasing journey, and not just in search engines the way that people traditionally think of it, of people like Googling to just find stuff, but even something that I have been saying for a long time YouTube is one of the most viewed things, period. And so they had a couple of specific new product launch things that they’ve been working on that– one of them was Ask YouTube, which is more specifically making YouTube have a more direct search feature for people that are looking for information on a set topic or products, which that sounds really interesting. And then even as another part of that, they had direct shopping links that you can have on a YouTube video for specific products that you’re promoting and a lot of interesting stuff. And then the other really interesting one to me was AskAdvisor was what it was called. It is a Gemini-powered piece of software that they’re using, and it basically reaches through all of the Google suite of products for the most part, the ones that they specifically said were Google Ads merchant and Google GA4, Google Analytics. And so having there be a single AI agent chat feature that you can have this conversation with on– they were pretty vague. To actually speak to it, I’m going to be interested to actually get my hands on it and try it out. But in theory, it’d be very cool to be like, all right, I’m working in Google Ads, but I need to check something that is attributed through GA4. Let me just type it in and see if it can be passed from one to the other. Instead of having to open up a new tab, go into a report, pull a bunch of reports, see if I can get what I can, and then attribute it back down. So there’s a lot. It seems interesting.

Heather Riexinger: It’s always interesting to see what they promise is usually version 6 that comes out three years from now. So it’ll be interesting to see what those first things that come through. And obviously, everything they’re doing is trying to monetize everything that we look at. So that’ll be really interesting from a marketer’s perspective for us of what new buying opportunities and placement opportunities there are for you and our clients.

Danny Meloon: Yeah, specifically on new placements, they just really pushed Performance Max, AI Max, as two of the bigger pieces to go in and push for people to start purchasing on. AI Max, in particular, I think a big conversation within Search in general is just how often the AI overview tends to cut into some of your– can attribute to CPCs getting higher as time’s been going on, and all sorts of other issues with just Search Engine marketing, because it’s taking that top spot, even above the stuff that has been traditionally the paid top spot that you’re trying to get. So AI Max, in particular, and some of those, they’re specifically pitching, hey, you can have ads that are appearing in that AI overview. And that seems like a really useful thing, as long as you’re able to be very directed and very– what’s the word I’m looking for?

Heather Riexinger: Deliberate.

Danny Meloon: Yeah, deliberate and intentional, I think, intentionality. That’s the big piece, is just making sure you’re going on there. And some of it is things that are still staying the same as well. They mentioned it very particularly during the presentation, that the way to get on those pieces organically and to be organically included in that AI overview, it’s through the same things people are already doing. It’s SEO. It’s all of those pieces. So it’s still changing, but there’s still the fundamentals that are still needing to be fallen back on.

Heather Riexinger: And I think from a consumer perspective, it’s always so interesting that Google’s working as an agent for me now, where I don’t need to do the work. It used to give me options, and I had to do all the reading and the work. And now, a lot of times, it’s summarizing everything for me. So I find it interesting, because unless something pops up in that overview that I already know to be untrue, I take it for true. So it’s interesting now that you can pay to place content in there. So it will be ever evolving, as we know. So awesome. So outside of these new updates, is this impacting anything that you’re currently running? Is there any small shifts that you’re hearing about that aren’t just massive overhauls of things that we should be aware of?

Danny Meloon: I didn’t really feel like it was anything too groundbreaking yet, like nothing that’s a complete paradigm shift, necessarily. I think their biggest focus, to me, felt like just trying to make you be able to do the work that you’re already doing more efficiently and quicker. I guess that’s the same word. But having– they had something along the lines– I don’t remember what it was in particular called, but it was a– it might have been Spark, but I don’t remember– basically taking a brief in plain language, throwing it in there, and it will make a grab-specific targeting or particular pieces to make the campaign for you so you don’t have to necessarily think of every single knob and switch that you have to pull. And knowing every single piece that’s in there can be very difficult at times. They are always adding things and taking things away in any platform that you’re getting used to. I know that last year– I believe during this event, they had talked about that being something within DV360 in particular– so not search, but on the programmatic side. And I honestly– I mean, I also switched to where I’m doing less programmatic in my day-to-day, but I haven’t used it. So I’m also wondering with some of those, are these features even going to be something that make it into my day-to-day adoption, or is it just a nice little bell and whistle that’s there? So I think with any of these products and with any tech company in general, yeah, they’re going to tell you it’s going to change your life. But we’ve got to see.

Heather Riexinger: So that’s a great point, because obviously, Meta announced massive layoffs this week. Everyone’s moving into AI. People are afraid. AI is taking our jobs. But we talk a lot here at Flynn about how AI is great, and it’s a useful tool for all of us, but the human touch is really what’s important, and the brain power behind that AI. So how do you feel like any of these things are impacting the way that you work, and where do you feel that it’s imperative that someone like you or on your team still be watching those optimizations, looking at what AI is doing? Where is the human touch most important? Do you think in media still?

Danny Meloon: I think the human touch really comes down to strategy and strategizing and making those decisions at a high level and directing the AI or just the platforms in general in the direction that they need to be working. If you just try to do a set and forget sort of situation, you’re going to have things stagnate. You’re going to have things not work as well as they could if you weren’t checking in consistently. And I think AI, in general, we have AI that we’ll use now and then that takes reports that we’ve run in previous weeks, and we feed them into the AI to summarize some of those to give us a better overview of what we did in a set month. And that’s a really nice way of just– we did the work to start with. We made those optimizations. We tracked them. And then having it be spelled out very quickly through AI can then help us kind of reorient on what we did in the set month, decide what worked and what didn’t work based on that. And AI is not going to tell us in a way that’s meaningful, at least right now, on what may or may not have worked based on we are the people that are in there and touching everything. So I think it’s just having the knowledge and having the willingness to change things when they aren’t working. And I just don’t think AI is at the point yet to be necessarily telling you to change stuff all the time. In some ways, they can.

Heather Riexinger: It is what– it does what it knows. And you’re not going to break through. You just talked about the strategies. So important. And I use it a lot to check my thinking. Like you said, does this make sense? What’s missing? Did it optimize the way I wanted it to? So awesome. Great. Well, obviously, the through line here is AI isn’t just another feature. It’s really changing the way that we work. So if we’re sitting here a year from now, what will– what do you anticipate? Or if you had a crystal ball, what do you think is going to change the most in the next year in terms of media buying?

Danny Meloon: Yeah. I know that there have been just straight agentic purchases where you’re not going through DSPs directly anymore. You’re going via an agent that is communicating directly with an SSP and making those changes. And that’s really promising. I think that just in plain language telling an agent, go buy this directly through an SSP, that’s huge. That cuts out a lot of tech fees even. Granted, there will be then tech fees that will appear there too. So you’re never escaping them. But that, I think, is an important factor. I think also something that they had said during the presentation was– I think it was through Gemini Spark, was that they’re pushing– also a big through line throughout all of this is– and I saw an article that was talking about it in particular– that Gemini has stopped being just like this AI assistant. And they’re attempting to really make it be more of the underlying operating system that cuts through every part of Google’s ecosystem. So that, I think, is really promising because they have so many of these platforms that we rely on them communicating well to one another. We’re running things on Google Ads. We’re running things in DV360. We’re running things then– we’re trafficking them through CM. And it’s all of these things. And I’ll have like 30, 40 windows open being like, where am I? And so having something at the very least that can be communicating through each of those as a common through line, like maybe in a year, one of the things that they specifically had said was this sort of cycle of having– your measurement is talking to your media. Your media is talking to your– something else. I can’t read my own handwriting. Yeah, I hate to see it. But yeah, having all of those different pieces communicating with each other and being able to take a little bit of your hands off the scale on a day-to-day basis and just being able to be focused on that high level strategy of where is this going, who am I trying to reach, and how am I trying to do that.

Heather Riexinger: Well, I think that that’s the key positive that I’m seeing coming up with all of the AI is as a smaller agency, we are– a lot of times, you need to put out the fire that’s in front of you. And all of this AI is taking away some of the mundane tasks. And we’re able to put more time into thought, strategy, looking forward, what’s coming the next three, six, nine months, three years from now. So I’m looking forward to all of that. And I’m interested to see– ChatGPT was everything everyone was talking about six months ago. And now Google and Meta and Claude and everyone– there’s all of these new pieces that are coming out and new platforms. And it’ll be really interesting to see how they come out, but then also how they combine. Because ultimately, they’re going to buy– everyone’s going to buy each other. And Google will own everything again in a year.

Danny Meloon: It also is interesting talking about small agencies and the way they work. Originally, I came from a slightly larger agency. And so it’s definitely a different environment. I’m doing a lot more across a lot of different mediums. And I really like it because I get to get my hands dirty in a bunch of different ways. And it’s interesting. And I think AI has a chance to help make– I’ve used it just initially in a lot of ways to get caught up and to learn things a little bit faster. And that helps on training. But there’s also one of the pieces that they had discussed in the presentation itself was just around how specifically for small agencies and for these smaller companies, it is allowing you to not only take on bigger clients than they previously would have thought they were able to, but also monetize things that they thought were too small. So being able to open that window up a little bit more seems really, really promising. And also, one of the other things that was the most interesting to me, but I think I have to play with it on my own time, was Google anti-gravity was what it was called.

Heather Riexinger: Yeah, I’ve been reading a little bit about that.

Danny Meloon: It sounds cool. I need to look into it more before I’m speaking too authoritatively on it. But having there be an easier way to code, because it is a coding, sort of an agentic coding platform, seems really promising for more and more times, I think proprietary technology tends to be something that gets talked about. And having something that makes that a little easier to put out and to work on quickly, that’s really, really useful. I might download that on my personal computer and mess around with it for a little bit and see what it is.

Heather Riexinger: See if it crashes everything.

Danny Meloon: Yeah, yeah, we’ll see.

Heather Riexinger: Maybe. Great. Well, thank you for coming and chatting, Danny. Is there anything else you want to leave the audience with in terms of updates or what they should be watching?

Danny Meloon: No, I don’t think I have anything. They ended their YouTube segments in