Google Brandformance LA Recap
In late October, Google hosted members of the Rain the Growth Agency team for Brandformance LA, an event about their tools and technology that can be leveraged to drive brand and performance outcomes.
Following introductions, Google’s Chief Brand Marketing Evangelist, Aprajita Jain, led off the event discussing an issue facing numerous brands—a focus on short-term KPIs without proper investment or visibility into long-term outcomes. While short-term tactics can, and often do, lead to a spike in performance, over time that performance dwindles. Alternatively, brands that invest in long-term impact with their marketing see 60% sales growth over time, according to Analytic Partners. These campaigns aren’t just successful in driving long-term revenue growth, however; they also drive incrementality. By leveraging brand-centric creative and focusing on long-term outcomes, brands can introduce new users to their products, leading to future revenue.
Of course, focusing on long-term outcomes is easier said than done. Jennifer Haran, Google’s Director of YouTube & Commerce Product Strategy, spent her session focused on the importance of measuring long-term outcomes to make proper in-flight optimizations. While aligning targeting and creative strategy to the goals of any campaign are paramount, clearly defining success and understanding the impact across the full consumer journey need to remain front-of-mind as well.
Understanding Google’s Impact on the Funnel
With a variety of Google tools and tactics, such as YouTube Select, Video for Reach or Demand Gen, the Rain the Growth Agency team is easily able to align a brand’s campaign with their goals. Additionally, we consistently set up brand and search lift studies to understand full-funnel impact. These studies can be helpful as leading indicators in-flight to understanding how audience sentiment toward a brand or product is changing, how creative is resonating beyond metrics like view rate, and help show insights into what creative messages are most important when users are early in their purchase journey to ease the burden of driving conversions when they reach the bottom of the funnel.
Testing and strategic iteration are key to driving full-funnel strategy as well. By understanding leading metrics such as brand or search lift studies, as well as leveraging marketing mix modeling and incrementality studies, the Rain the Growth Agency team can strategize with more information, leading to stronger plans driving better results.
Creative’s Role in Brand Growth
Of course, creative is a key piece in driving brand growth. Developing the volume of creative to drive both upper- and lower-funnel messages to a diverse audience can be time-consuming and expensive. However, Google has continued to invest in their generative AI creative tools, making this creative development more accessible. From simple tasks like resizing existing creative or cutting longform videos into shorter cuts for more versatility, to generating valuable creative variants leveraging AI translations to quickly develop ads for users that don’t use English as their primary language, Google’s AI is continuing to improve its creative capabilities, allowing brands to meet their various needs.
The overall message of the day was clear—it is vital that brands drive brand marketing alongside performance tactics to drive long-term business outcomes, but creative and measurement need to work together with media activation. With Rain the Growth Agency’s expertise in all three of those areas as part of our full-service offerings, and the variety of tools Google has developed and continues to improve, it’s time to make sure your brand is focused on long-term growth.
This article is featured in Media Impact Report No. 60. View the full report here.
