To kick off NewFronts week, Google’s VP of agency, platforms, and client solutions, Kristen O’Hara, started off with a question that she was first to admit was a softball. “In one sentence, could you each tell me your favorite use of AI?” she asked a panel featuring an agency exec, consultant, and creator during a breakfast panel Monday morning.
The answers varied from weekly meal prep to interior design—but a more ideal answer might have also mentioned any of Google’s own AI tools, which the tech giant would just an hour later heavily emphasize during its official pitch to advertisers.
Google’s Display & Video 360 platform, which features inventory across TV, sports, gaming, audio, and digital display ads, will get an injection of generative AI capabilities, the company announced Monday, with new updates that will incorporate generative AI into various steps including curating deal packages and providing reporting in response to text prompts. “It’s the DV360 you know, just supercharged with Google AI,” Bill Reardon, GM of enterprise platforms, Google Ads, said ahead of an onstage demo of how the tools work.
Ahead of the presentation, Marta Martinez, managing director of Google Marketing Platforms, Americas, told us that the new tools are aimed at making ad buying and planning even easier across Google.
“How do you make the complex simple?” Martinez told us. “Our consumers are starting to think very differently about how they search and how they explore and how they communicate with technology, and they’re going from shorter queries to more conversational [ones]. We want to bring the experience that they’re having on the web to how they interact with our marketing tools.”
It’s unlikely that Google will be alone in its emphasis on AI during the 17th year of NewFronts presentations that precede the traditional TV upfronts. Major advertising platforms like Meta and TikTok have forged ahead with AI-powered tools, while streamers like Tubi have looked to incorporate AI-powered content recommendation into their platforms. Spotify, which last month announced a push into generative AI ads and has partnered with Google to expand its programmatic capabilities, made an appearance Monday in the form of Xavier, “your friendly neighborhood Spotify AI DJ,” who introduced the show.
During a keynote ahead of Google’s presentation, David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the organization behind the NewFronts, emphasized the changing technologies and the opportunities they could present to the industry.
“Converging trends of AI, of commerce media, of streaming, and of social media are like the new Big Bang,” he said. “All of that change means there’s a lot of money up for grabs—and ‘tis the season when brands and agencies make decisions on where to place their bets.”
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Shop talk: One of the other big bets marketers are making is the booming opportunity represented by retail media, where spending is forecast to increase by 88% from 2024 through 2028 toh $98 billion annually, according to eMarketer. To that, Google also had an answer: the tech giant is rolling out a full commerce and media offering in DV360, which will allow brands to use retail media network data and audience segments across DV360 inventory and YouTube. Google has partnered with Costco, Intuit, Regal Cinemas, and United Airlines’s retail media network, Kinective Media, Andrew Hotz, Google’s director of programmatic media, announced onstage, providing “new ways to activate your data with brands without having to share it with your competitors,” he said.
The more, the merrier? Google continues to ink more deals with other media companies and content creators. As part of one of those partnerships, live TV inventory, including YouTube TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket games and other live sports inventory from media companies like NBCU and Disney, will be transactable on DV360.
Outside of live inventory, Google is furthering partnerships with major streamers like Disney, Netflix, and Tubi, as well as gaming platforms like Roblox, to increase its programmatic inventory on DV360 even more.
Don’t ask: There were a few elephants in the room, including what could happen to Google’s businesses pending the remedy stages of two federal antitrust trials that have ruled that Google’s search-engine business and advertising technology business were both operating as illegal monopolies. The DOJ is seeking to require Google to sell off Google Chrome as a potential remedy in the former case; Google has said it will appeal.
Also looming over the presentation—and the week of presentations—is the general economic volatility and its effects on ad spend, which are, like the rainy New York weather this week, forecast to be gloomy. While Google’s presentation largely sidestepped the economic reality, Cohen said during his keynote that he felt that the sentiment is eerily similar to that felt during the pandemic.
“Now is not the time for fear. Now is not the time for hunkering down and short-term-ism,” he said. “Yes, things are in flux. Yes, things are unpredictable, and yes, we are on the verge of big changes. It is better to be an optimist who’s occasionally wrong than a pessimist who’s right all the time.”
Coming up: It’s not Google’s last time in front of advertisers this month. On Thursday, YouTube is hosting a creator-centric presentation, and next week, YouTube will host its annual Brandcast event during upfronts week, when TV networks vie for advertiser attention and dollars.
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