As consumer expectations evolve faster than ever, staying ahead of the curve is the key to growth. To stand out, brands need the right data and performance marketing strategies to punch above their weight.
On September 25, the Google x Amsive Executive Summit brought together over 110 marketing leaders to discuss the next big shifts in our industry. Held at Google’s newest office, St. John’s Terminal, the Executive Summit featured forward-thinking discussions, panels, and presentations.
Explore the highlights. Audience-first strategy. Blending brand and performance. Modern incremental measurement. All against the backdrop of Google’s growing AI technologies supercharging the future of marketing.
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Audience-first strategy drives better marketing performance
An audience-first strategy goes far beyond reporting and basic analysis of consumer and marketing data to be a foundational necessity that powers performance. Instead, oftentimes, marketers find themselves developing journeys and campaigns based on channel-specific thinking. This misses the central truth of a clearly defined audience strategy.
A clear audience strategy, such as using our proven Audience Science approach, is the only way to meet the evolving needs of consumers. From first-party data to predictive modeling, harness the right data to anticipate future behaviors and activate consumers on their preferred channels.
Optimize key channels for superior marketing performance
While it sounds like a no-brainer, marketers can get lost in the weeds of an expanding and fragmenting media system when defining a modern customer journey. Channel-specific tactics should amplify—not define—a broader marketing strategy centered on your best audiences’ unique journeys.
For example, YouTube is the #2 most watched media company on TV, according to Neilson Media Distribution Gauge, April 2024. However, ad supported YouTube CTV household reach is only 58% in an era where streaming accounts for 41.4% of total TV viewing, as Nielson Gauge shared from July 2024. This complexity exemplifies a fundamental truth. For many audiences, YouTube plays a key role in a consumer journey. Who? How? When? Is what marketers ask—and channel experts can answer.
YouTube is just one platform in a sea of channels that should all be uniquely tuned for optimal success. Marketers have a growing need for deep channel expertise and seamless partnerships with technology leaders, that can be leveraged in the service of a broader audience-first strategy.
The Takeaway: Strengthen your audience-first strategy to leverage deeper channel expertise for better performance.
Account for the real-life customer journey
From acquisition to loyalty, what consumers want from brands is changing. Armed with a deeper understanding of your best audiences, marketers can guide them towards purchasing decisions and increase lifetime value.
Channels are the only thing that’s evolved. Post-COVID thinking greatly impacts consumers and their relationships to new and beloved brands. Consumers have less memory, attention span, patience, and brand linkage year over year according to a 2024 NCIS report. Yet, they are searching online more than ever before, including unique searches.
More than 15% of Google’s daily searches have never been searched before, as stated from Google Internal Data, January 2022. To be top-of-mind for your best audiences, brands require a new reality of the customer journey, letting the idea of a linear funnel be left in the rearview mirror.
The middle of the funnel? It’s messy. While some marketers still operate with the idea of a straight-forward marketing funnel, the fact of the matter is, the customer journey has not been linear for a long time. Evolutions including but not limited to the rise of influencer marketing, user-generated content, and social search have all had a hand in reshaping the ways in which consumers are exposed to products, research their options, and ultimately make purchasing decisions.
Knowing your best audiences’ triggers, behaviors, and more unlocks action and ultimately lifetime value. What’s best for your unique audience? It depends. For example, while people increasingly make purchases directly from their mobile phones, a large faction still adhere to the idea of making a “big purchase” on a “big screen”—a laptop or computer.
The right data into your best audiences and the modeled audiences of people just like them help marketers navigate stage-hopping as consumers bounce from one device, frame of mind, and activity to the other.
The Takeaway: Deeper audience intelligence ensures brands drive action and loyalty with the correct people engaged in a more complex customer journey.
Brand plus performance equals outsized results
Marketers don’t need to be convinced that brand and performance are better together. But they do need guidance on what integrated brand and performance strategies look like and how to get the C-suite onboard. According to McKinsey, only half of CEOs see marketing as a top growth driver. Enter the power of brand + creative + performance.
3 out of 4 consumers expect a personalized experience. As brands work to create cross-channel cohesion across an extended consumer journey, tools that offer the ability to personalize and customize at scale are one way marketers can stay ahead.
With 80% of marketers deem creative quality key to marketing effectiveness, according to Marketing Week/Kantar, The Language of Effectiveness, 2023, personalized, high-power creative takes centerstage.
Drive personalization at scale
Dynamic creative performance allows marketers to tailor brand messaging and visuals in real time, aligning more closely with a consumer’s preferences and needs. This can enhance relevance, improving the likelihood that your marketing efforts resonate with them at the right moment.
For example, taking advantage of the dynamic prospecting and remarketing capabilities of Performance Max, which will personalize ads by marrying user and product information to present the most relevant content to a consumer across Google Ads campaigns. Or additionally, YouTube TV which personalizes live TV ad experience.
The Takeaway: Utilize the right AI-powered tools to deliver more personalized brand experiences.
Compound brand health and recall with an always-on strategy
Brand marketing is increasing in focus for both consumers and marketers. Businesses have boosted brand marketing investments by 56% in the last two years alone.
Brand recall impacts advertising when now only 20% of consumers can recall the correct brand even if 68% have total ad recall, according to thinqinsights research.
Brands that turn off evergreen brand messaging during shorter-term campaigns may lose gains made over the course of dedicated campaigns. These companies also face lower possible search, awareness, and recall without consistent branded campaign efforts. Audit how your best audiences discovers, explores, and connects with your brand, determining brand health trends over time.
Brands using impactful creative and unique, value-driven messaging personalized at scale can bridge the growing emotional gap with consumers. Challenger brands must make a stronger push to stand out from the heavy-hitters in market, but the rules remain the same.
The Takeaway: Consistent brand efforts using performance creative drives long-term growth.
Modernize your measurement framework
Brands require a clear, accurate picture of the full value and impact of marketing efforts for confident decision making to stay ahead in the marketing ecosystem. In today’s increasingly fragmented marketing landscape, having a clear, accurate understanding of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is essential to driving smart, data-backed decisions.
Traditional measurement methods, such as multi-touch attribution (MTA), have been valuable in tracking how different channels contribute to conversions, but they come with notable limitations. MTA often overlooks the complexity of cross-platform interactions, risks double-counting conversions and struggles with incomplete data from walled gardens that restrict sharing insights across ecosystems.
Integrate incrementality into your marketing practice
Integrated incrementality, a method that allows marketers to measure and analyze the impact of their marketing, can help provide a more complete picture of the impact of overall marketing efforts.
Incrementality is the practice of determining the additional impact a specific marketing activity has—answering the critical question, “What would have happened if we hadn’t run this campaign?” Rather than simply attributing credit to the last click or touchpoint, incrementality measures the true lift generated by your efforts, providing a clearer view of which tactics are delivering value beyond what would have occurred naturally.
Unsiloing the data and understanding how channels may play off or feed into one another can help you boost your marketing mix, prioritizing the channels that are the most integral parts of your customer data. Access to high-quality, first-party data can help ensure that you not only gain a more accurate picture of your consumer, but to accurately model and test for greater marketing success.
To get a complete picture of your marketing performance, brands should leverage advanced tools like media mix modeling (MMM), paired geography testing, and audience holdout tests. These methodologies allow marketers to compare the impact of different strategies across multiple channels and media types, including digital, traditional, and offline. By integrating these approaches, you’ll not only see which channels contribute most to conversions but also gain insight into brand lift, customer acquisition costs, and long-term customer value.
With incrementality measurement, you’re better equipped to make informed decisions about where to allocate your budget and how to optimize your media mix for both short-term results and long-term growth. By combining these insights with day-to-day optimizations through MTA within individual platforms, marketers can refine their strategies at both the micro and macro levels. Incrementality is the key to unlocking a full and accurate understanding of your marketing performance. By measuring true lift, you can optimize spend, avoid double-counting conversions, and ensure every dollar is driving real, measurable impact.
The Takeaway: Embrace incrementality to make smarter, data-driven decisions that boost your marketing ROI and fuel sustained growth across all channels.
To get a complete picture of your marketing performance, brands should leverage advanced tools like media mix modeling (MMM), paired geography testing, and audience holdout tests. These methodologies allow marketers to compare the impact of different strategies across multiple channels and media types, including digital, traditional, and offline. By integrating these approaches, you’ll not only see which channels contribute most to conversions but also gain insight into brand lift, customer acquisition costs, and long-term customer value.
Gain new insight with marketing mix modeling
Marketing mix modeling offers several advantages for businesses that optimize their marketing strategies and allocate resources effectively. One of the primary benefits of MMM is its data-driven approach. It helps marketers to prioritize investments and allocate budgets strategically by understanding the impact of various marketing activities on KPIs like sales, ROI, and market share.
MMM also offers a holistic view of marketing performance by considering multiple variables simultaneously. By understanding the impact of different marketing, MMM helps marketers understand multichannel marketing effectiveness.
Plan key targeting and testing
Marketers can enhance their strategies by leveraging analytical techniques to fine-tune audience targeting based on desired prospect profiles. Predictive modeling helps identify the characteristics that align with your best customers, ensuring optimal campaign performance.
For example, paired geography testing can be used to isolate the effect of media in specific regions, comparing the performance of areas where campaigns ran to similar areas where they did not. This allows for a more accurate measure of how much incremental growth was driven by your marketing efforts. Similarly, audience holdout tests involve excluding certain audiences from campaign exposure to gauge how much impact the ads have in driving key outcomes, such as engagement, conversions, and revenue.
By applying these analyses to specific geographies or trade areas, marketers can maximize their marketing investments. Understanding where individuals are in their customer journey allows marketers to select the most effective channels, ensuring they connect with audiences at the right time and place with the appropriate messaging.
Modern measurement requires a framework that holds both granular optimization with big-picture insights that can only be uncovered with an ongoing cycle of data and action that informs each other. Whether you’re looking at your long-term testing framework or your media mix optimization, being able to connect the dots and accurately exemplify marketing value is key to improved performance and being an engine for business growth.
The Takeaway: Ensure data and action deliver a full feedback loop of clear value and learnings across your entire marketing efforts.
Innovate ahead of what’s next in marketing
The future of marketing lies in understanding and anticipating the needs of an ever-evolving consumer landscape. As highlighted in the Google x Amsive Executive Summit, success requires an audience-first approach, a blend of brand and performance marketing, and a modern measurement framework.
To stay ahead, marketers must not only embrace the power of AI and predictive analytics but also adopt modern measurement frameworks that provide a complete view of marketing impact. As the pace and use of new technologies increase, it’s important for marketers to be active participants in the evolution that shape our landscape’s future. By prioritizing exceptional audience insights and understanding consumer behavior, brands can craft tailored, hyper-personalized campaigns that resonate on multiple channels.
As consumer expectations also continue to evolve, leveraging advanced analytics and embracing dynamic creative performance will be vital for brands seeking to build loyalty and drive conversions. The future of marketing lies in understanding and anticipating audience needs to create meaningful connections.
By leveraging deeper audience insights, optimizing across channels, and maintaining consistent brand messaging, marketers can drive meaningful engagement, increase loyalty, and achieve long-term growth. The brands that invest in these strategies now will be the ones leading the charge in marketing’s next frontier.
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