The ways people get things done are constantly changing, from finding the closest coffee shop to organizing family photos. Earlier this year, we explored how machine learning is being used to improve our consumer products and help people get stuff done.

In just one hour, we’ll share how we're helping marketers unlock more opportunities for their businesses with our largest deployment of machine learning in ads. We’ll explore how this technology works in our products and why it’s key to delivering the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands.

Join us live today at 9am PT (12pm ET).

Deliver more relevance with responsive search ads

Consumers today are more curious, more demanding, and they expect to get things done faster because of mobile. As a result, they expect your ads to be helpful and personalized. Doing this isn’t easy, especially at scale. That’s why we’re introducing responsive search ads. Responsive search ads combine your creativity with the power of Google’s machine learning to help you deliver relevant, valuable ads.

Simply provide up to 15 headlines and 4 description lines, and Google will do the rest. By testing different combinations, Google learns which ad creative performs best for any search query. So people searching for the same thing might see different ads based on context.

We know this kind of optimization works: on average, advertisers who use Google’s machine learning to test multiple creative see up to 15 percent more clicks.¹

Responsive search ads will start rolling out to advertisers over the next several months.

Maximize relevance and performance on YouTube

People watch over 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day. And increasingly, they’re tuning in for inspiration and information on purchases large and small. For example, nearly 1 in 2 car buyers say they turn to YouTube for information before their purchase.² And nearly 1 in 2 millennials go there for food preparation tips before deciding what ingredients to buy.³ That means it’s critical your video ads show at the right moment to the right audience.

Machine learning helps us turn that attention into results on YouTube. In the past, we’ve helped you optimize campaigns for views and impressions. Later this year, we’re rolling out Maximize lift to help you reach people who are most likely to consider your brand after seeing a video ad. This new Smart Bidding strategy is also powered by machine learning. It automatically adjusts bids at auction time to maximize the impact your video ads have on brand perception throughout the consumer journey.

Maximize lift is available now as a beta and will roll out to advertisers globally later this year.

Drive more foot traffic with Local campaigns

Whether they start their research on YouTube or Google, people still make the majority of their purchases in physical stores. In fact, mobile searches for “near me” have grown over 3X in the past two years,⁴ and almost 80 percent of shoppers will go in store when there’s an item they want immediately.⁵ For many of you, that means driving foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar locations is critical—especially during key moments in the year, like in-store events or promotions.

Today we’re introducing Local campaigns: a new campaign type designed to drive store visits exclusively. Provide a few simple things—like your business locations and ad creative—and Google automatically optimizes your ads across properties to bring more customers into your store.

Show your business locations across Google properties and networks

Local campaigns will roll out to advertisers globally over the coming months.

Get the most from your Shopping campaigns

Earlier this year, we rolled out a new Shopping campaign type that optimizes performance based on your goals. These Smart Shopping campaigns help you hit your revenue goals without the need to manually manage and bid to individual products. In the coming months, we’re improving them to optimize across multiple business goals.

Beyond maximize conversion value, you’ll also be able to select store visits or new customers as goals. Machine learning factors in the likelihood that a click will result in any of these outcomes and helps adjust bids accordingly.

Machine learning is also used to optimize where your Shopping ads show—on Google.com, Image Search, YouTube and millions of sites and apps across the web—and which products are featured. It takes into account a wide range of signals, like seasonal demand and pricing. Brands like GittiGidiyor, an eBay company, are using Smart Shopping campaigns to simplify how they manage their ads and deliver better results. GittiGidiyor was able to increase return on ad spend by 28 percent and drive 4 percent more sales, while saving time managing campaigns.

We’re also adding support for leading e-commerce platforms to help simplify campaign management. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to set up and manage Smart Shopping campaigns right from Shopify, in addition to Google Ads.

Tune in to see more!

This is an important moment for marketers and we’re excited to be on this journey with you. Tune in at 9am PT (12pm ET) today to see it all unfold at Google Marketing Live.

For the latest news, follow the new Google Ads blog. And check out g.co/adsannouncements for more information about product updates and announcements.

1. Internal Google data

2. Google / Kantar TNS, Auto CB Gearshift Study, US, 2017. n=312 new car buyers who watched online video

3. Google / Ipsos, US, November 2017

4. Internal Google data, U.S., July–Dec. 2015 vs. July–Dec. 2017

5. Google/Ipsos, U.S., “Shopping Tracker,” Online survey, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days, Oct.–Dec. 2017

Two weeks ago, we announced that we’re unifying our DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under one brand: Google Marketing Platform. We also introduced Display & Video 360 as a key part of Google Marketing Platform. Display & Video 360 is a single, integrated product that helps creative, data and media teams work together to execute end-to-end ad campaigns.

Today, we’re sharing more about Display & Video 360, including how it helps marketers collaborate across teams, gain transparency and control over their investments, and use the latest advances in machine learning and automation to get better results. Read on to learn more, or watch the live stream from our Google Marketing Live event happening later today in San Jose, CA.

About Display & Video 360

Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio, and Audience Center in a single product.

So what does that mean?

First, Bid Manager will soon become Display & Video 360. This will happen automatically—customers won’t have to take any action and campaigns will continue to run uninterrupted. Second, Display & Video 360 is organized around five integrated modules that work together to simplify the end-to-end campaign process: Campaigns, Audiences, Creatives, Inventory and Insights.

These new modules reflect the fact that Display & Video 360 offers more than just Bid Manager’s programmatic capabilities. It also includes the campaign management, cross-platform measurement, creative and audience capabilities that are currently part of DoubleClick Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center. (Don’t worry, these products aren’t going anywhere right away—we’ll gradually transition customers of these products to Display & Video 360 in the future as additional features become available.)

By bringing these solutions together, Display & Video 360 enables marketers to fully manage their reservation, programmatic and programmatic guaranteed campaigns across display, video, TV, audio and other channels, all in one place. And using a single product to manage advertising campaigns and workflows end-to-end offers significant advantages compared to a more piecemeal approach.

Collaboration across teams

We know that getting a successful ad campaign up and running requires media, creative, data and analytics teams to work closely together along the whole journey. In fact, recent data from Google’s Media Lab—the team that manages all of Google's advertising campaigns—shows a 1.5X improvement in campaign performance when creative strategies and design are aligned to media, compared to when creative is built in a silo.¹ But today, the typical digital campaign workflow is complex and manual, involving handoffs across multiple people, organizations and products—which makes it really hard to collaborate.  

Display & Video 360 changes that. It helps teams share campaign data and insights at each step of the process, so they can work together to plan campaigns, design and manage creative, organize and create audience segments, find and transact inventory, then measure and optimize results.

"Running digital marketing for Major League Baseball is a unique opportunity because we cover all 30 MLB teams and a total of 2500 games each year. Display & Video 360 helps us to achieve the scale we need to meet this demand because it allows our creative, campaign management and analytics teams to collaborate really well. For example, our analytics team can share feedback on creative performance much faster than before, and then this feedback can easily be applied to many campaigns at once."

Barbara McHugh

SVP, Marketing, Major League Baseball

Transparency and control

With Display & Video 360 you can see precisely how your money is being spent and know exactly where your ads are running—across all of your campaigns. Understanding how your marketing is performing in real time gives you more control. You can quickly see what’s working and what’s not, and then make informed decisions to adjust your tactics and improve campaign performance.

Justyna Valente

Digital Marketing Manager, TAP Portugal

Faster, smarter marketing

According to a recent study of global marketing organizations by Bain & Company, speed in decision making separated the leaders—the top 20 percent of respondents based on revenue and market share growth—from the laggards, who represent the bottom 20 percent. Marketing laggards are 1.7X more likely to be held back by slow decision making⁴, while marketing leaders are using technology to surface trends and patterns in near-real time so they can deliver more relevant marketing with speed to assist consumers at the right moment.

Display & Video 360 takes advantage of Google’s unique capabilities in machine learning to automate tasks like bidding and optimization, so you can respond to users’ needs faster. Built-in intelligence across the product automatically surfaces insights and recommendations—such as where to shift budget to improve campaign performance—so you can act quickly to achieve your goals.

Tune in to learn more

Display & Video 360 will begin rolling out to all Bid Manager customers in late July.  We’re excited to introduce this end-to-end advertising solution as part of Google Marketing Platform, and we’re eager to hear your feedback.  

^{1. Based on Q4'17-Q1'18 internal Google data.}

^{2. Based on a Google-commissioned Nielsen study, May-Dec. 2017.}

^{3. Based on a Google-commissioned BCG report, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising,” July-Sept. 2017.}

^{4. Bain/Google Marketing Leaders Study, Nov. 2017.}

Editor’s Note:Today’s post is from C-suite duo Colin Jones, CTO, and Ben McMullen, CIO, ofService NSW, an agency that helps residents of New South Wales, Australia, connect online and in person with government services. The agency uses Google Chrome Enterprise, Chromebooks and G Suite to reduce IT administration and costs, and to give employees more work flexibility.

When you replace inefficient technology with easy-to-manage tools, you become inspired to build on your success. That’s what we found after we adopted Chrome OS to run our government customer-service kiosks. Once we saw how easy it was to manage and use our kiosks, we started to look for ways to use Chrome OS more widely. By bringing Chrome Enterprise into our offices as well as our customer storefronts, we found we could reduce IT workload, trim network costs, and most importantly, help our employees work better together.

Our journey started with a goal to improve customer service. At 130 Service NSW locations across New South Wales, people can use self-service kiosks for 1,200 types of transactions, like obtaining driver’s licenses and ordering birth certificates. The kiosks offer a much faster way for people to request these services compared to standing in line. Our customers love using them, and since Service NSW launched in 2013, we’ve completed about 70 million transactions.

Before switching to Chrome OS in 2015, our kiosks ran on a legacy OS that lacked reliable remote service features. When kiosks needed repairs or upgrades, field support agents had to visit offices and spend a couple of hours rebuilding hard drives. This meant that kiosks could be out of service for as long as two days.

Once we purchased 800 Chromebase all-in-one desktop computers, we immediately found Chrome Enterprise reduced our costs, streamlined IT management and increased security. Over a six-month period in 2015, we estimated that Chromebases required only 5 percent of the support hours we were spending on the Microsoft devices previously in use.

Because our kiosks didn’t need as much maintenance and could often be repaired or upgraded remotely, their uptime improved, giving customers more kiosks to use. And with kiosks more readily available for users, Chrome OS is helping us meet our goal of performing 70 percent of all transactions digitally by 2019. As we moved resources to the cloud, we found we no longer needed costly private WAN networks for each service location, only broadband and Wi-Fi. Eliminating private networks is an enormous savings by itself. When you add in the savings on devices and IT management, we’re targeting reducing our operational costs by 46 percent per year.

As a result of our successes with Chrome OS in our service locations, we began replacing legacy desktops and software at our head office locations with Chromebooks and G Suite. We're actively rolling out Chromebooks and G Suite to all of our staff in the next 12 months.

In our offices, we see the same reduction in cost and IT administration that we experienced with the kiosks. We also realized that we can give employees much more flexibility in the ways that they work. Their applications and files are in the cloud, so they can do their jobs from any place that has internet connectivity, instead of being tied to an office. And G Suite helps employees save the time they used to spend traveling to other offices. Collaboration has increased now that our employees can work from any device, anywhere, and be productive.

As a result of all of this, Chrome OS has become our digital platform of choice at Service NSW. We’ve recently purchased 1,200 additional Chrome OS devices to replace the remaining Windows desktops at all of our service locations. We expect that we’ll continue to see the same dramatic savings in costs and admin time that we’ve already experienced with our kiosks—and our employees will get the benefits of working in the cloud.

What started as a journey to make our customer experience faster and easier became a solution that made our employee experience faster and easier as well. As we continue on this journey, we’re expecting to see even more positive effects on costs, IT workload, and worker flexibility in the future.

Editor’s note: To celebrate the hard work, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of app makers around the world, over the coming months we’ll celebrate our Android community by featuring founders, product managers, designers and developers from around the world. We’ll showcase their passions and also hear about what they do when they step away from their computers. Meet our next app maker—Gregory Veret, a French organic farmer, co-founder and CEO of Xooloo—and check out more #IMakeApps stories on g.co/play/imakeapps.

When he was 29—while leading his tech startup Xooloo—Gregory went back to school to learn agriculture and bought a 65-acre island to start a farm. His passion for helping children grow is consistent throughout his life—both through his app that helps kids become good digital citizens, and his farm that provides food to Paris schools and daycares.

We caught up with Gregory at his farm outside of Paris.

When and why did you get involved with technology?

I got into technology when I was 19. I thought new technologies will dramatically change the way children grow, learn and interact with each other. I created Xooloo to give super powers to children through technology. I chose to be an entrepreneur because I want to make a difference and I genuinely enjoy working with other like-minded people that carry the same sentiment.

How did you get into farming?

I worry about the world that we’ll leave behind for children, and as an extension of what we do at Xooloo to help kids with their digital lives, I also wanted to do something that would have a positive effect on their physical lives. While leading Xooloo, and without telling anyone, I went back to school to study agriculture and bought a farm. In the beginning, I had no clue what I was doing; now every year I grow 100 tons of organic vegetables, mainly potatoes, that feed children in more than 500 schools and daycares in Paris. Xooloo and the farm have both the ambition to bring something positive and different to children, by allowing them to grow, both in their physical and digital lives.

Why did you create the Xooloo apps?

At Xooloo, we believe technology is an opportunity for kids and not a threat. That’s why we've made it our mission to create digital services to help them transform the world. Parents are scared and sometimes clueless when it comes to enabling their kids access to the digital world. Our apps empower children to guide parents in their kids’ digital life, to access new technology freely, and remove their parents’ fears.

What has been your experience with Android and Google Play?

Android’s openness provides great opportunities for our service. We get access to APIs that work across many device models from many OEMs, which enables us to reach many potential customers. On Google Play we can also use whichever business model we like, which is particularly important when working with partners, like mobile operators.

How has your app business grown since you started?

At first it was just my sister and I. Now we’re 13 people and have signed a distribution agreement with Orange, the largest mobile operator in France. We’ve also won several awards, including the “CES Best of Innovation Award” in Las Vegas, which brought a lot of traction for the app; for example, we were invited by the French President Emmanuel Macron to accompany him in his first foreign state visit to show how we’re using technology for good. We’re looking forward to continuing to enable a better future for children.

As part of our series of interviews with people across Asia-Pacific who use the Internet as a tool to connect, create and grow, we spoke with Bình Võ, the co-founder and General Manager of Amanotes, an Asian game developer whose team (pictured) is spreading love for music with their apps. Amanotes’ Magic Tiles app is the top piano game in more than 50 countries.

Tell us about yourself and your path to becoming an entrepreneur.

I’ve always loved music. My father taught me how to play the piano when I was six and I picked up the guitar and Vietnamese bamboo flute on my own. I also love technology and that's why I chose it as my major in university. Music and technology are quite different, but they both improve our quality of life. My mission is to combine these two passions and share my love for them with the world with great music game apps.

How did you start Amanotes?

MusicKing, the first music game startup that I founded in 2009, failed. But that experience made me much better prepared for when I and cofounder Cường Nguyễn established Amanotes. We still wanted to focus on our love for music and technology, but we realized that we needed revenue to be viable! So we started out by producing websites for companies in Vietnam. With the income from that work, we funded the creation of Magic Tiles, a game that lets you play different musical instruments like piano, guitar and drums on your mobile phone.

How did you succeed the second time round?

We had some promising early reviews for Magic Tiles, but not many people were downloading it. So we asked Google for help. The Google App Developer Sales team helped us use Firebase and universal app campaigns (UAC) to improve our game and reach. Google Play also advised us how to make the game more appealing and featured us on the Google Play Store.

Thanks to this support, we managed to gain and delight a new global audience of gamers.  Magic Tiles became one of the top five most popular music games in the U.S. and even ranked as the single most downloaded game there for a week in 2017. With this international success, we were able to double our team to 50 people in the same year and expand our presence regionally with offices in Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

Magic Tiles 3 has seen great success on the Android Play store.

That’s amazing! What have you done since then?

Our experience with Magic Tiles taught us that a solid marketing strategy is critical. There are a lot of great apps out there, but we never get to know about many of them.

We decided the best use of our experience would be to pass it on to other indie developers, helping them publish and market their music and music game apps. As a publisher, we support indie developers in creating quality music game apps and bringing them to global markets. We were really proud when App Annie recognized our efforts by ranking Amanotes as one of the top five publishers from Southeast Asia for 2017.

Amanotes team members love music and often play together during meetings.

What’s next for your business?

In 2017, we were ranked 20th in terms of the most downloaded apps by App Annie. Our current users are mostly from America and Europe. Our priority is to keep up our momentum in these markets. We’re also planning to do more to engage audiences in China, Japan and South Korea.

We’re working on new apps that will let people enjoy music, teach them how to play it and even help them make a living from it. Our aim is that Amanotes becomes a companion in everyone’s musical journey.

What’s your big dream?

My personal motto, inspired by the late Steve Jobs, is "stay hungry, stay foolish." Our long-term goal is to build a complete music ecosystem, producing excellent apps for music lovers, and enabling other indie developers to do the same.