Nasser: 

Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool. Today I’m joined by Miles Savage, head of agency from Google Canada. Let’s be honest, marketing has always been about trying to figure out what Google is going to do next. Well, these days Google is asking the questions too. Search is becoming more conversational, AI is helping people find answers before they even click. And marketers are wondering what all of that means to their strategies.  

Today, we’re going to talk about how AI is changing the way that people search, shop, discover brands, and make decisions. And what marketers need to rethink as Google builds AI into just about everything. Miles, welcome to Shift Happens. 

Miles: 

Thank you. This is my first podcast and I’m very excited to be here. 

Nasser: 

Well you have the perfect voice for a podcast. And if I might be so bold, the perfect name. And actually like that is a James Bond tier name. You know that right? 

Miles: 

I do unfortunately, I can’t take any credit for it. I can give that to my parents, but I’ll take it. 

Nasser: 

Yeah. I mean, your options were either work in tech with that name or be a supervillain. 

Miles: 

Yes, there’s a few other options in there as well, but we’ll stick to the clean ones. 

Nasser: 

Well, welcome to the show, Miles. So why don’t we get into this? For years, digital marketing has been about building around keywords, around traffic, around these kinds of things. And with your AI innovations at Google, we’re entering, like, would you say that we’re entering a new operating system for marketing? 

Miles: 

100%, and not just from a Google standpoint either. Look, with AI, we’re absolutely entering this new operating system for marketing in general. For years, marketers have been building funnels and mapping journeys, all in this attempt to chase demand. That’s what marketing has always been about doing. But that entire paradigm shift is really going to become obsolete in the future. Actually, it’s getting there now. What we’re seeing in AI is we’re seeing enablement at incredible speed. From a Google standpoint, we’ve had a decade’s worth of innovation in just the last year alone, and that speed is only going to continue across all of our products in the way we interface with consumers. 

That velocity, or the speed in which we’re kind of going to market, is really only possible because of Gemini, which is our intelligence model. And I think what’s really unique about Gemini is we build all of our infrastructure, we own our infrastructure, we own our chips, we own the models, we own the research. And that’s our unique differentiation. We have all of those pieces, and that’s what’s ultimately fueling all of our products that we put into market every single day. 

Nasser: 

And of course, the data that underpins it right? 

Miles: 

Absolutely. Billions of users across seven to eight, nine different platforms. That’s really the magic sauce. And I think we’re going to talk a lot more about data today. It’s probably the most important thing that every marketer should have. 

Nasser: 

So obviously you’ve got the infrastructure in place. But what about from a consumer perspective? Because of course, one of the advantages that Google brings is you have this enormous user base. 

Miles: 

Absolutely. Well look, I think what AI is really doing right now, is we’re creating this new super empowered user. The path from discovery to decision is happening faster than ever before. We like to think of it as consumers are doing four things right now. They’re searching, they’re streaming, they’re scrolling and they’re shopping. And what’s interesting is they’re often doing multiple of these things at once. And so if we think about it from a marketing standpoint, trying to segment campaigns and segment budgets against different sort of actions that a consumer takes is almost impossible these days. I mean, I can be streaming on my TV, which then I can click on an ad to buy something. I can be taking a photo with my phone and then searching with that. All these things are evolving very, very quickly and consumers are doing multiple all the time. 

Nasser: 

And of course, this would have been impossible once upon a time because of the sheer speed and volume of signals that that marketers would have to decode. So they’ve been thinking about things in a very linear way. So from your perspective, given that the superpower behind all of this is AI, what, in your opinion, is the biggest misconception or series of misconceptions the marketers have about that today? 

Miles: 

Yeah, that’s a good question. Look, I think there’s actually two misconceptions. I think the first one I would say is that because of AI, people are searching less fundamentally not true. I would argue that AI is actually the greatest thing that’s ever happened to search. We’re seeing search absolutely explode. Back in 2000, Larry Page, one of our founders, said “the ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you want.” And I think thanks to AI, we’re actually closer to or even in that moment now, which is incredible. 

I think AI is transforming search from just this simple information tool that consumers used to have like a very linear back and forth conversation with, into a more an intelligent, agentic platform. And it’s unlocking billions of new commercial opportunities for marketers everywhere. And look, AI is just growing their search pie. We’re finding that AI is becoming that connective tissue that’s helping consumers navigate. Users are asking much longer questions than they ever have before. They’re searching more. And the reality is, when users realize they can search for anything, they search more. 

Nasser: 

All right. That’s a really striking misconception. Anything else? 

Miles: 

Well, I mean, I think the other one relates to how AI is being used in marketing, which is probably what we’re here to talk about today. There’s a great piece of research that McKinsey just released that talked about 96% of CMOs are excited about the potential of AI. It makes a lot of sense, right? It’s efficiency, its relevance, its cost savings. It’s the number one thing on everyone’s mind right now. And thankfully what we’re seeing is there’s about 58% of marketers are actually using AI on a weekly basis. On the surface, that seems pretty good, but unfortunately it’s pretty siloed. 

It’s very individualistic, and a lot of it’s like efficiency based. It’s basic tasks, it’s copy. It’s very rudimentary kind of use of AI at this point. The scariest statistic right now is that a third of marketing organizations, are actually retooling how they build their marketing programs and how they build their marketing teams. And so I think there’s a huge opportunity for those marketers who use AI if they’ve retooled and restructured the right way. And I think there’s six of those things that I like to think of as this is the opportunity for marketers. 

The first one is if you have AI at the core of the way you’re running marketing, you’re going to have a more integrated view of the customer. I think that’s something every marketer has always been chasing. Marketers need to think about how do they shift budgets dynamically to maximize outcomes. So versus setting them at the beginning of the year, and kind of saying this is where we’re going to go. How are we able to dynamically move them around? I think marketers are going to be able to reach real time audiences and hit them with the right message at the right time, on the right platforms all of the time, and they should be using general generative AI to create creative and scale creative and put it across every platform that they potentially need to do. 

There’s an opportunity for AI to do more testing, creative testing, campaign performance testing, ensuring that you know things are working for them and they can make those pivots in real time. And most importantly, I think this is the one that everyone is struggling with the most, is you need to embed like an AI culture within your organization, and that is finding AI native people, having them evangelize the use of tools, and have them evangelize and look at workflows across the organization and say, here’s how we can do things better. 

Nasser: 

The idea of an AI native person brings to mind to three year olds, though, which could be difficult to integrate into your organization, potentially. 

Miles: 

But the reality is that for marketers in this age of AI tactics like, you know, manual campaigns or traditional media planning, they’re just not going to keep up with that super empowered consumer that I talked about before.  You can’t possibly do it. 

Nasser: 

So let’s talk a little bit more about the consumer, because I think that brings us to this idea of, as AI gets more embedded into search and shows up as AI overviews and AI assisted answers and all of this kind of thing, how’s that changing how the consumer is discovering brands? 

Miles: 

Consumers are just as curious as ever before. We know that search is growing. We see 5 trillion searches globally at Google every year, which is an incredible, incredible number. And in fact, last quarter search saw the largest number of queries ever. Actually, here’s something super interesting and timely, the Argentina game, that was the number one search day in Google’s history. 

Nasser: 

Oh, wow. 

Miles: 

Yeah. Number one day. So what people were searching for was “what were the results from the Argentina Egypt game?”   So that’s the first search they make. The second search is going to be, “who scored the winning goal?” The next search is going to be, “can you show me a replay of the winning goal?” And then maybe they went ahead and screenshotted the photo of the player. Or screenshotted the video of the player who scored that winning goal. And now they’re taking that screenshot and they’re uploading it to Google and they’re saying, “where do I buy this jersey?” Or “where do I buy these boots?” 

And so you start to think of these micro moments. This is what the consumers are doing with search today. This is how they’re interacting. And this is how they’re taking what used to be probably a week worth of searches or multiple days worth of searches into like 10 seconds. And so you think of the implications for marketers, it’s pretty incredible. 

Nasser: 

I’m sure there were also a few searches that were a little bit less palatable, should we just say around that game? But yeah. I enjoyed it for sure. So getting back to this idea of how consumers are discovering these brands using AI and how it’s changing. Could you could you dive a little bit more, more deeply into that? 

Miles: 

Yeah, absolutely. So looking at AI overviews, we now have over 2.5 billion users. And what we’re finding with AI overviews is people are searching more and they’re kind of more satisfied. I think what’s interesting with AI overviews is they tend to be for no one single right answer searches, okay? And so wherever there is a commercial opportunity, Google will go and put in an ad above, below or naturally embedded within that AI overview as well. And so consumers are getting a much richer answer that’s very relevant to them as an individual user as well. 

Nasser: 

So looking at it from the marketers perspective, historically, marketers have optimized and and bought into search with the goal of securing traffic and visibility for their website and for their brand. With these changes, and with the answer often being provided to the consumer before they even visit the website, how does that change what marketers’ success or view of success looks like? 

Miles: 

Well, look, marketing has always been about maximizing ROI. I like to go back to John Wanamaker’s quote of “50% of the advertising works. I just don’t know which half.” I think we’re closer to that moment now that we can actually start to find out. So while we’re seeing AI overview is increasingly answer questions. This actually improves the quality of the traffic going through, because we’ve high level already answered the question. And now that user is deeply interested in taking that next step and going a few layers deeper in this new era of search. Maximizing ROI requires executing really four elements that we see as the foundation for success. For every marketer today, we call those the search four. And that’s what’s really going to help marketers appear and succeed in this, in this new AI overview world. 

Nasser: 

So let’s not hold people hostage to their emotions,  what are those search four? 

Miles: 

Yeah, thank you for asking. Look, the first one is data strength. Your growth fundamentally depends on the quality of your data. That is the secret sauce for marketers today. Every marketer has data. They need to be using it in their campaigns. You need to allow search to deliver the very best results. You need to connect Data Manager, which is going to import all of your data signals, the signals that matter most to your specific business. I think that’s really important because your business is different from my business is different to somebody else’s business. So therefore your data is going to be most relevant there. 

The second most important thing is aligning your bidding. So the smartest AI in the world, it can’t help you if it doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do, right. Integrating the specific business goals into smart bidding strategies is what’s going to ensure that the AI can connect the right consumer with your products.  

And three, I think we need to be adopting AI powered campaigns. So we have AI Max for search, and Performance Max campaigns. And these are what leverage the data that you uploaded and the bidding strategies that you set. But we can do it at the scale and speed that you as an individual marketer, sitting there trying to guess your way through, is never going to be able to do. A good example is in the past we might have used to say, “show my product to 18 to 25 year old women who are interested in pickleball shoes.” That’s great, right? That’s the kind of old way of thinking about structuring campaigns. The way we might do it today is, “show my shoes to anybody who’s interested in buying them at a certain ROI for my business.”  Very, very different. And so all of a sudden, you open up the aperture of your entire potential universe of customers. Who knows, who wants a pickleball shoe? Maybe they want it because it’s a fantastic designed shoe, and they want to wear it as a street shoe. Maybe painters have discovered that pickleball shoes have great traction for walking around a house while they’re painting. 

And the fourth one, the most contentious one, is to set flexible budgets. You know, while search finds high value customers, it needs the capacity to convert. And so if you’re capping your budgets today, that’s the equivalent to kind of closing your store at lunchtime, despite the fact you might have a lineup sitting outside. Those are all potential customers. And with AI, they’re not just potential customers who want to come into your store and kick the tires. We’ve already validated them as being high potential customers to a certain set of parameters that you’ve said you’re interested in, so you would never close your store to that case. And so setting that flexible budget is going to allow you to capture that demand. 

Nasser: 

Understood. So these are the things that you should be doing. And thank you for that insight. What’s something that marketers have historically done and kind of obsessed about as it relates to search that you think they should just stop doing with all of this innovation? 

Miles: 

Yeah. Look, I think the single biggest one for me is stop obsessing about keywords. Yes, keywords are still important. Yes, keywords for brand are going to always be important. But the reality is, as we see search queries grow in the length and complexity, and we’re seeing that every single day, it’s actually impossible to have an appropriate number of keywords to cover every possible permutation that a customer is potentially searching for. You can’t predict what they’re going to search for next. 

Interestingly, I recently looked at a count complexity dashboard internally and saw that 91% of the keywords in this campaign set up structure had never received an impression. 

Nasser: 

Wow, still. 

Miles: 

91%. So said another way, only 1 in 10 of those keywords that they had on that list of however many thousands were there, was actually getting impressions and had the opportunity to convert. That’s incredible. And I think for marketers, if you’ve got teams that are obsessing about keyword lists and managing them and building campaigns around them, frankly it’s a waste of overhead. In a time of efficiency, you can be using AI powered campaign products like AI Max and PMax to do that. All that heavy lifting for you as long as you’ve loaded in data, smart bidding, the flexible budgets, that’s what’s going to enable you  to reach those people at the right time. And you’ve saved all this efficiency internally. 

Nasser: 

Understood. So on the on the flip side of search, you know, talked about the paid side. How can marketers make decisions that are going to help increase their visibility, their trust, their authority in AI search? How is it different from what went before? 

Miles: 

Yeah. Look, I think everyone is trying to figure out how to optimize for this new world and ensure that they, as a marketer or as a website, are relevant and visible in AI searches. I totally hear that.  The biggest piece of advice that we at Google give right now is the way to optimize for AI Search is the same way to optimize for regular search. Create great and relevant content. Simple as that. Create content that you would want as a user and expect your users to want. 

The additional piece of advice we give is go beyond the surface level. I think a lot of marketers think about spreading a very broad net. The content that will do the best within AI is the content that goes one or two or even three layers deep and is really, really helpful to the customer. So for marketers, SEO best practices are just as important as they’ve ever been. You know, first lead with what your brand can uniquely say. You know, you’re not a commodity. There’s something unique in your brand. Tell the user about that particular thing. So instead of generic commodity information that could originate from anyone, focus on the specific one-of-a-kind content and expertise that only you have. I like to say like share reviews, firsthand experiences, or even expert takes that only you can provide. 

The next thing is really to focus on the most helpful content for your customers. Don’t try to write for bots. I think a lot of people out there right now are LLM.txt and all the rest of it. Don’t try to write for bots. 

Nasser: 

Bots writing for bots. 

Miles: 

Yeah, look, listen. Our models will go and find what’s relevant. And the reality is Gemini is multimodal, we’re search, we’re text, we’re video, we can look at all of those particular things. And so, you know, people ultimately appreciate finding relevant images and videos. And generative AI is going to pull all of those things into the result. And we’re going to tag them and we’re going to reference them. That’s going to drive better traffic back to your website in due course as well. 

And finally, you’ve got to get your website ready for users, systems and agents. We’re in this agent moment. They’re coming if they’re not already here, and you’re going to have to build websites, that’s going to enable them to navigate your sites easily. So making sure that they’re well structured, accessible and easy to navigate, and make sure that your product and business listings are up to date. So whether that’s Merchant Center or Google Business Profile, these are tools that Google has built out that we look at first for so much, so much content that’s out there. 

Nasser: 

It’s fascinating that you should talk about the importance of the website because, you know, I don’t know about you, but I sometimes hear people say that, you know, the website becomes meaningless over time, and I just don’t think that’s correct. 

Miles: 

No. People are still going to go to websites. They’re still going to convert on websites. AI search, and all of your AI-powered campaigns are just going to deliver a much more qualified, much more interested, much more ready to convert customer. And they’re going to come to your website to dive into that rich content. They want to see a deep review from a consumer about your particular product, and they’re going to hold you to it. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about AI as well. When you have to put consumer content first, you have to put a good product in market, right? So the best brands are going to win in the long run. 

Nasser: 

Yeah. So not just tell people who you are but get others to verify it. 

Miles: 

Absolutely. 

Nasser: 

So I have two last questions for you. We’re in the homestretch here, Miles. So as we think about the fragmentation of customer journeys and the data that underpins it, because you mentioned data, you have GA4, you have Meridian. We have marketing mix modeling incrementally, first party data like how do we combine these, and do we need to combine these in order to get a true view of what success looks like in this AI-powered environment? 

Miles: 

Well, yeah. Look, I mean, I think you nailed it there with the marketing mix models and incrementality and first party data. You’re absolutely right. We call those the modern measurement playbook. There’s three things that marketers really need to be doing to action. So the first one we talked about it build your data strength. So that starts with importing your first party data. Using something like Google Data Manager, the more signals, the smarter the AI is going to lead to better results for you. You know, advertisers who import first party data like signals and from online sales or lead forms, in-store data critically important. Not everybody imports that side of things. And we know a lot of those sales happen offline. Marketers that do that generally see a 26% increase in incremental rollouts.  So if you’re sitting on a treasure trove of data, upload it into Google Ads data Manager, connect that to your campaigns. That’s what’s ultimately going to drive increased ROI for you. 

I think the second one is get a unified view. We talk a lot about Google Analytics and for Google Analytics, it now allows a native integration to other popular advertising platforms. I won’t mention who they are, you can probably guess who a few of them are. But the problem today is so many marketers are looking at individual platform reporting and everyone measures things differently. So it’s really difficult to get a true apples to apples comparison. So by unifying everything into Google Analytics, you can then create your own apples to apples comparison across all of these particular platforms. And you’re going to have a much better sense for which platforms are actually working for you and which ones are potentially hurting you, allowing you to make better, smarter decisions as a marketer. 

And I think one of the latest things that we launched just earlier this year is Ask Advisor, which is embedded naturally into Google Analytics. And so you have an AI chatbot built into Google Analytics, where you can ask it anything. So no longer do you have to download reports, run pivot tables, try to work out what happened with my mobile sales on a Tuesday afternoon. You can just go to Ask Advisor and say, “what happened to my mobile sales on Tuesday afternoon?” It will do all the backend work for you and present you an answer allowing you to make better decisions. And so that’s something that’s available to everybody who has access to Google Analytics. So all of a sudden, your CFO, your CEO, your CMO, your director of marketing, all of those folks have access to that same, you know, analytical agent that can help you navigate what’s actually going on in your business. But that only comes once you’ve unified everything under a Google Analytics banner.  

And then I think the last one is really evaluating causality. You know, you need to be brave. You need to run causality tests. We see marketers that run five plus tests a year, see about 10% incremental sales from Google, because they’re testing things in a way that makes them understand what’s working and what’s not working, and then can make those adjustments accordingly. 

Nasser: 

Be brave, I like that. So we’ve covered a lot of ground today. What’s the one thing you want people to take away if they forget everything else? 

Miles: 

I’m going to give you two. Look, the first one is you got to lean in now, you have to know your business goals. You’d be surprised how many marketers don’t understand the true profitability that they’re trying to hit. They’re still focused on those, you know, media metrics, so to speak. So I think really understanding your business goals and implementing the AI best practices. And then look at your organizational structure from a marketing standpoint. Look at your marketing organizational structure. We should stop panic piloting things. I think that’s a bit of a knee jerk reaction right now. This era of disconnected tests and brand versus performance, it’s kind of over. You can’t really just go and bolt AI onto legacy processes. You really need to retool and rethink about how we’re running marketing as an operating system as you said before. And then build integrated systems, replace the functional silos of brand work and performance work and measurement work, and kind of stitch them all together with the customer at the center of it. So I think that’s kind of really the first one. 

And then the second thing is like, know that you’re not alone. I think everybody is navigating this AI world right now. It’s complex. It’s challenging. It’s moving very, very fast. From a Google standpoint, we feel it as well. So you’re not alone. And then I would say like subscribe to Think with Google.  We publish so much great content on all of these topics, whether it’s search, YouTube measurement, we have CMO commentaries. There’s a lot of great content there that is going to help you as a marketer, kind of navigate what’s next. And it’s always up to date. 

Nasser: 

And fundamentally, this is not a technology problem, this is a people problem. 

Miles: 

Absolutely a people problem. 

Nasser: 

Right. So there’s the shift. Marketing is moving from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for decisions. As AI becomes part of how people search, compare and discover brands, marketers need to think beyond rankings and campaigns. Success will come from creating content that earns trust, building brands that people recognize, and measuring what drives real business outcomes, not just traffic. The technology will keep evolving. The real advantage will belong to marketers who know how to combine AI with smart strategy, strong creativity, and deep understanding of their customers. 

Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens. Leave us a review and share this episode with your teams. If you have any questions for the podcast, email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com.  We’d love to hear from you. 

Miles, thank you for giving us the privilege of being your first podcast. You did great today. 

Miles: 

Thank you. I really appreciate it. 

Nasser: 

Thank you. And thank you very much for listening. I’m Nasser Sahlool.