Frederick Vallaeys [Vallaeys - Digital Marketing in an AI World: Futureproofing Your PPC Agency

Is the sky really falling? It sure seems to be. Announcements about AIs increasing importance in Google Ads have many PPC agencies and professionals confused, scared, and ducking for cover. After all, Google is by far the biggest player in pay - per - click (PPC) advertising. And yes: artificial intelligence, and specifically machine learning, are transforming the PPC landscape. But no: this does not mean that machines are ready to take over from us humans. In fact, the best results may happen when machines and humans work together.

There are many ways to futureproof your role as a PPC expert. However, the current changes do require you to reevaluate and refocus, and this book will tell you how.

When Google introduced AdWords in 2000, everything was done manually. Over time, Google layered more and more automation into the process. Working there from 2002 until 2012, first as a Product Specialist and then as the AdWords Evangelistspreading the word about this new form of advertisingI saw all this happen from inside the company that invented online advertising as we know it today.

In 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced we would soon be living in an AI - first world, and that Google was going to become an AI - first company. Since then, machine intelligence has driven the changes that have produced a new generation of AdWords, which was rechristened Google Ads in July 2018. The push towards AI has many, perhaps most, PPC agencies and professionals wondering: what does this mean for me? Is the AI - first Google going to put me out of a job? Will the things Ive been doing to make accounts successful, such as optimization and reporting, be handled by machines?

PPC angst is even stronger because so many digital marketers are fairly young, towards the beginning of their work lives. They may have thirty years of their careers left, and, in that case, what does the AI push mean for them? If you believe Googles official pronouncements, machines will be doing everything long before its time to retire.

In this rapidly changing environment, the half - understood artificial intelligence jargon being thrown around only increases confusion. The media, seeing a trend, is now extensively covering this new, disruptive technology. Media dramatization of AI always seems to come down to the image of a beautiful humanoid robotlike Alicia Vikander in the movie Ex Machina taking over from us poor humans.

However, the story of whats really happening is considerably less sexyand less frightening. Machine learning is great at figuring out correlations within masses of data: indeed, its a lot better at finding patterns in large data sets than we humans are. What this really means is were seeing the increasing automation of the highly repetitive, boring, and tedious tasks of pulling data from reports and looking for signals within the noise. This is where machines, rather than people, excel.

Marketing, however, remains a fundamentally human field: communicating with other people, telling them what you can offer, and inspiring them to act. Intuition and creativity are at the foundation of much of our human intelligence. Weve done pretty well as a species for quite a long time, and machines are not going to suddenly become better than humans at communication or creative intuition.

Yes, machine learning is having a considerable impact on PPC marketing. This has been true for some time and will be even more so in the future. At the moment, however, it appears that were at an AI inflection point, which means its more important than ever to separate fact from paranoid fiction and figure out whats really going on.

As one of Googles first 500 employees and its first AdWords Evangelist, I have great respect for the company and its products and services, some of which I helped create. However, I also feel they could do more to explain how humans and machines can successfully collaborate. Without guidance from the company most responsible for driving the AI revolution, they allow paranoia surrounding AI and PPC advertising to persist. Yes, CEO Sundar Pichai has said Google will be an AI - first company. What tends to happen in big companies is whatever the CEO says becomes gospel: this is what were going to do!

This can reach the point of the absurd, as a Wall Street Journal article has described (https://www.wsj.com/articles/ how - bosses - waste - their - employees - time -1534126140). At a breakfast meeting, a CEO commented that no blueberry muffins were available, although there were plenty of other things to eat, and he didnt particularly care for blueberry muffins. He was just making small talk about the food. Blueberry muffins began appearing at every breakfast meeting thereafter. It was several months before the CEO realized that a very casual remark on his part had been taken as a hard - and - fast requirement.

Whats happening with Google Ads, now that the CEO has said theyre an AI - first company? Two years ago, during Googles annual marketing event at which new products are launched, a product manager got up on stage and said: In the past, you had to worry about which ads to write for which audiences. But now, our machine learning is smart enough that you can just submit fifty different ad variations, and the system will figure out which is the right one to show to each individual user.