Google: Rethinking Readiness

The Challenge

Google, the market leader within the digital advertising landscape, is facing pressure from multiple angles. Competition is fierce, marketers remain wary of the complexity of machine learning, and people’s fears surrounding data privacy have increased. The brand knows that the future of data-driven marketing is to get beyond transactions and deliver meaning. And by humanizing their products, they can grow their leadership position, simplify the burden put on marketers and help them use signals respectfully and helpfully.

So, the Google Ads Marketing team launched a new research initiative called “Rethinking Readiness” to prove out their thinking.

We helped Google lay the foundation of this research initiative by providing a fresh point of view and a new framework for talking about the human value proposition of Google products, particularly machine learning. For them, that meant enabling their customers (marketers) to meaningfully connect with and help people when it matters most.

The Approach

We had our task cut out! To truly understand meaningful connections, we started with ‘human to human relationships’ and set out to discover how those relationships can (or should) be translated to ‘brand to human relationships’.  People anticipate others’ needs and offer help all the time. What does it feel like to be seen and understood? And how do people know when others’ need help, let alone the type of help they need?

For this, we had to identify and codify the types of impact that people experience, and often expect, in a variety of relationships. We explored three types of relationships: human to human relationships, professional service relationships where help is often ‘purchased’, and brand and consumer relationships. 

We started off by capturing stories from people who have been ‘helped’ in situations where they didn’t specifically ask for that help, allowing us to explore the various types of impact that occurs, both positive and negative. By leveraging the scale of survey research and the power of text analytics, we were able to capture stories from 1,000 people in their own words across a variety of relationships and scenarios.

The next building block was to unpack how service-oriented professionals operate and prioritize for the clients they’re working for. We talked one-on-one to 15+ professionals in service-oriented roles where anticipating others’ needs is critical for success (executive admins, hotel concierges, wedding planners etc.). 

The final piece of the puzzle was to translate the types of impact from personal relationships to brand/consumer relationships. And we needed to do it across categories, across touchpoints and at scale. We developed an innovative online survey that pathed 4,200 people across 12 categories with the goal of translating, mapping and sizing the impact territories and their relationship to people’s human needs.

The Impact

Relationships are the heart of any brand impact and it’s critical to balance privacy (the technical side) and permission (the human side). We discovered eight ways that marketers can make a positive impact on their consumers, often through ads alone. And provided guidance for marketers to build an empathic relationship with consumers, to enable them to assess where they are in the relationship and to guide when and how to use information/data respectfully and helpfully.

In the end, The Sound delivered a fresh point of view and new way of thinking that inspires and showcases the human side of machine learning.