Adweekly: Leaked Presentation Shows How Google Is Pitching Its 2024 AI Agenda to Ad Buyers
Welcome to Adweekly, the LinkedIn newsletter giving you an inside look at the advertising industry. Each edition will highlight some of Adweek's most important stories from the past week to help marketers, agency leaders, creatives and publishers better understand the industry they work in. By senior media reporter Mark Stenberg
Good morning, and welcome back to Adweekly.
Artificial intelligence has dominated storylines for more than a year now, but this last week seemed to mark a real inflection point.
While new products from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI generated plenty of headlines, many of the most practical applications of AI are far more mundane.
Case in point: A pitch deck reporter Trishla Ostwal obtained from Google shows how the company is touting its AI capabilities to ad buyers.
The search engine, along with competitors like Facebook and Amazon, has been using AI to optimize media buys for more than a year now through Performance Max, a tool that uses AI to place ads across search, video and display, based on where those ads will drive the best results.
In the deck, which ADWEEK has included in full, the company lays out just marketers can use PMax and other Google offerings to realize immediate improvements in their ad yield and efficiency.
Related | Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships
Meet Vidhya Srinivasan: the Google Exec With the Toughest Job in Advertising
Speaking of Google, reporter Robert Klara published a profile this week on one of its most critical leaders, the vice president and general manager of its advertising division Vidhya Srinivasan.
The company tapped Srinivasan, 44, to oversee its advertising business last November, effectively putting her in charge of the largest advertising operation on the planet.
To make matters more challenging, Srinivasan assumed the role amid the first real wave of existential threats that Google has faced in more than two decades. New search offerings powered by Gen-AI, including products from OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, Meta and potentially Apple, all present material threats to Search.
Even Google's new AI-powered search product, SGE, is off to a rocky start, adding another hurdle for the executive to handle.
"We do adversarial testing of these [AI] models to find flaws," Srinivasan said. "And on top of that, we want advertisers to remain in control. It’s a process of evolution and getting comfortable. That’s going to take some time.”
Read more: In her new role, Srinivasan needs to be more than a digital whiz kid. She also needs to be diplomat.
How the TV Landscape Is About to Change, According to 5 Industry Executives
Finally, although NewFronts week in New York is over, the sheer pace and scope of the programming can make it challenging to distill the information into a clear set of themes.
To help, ADWEEK partnered with the IAB to convene a roundtable of some of the most prominent executives in the industry.
Led in conversation by IAB CEO David Cohen, marketing leaders at Google, Roku, the Sports Innovation Lab, Meta and Samsung Ads discussed their biggest insights from the week, as well as its defining trends and their predictions for the year ahead.
The timing of the panel comes at a defining moment for the television industry: This year, the IAB predicts that ad spend on digital video (52%) will eclipse ad spend on linear channels (48%) for the first time.
“Very few people would argue that we are not moving toward digital video,” Cohen said. “The question is: There is still around $60 billion in linear spend—what will it take to move that to streaming?”