The Google Marketing Re-Org You May Have Missed
Marketers trying to keep up with the fast-changing dynamics in advertising have their work cut out for them. TV is becoming more like digital, with segmented buying, data-driven addressable for OTT around the corner and cross platform targeting starting to gain ground. Facebook is changing it's systems seemingly every week. Amazon advertising is surging, and Google's YouTube is making a push to connected TVs, among other things.And yet amid all the flurry of innovations in TV and video, it's almost easy for the media to miss another shift in the landscape -- one that touches virtually all online businesses: Google has consolidated its DoubleClick, Google Analytics 360 and Google Marketing Cloud products into a single organization, the Google Marketing Platform.But how will that consolidation impact the market? For one, it will invite more streamlining of service providers and platforms that feed off the Google ecosystem. Case in point: I spoke to Denver-based AdSwerve – which for nine years has provided small- and medium-sized businesses with on-boarding, training, implementation and support services on Google's former DoubleClick platform. The company recently announced it is merging with Analytics Pros which provides a range of data analytics to big brands and other companies, and is also a major reseller of Google Marketing Cloud products.
"As former Double Clickers, we're a little sad to see the brand going away," Tasset said. "But in talking with Analytics Pros, a lot of companies were working in a very siloed way with their analytics and their media. Companies were uncovering amazing insights in their customer journeys, but none of that gets delivered (back) to the media team. Google’s fix is in the technology space. You can fix the pipes, but how do you fix the communications?"
That's where the AdSwerve-Analytics Pros merger is designed to help. With Google's blessing, AdSwerve will take on clients with "bigger books of business" that Google in-house teams once handled, while the relationships that Analytics Pros has built with big brands will now carry over to AdSwerve's side.
"We have these two products, (Google Analytics) 360 colliding with the DoubleClick platform, and for the longest time these two different products really didn’t interact," said Matt Fiskness, AdSwerve's COO. "It's going to take a company that has a deep understanding (of the Google ecosystem) to get all these pipes to connect. We look at this as an opportunity to connect those pipes from a service standpoint."
Data-driven digital platforms continue to attract more money and brands, while the traditional ad business has been turned upside down. The fast-growing digital business is also changing quickly, as the ad-tech sector consolidates, new technologies such as the blockchain promise to fix issues with validation and fraud, and entirely new sectors emerge.Amazon, for instance, has recently spawned a sector of third-party services companies such as Downstream. These new companies are helping brands navigate its huge, highly competitive and dynamic paid-search business.The AdSwerve-Analytics Pros merger will allow more efficient processes for companies in the Google ecosystem, explained Tasset, even as such premium hand-holding becomes more important than ever.
"We see this as an opportunity to close the gap between ad technology and marketing technology, allowing AdSwerve to build the services our clients demand,” said Tasset. “By bringing Analytics Pros into AdSwerve, we can instantly offer a start-to-finish service model across the entire Google platform, while adding additional marketing cloud solutions and predictive analytics.”
