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What We Learned at Google Marketing Live 2025
You can buy more YouTube using AI!
Events such as Google Marketing Live are always useful for confirming what you think you know and educating on the things you don’t. Before diving into the fun stuff, let’s review what we already knew from the back to back events of Google Marketing Live and Google I/O.
Firstly – there is not a sentence uttered from any Googler worth their salt that does not include reference to AI and their crown jewel Gemini. We know Google is behind ChatGPT when it comes to AI-powered search. For the first time in 20 years, they’re facing serious competition in both discovery and paid advertising.
From a marketing and consumer standpoint, I think this is good – Google have had it their own way for too long. The recent Chat GPT announcement that it will be taking in retail product feeds is the opening shot in the coming war and it could very well lead to CPC inflation within Google’s media estate.
In the breadth immediately after Gemini Googlers quickly pivot to how easy it is to ‘buy more YouTube’ ads with Google. The relentless push to sell YouTube remains – admittedly with much better sales and creative support including the new Veo 3 model which will dramatically cut production costs and time.
In all fairness the asset creation with Google AI is a WOW moment that’s will fundamentally change the advertising industry. As proof, we were shown an ad with production costs of $2m and a replica created using AI and it’s impossible to tell which is which.
In regards to ‘new news’ there was some interesting theories and developments, plus some new literature available. The “agentification” of AI means it’s soon going to be doing our consumer admin as well as the research – with booking tickets, making reservations and setting appointments all nearly up on us.
AI driven personalisation is also gaining ground, especially through the organic field where customers can request the content they want and armies of bots or people can deliver their every advertising whim. Google demonstrated this with its Android and Apple phone ‘buddy’ series, creating 300+ unique ad versions based on consumer requests.
Considering practical developments for marketeers, the concept of ‘marginal ROI’ was new to the Google lexicon. It seems marketeers are running out of budget too often for Google’s liking, so they are exploring the ROI on every pound spent above your budget.
They also shared some neat research and frameworks to bridge the gap between marketing and finance teams. Who knew that finance teams don’t give a jot about a marketeer’s priority to “brand build”. To win them over, marketers need to shift the conversation from efficiency metrics like ROI and CPM to effectiveness metrics like profit and CPA.
Google Marketing Live is a great event. If you don’t want Google to sell to you don’t watch and certainly don’t go. But in reality, Google still leads in marketing, data, and service. They’ve earned their #1 spot, and they do more for the industry than any other media provider. It’s pleasing they’ve got some competition but my money is on Google to fend them off and deliver on the next evolution of search.
Written By Martin Corcoran
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