Google is looking to shift more of its digital marketing budget into programmatically traded campaigns, according to its global chief marketing officer Lorraine Twohill.
Twohill, speaking at the recent Web Summit in Dublin, set the expected figure at 60 percent, the Drum reports.
“The biggest barrier to getting to that is that the team gets the value, so retraining your team because it changes their jobs,” Twohill said.
Twohill said the Google team has to test and learn how to best take advantage of programmatic. “In the US we’ve started getting some of our newer campaigns into programmatic so they are programmatic from day one, and we’re moving campaigns in one by one. Sometimes it’s hard to disrupt existing campaigns because you worry about what could happen if you turn stuff off.
“There’s things in programmatic that aren’t quite there yet. I really care about ads where people can play and engage so skippable ads, mutable ads; programmatic doesn’t support that yet. I care about cost-per-click, programmatic doesn’t support that yet. I assume all this will come, I think it’s inevitable, but until all those things are there it’s hard for me to get to 60 per cent but we’re moving as fast as we can,” Twohill went on to say.
In Canada, marketers are also dipping their toes into programmatic technology, said Adam Green, agency lead at Google Canada.
He points to Loblaw Companies Ltd. as a sterling example. The grocer chain recently experimented with tweaking its ads to align with regional tastes in different provinces, such as promoting a certain kind of squash on its site in Manitoba, versus what it might publicize in Alberta.