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The future of search
Matthew Maltby
Google
Search can be used to identify emerging trends and to react to those trends by reaching out to potential customers
– right ad, right person, right place, right time. The brand marketers who can grasp and use search will be there for
their customers' and potential customers' moments of need, building brand love and driving sales.
This article is from the 50th anniversary issue of Admap, which looks ahead to the future of brand
communications.
All Admap articles are available exclusively on Warc.
Three years ago, a new hairstyle emerged on the world's catwalks and red carpets. The style, first popular with long-haired
brunettes, started dark at the top and faded to blonde towards the bottom. It was known by several names: Ombré hair,
Balayage and even 'dip dye hair', since the bottom of the hair seemed to have literally been dipped in dye.
In reality, Ombré hair took more than a simple dip. As the look jumped from catwalks to nightclubs, fashionistas were spending
$200 or more in hair salons to get it for themselves. A quick search for 'Ombré hair' on Google or Google Images shows just
how popular the style has become.
So what do searches for an expensive hair trend have to do with the future of brand marketing? And what are search ads – the
most performance-focused of all marketing media – doing in a 50th Anniversary Edition of Admap entitled 'The Future of Brand
Communications'?
For the answer, we return to our story. A savvy team from L'Oréal Paris, including Julie Chamberlain – the VP of marketing for
Haircolor – noticed Ombré hair taking off through search data. By watching publicly available search volumes in Google
Trends (google.com/trends), they could see the start of the Ombré trend, its rapid ascent, and its state-by-state, country-by-
country sweep of America and the world.
L'Oréal Paris knew an opportunity when it saw one. Working with Google, it identified in more detail the search terms that were
spiking. 'Ombré hair' in general was going through the roof, but so were specific search terms such as 'DIY Ombré' and 'How to
get Ombré at home'. A key audience was trying to get the look without spending hundreds of dollars at a salon.
"This signalled to us that L'Oréal could come and fill a need in the consumer marketplace: to get Ombré at home," recalls
Title: The future of search
Author(s): Matthew Maltby
Source: Admap
Issue: October 2014
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3. Chamberlain. "What was clearly missing was an applicator tool." Already armed with a successful line of hair colour formulas,
Chamberlain's team acted quickly to address the need they'd spotted. In just months, they developed an applicator tool and
L'Oréal Féria Wild Ombré: the world's first at-home Ombré hair product.
How did they market it? Through search, of course. With search ads, they could reach the vast interested audience that had
alerted them to the opportunity in the first place. Not only that, they could engage these people at exactly their moments of
need.
L'Oréal Paris complemented its search ads with a full marketing campaign. It led people to a brand experience online,
produced professional YouTube videos to teach buyers how to use the product, and courted press and YouTube beauty
bloggers.
The initiative was a huge success. Today L'Oréal Paris Féria Wild Ombré is a leader in the at-home Ombré hair market.
Chamberlain and her team have brought a whole new category of consumers into the hair colour market – years earlier than
the historical norm.
Why search works for brand marketing
L'Oréal Paris's strategy shows how search can do much more than drive online conversions. As marketers, we have tended to
see search ads as a performance or direct-response tool. Understandably so: advertisers have primarily used search ads for
their effectiveness in driving sales at the bottom of the funnel.
But the success of L'Oréal Paris and others has shown us that a tool with little history in brand marketing has a big future.
We've spent the past year studying what the most innovative brands are doing in this area, to understand why search is
growing in popularity as a brand medium.
The answer – as with so much in marketing today – is mobile. Five years ago, search was an activity you sat down to. You
turned to it when you needed to find, learn or do something. For commercial searches, this tended to be at the end of the
purchase journey. Today, nearly everyone carries search with them in their pockets and bags. They search on smartphones
from the minute they wake up until bedtime. There's no longer a gap between need and action. Search has become part of our
everyday lives.
This means that people use search far more throughout the purchase journey, from first stimulus to point of sale. More
importantly, thanks to mobile, we do those searches at the moments that matter to us, whether we're at home, in the office, or
on the go. As L'Oréal Paris's Chamberlain puts it: "We can be there at the consumer's moment of inspiration; when she sees a
look she's inspired by and wants to know how to get it."
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4. This behaviour is a boon for brand marketers. It provides unique audience insights, reach and engagement. It makes search
the only place where a brand can guarantee it will deliver on the old saw of 'right ad, right person, right place, right time'.
Using search for insights
Commercially relevant searches come in three broad types: branded, category and affinity. Branded searches are those where
a brand name is present, such as 'Nike running shoes'. Category searches just reference a product category, such as 'running
shoes'. Affinity searches have neither, but are still related to the brand or product, for example 'marathon running'.
You can see how these three search types correspond to the purchase funnel. Branded searches are typically at the bottom,
where people are looking to purchase, whereas affinity searches tend towards the top, where people may not even be aware
of a brand or product. Innovative brand marketers use the data from these searches to uncover and understand consumer
desires. Search reflects the authentic interests, intent and behaviour of people worldwide. For example, search showed that
consumers were interested in Greek yogurt, BB cream and Ombré hair before many brand managers knew what they were.
Online data is also up to the minute: 15% of searches seen by Google each day have never been seen before. When used as
an insights tool alongside traditional brand research methods – such as focus groups, custom surveys and social monitoring –
search delivers scale, immediacy and authenticity.
Brand marketers can benefit not just by identifying rising trends such as Ombré hair but also by uncovering long-standing
truths. For instance, of the five main kinds of hair issues (dry, damaged, fine, curly, and oily), one is searched for far more than
the others: curly hair. People searching for 'curly hair' are interested in hairstyles; people searching for 'dry hair' are interested
in hair care tips. How can you tell? Do a search for both and look at the organic (non-paid) results to see what the audience is
interested in.
Search insights work offline as well. Kleenex and Mindshare won a Cannes Lions Gold Media for their creation of 'adaptive
planning' in the UK. They used search trends to spot live cold and flu outbreaks and directed their offline media spend
accordingly. The technique delivered a 40% increase in year-on-year sales.
Using search for reach
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5. Worldwide, people make over 100 billion searches on Google every month. Each search is a moment that matters to
somebody, and many of these are an opportunity for brands to make a connection. As you move from considering just branded
searches, to including category and affinity searches too, the number of searches – and brand opportunities – can rise
dramatically. With most brand media, you buy an audience. With search, you buy an interested audience.
Leading brand marketers have understood the value of that interested audience, and of reaching it at the moments of need.
They treat search as any other mass medium, identifying and investing more in the large audiences that are most valuable.
Remember the customer, too. Is your brand showing up at their moment of need, wherever that is and whatever their device?
With search you can find out how many people are searching for your brand, your category and your competitors. You can see
how often you and your competitors show up. With some third-party tools, you can even see how many times people choose
you over your competitor, or vice versa.
Using search for engagement
When you do reach your interested audience, make sure you engage them. Search success depends on relevance – users
look for it and so the system rewards it. All else being equal, ads and websites that are more relevant to people's searches will
be rewarded with higher placement and lower costs.
For brand marketers, the future lies in providing a helpful answer at people's moments of need. A woman searching for
'hairstyle' on her mobile device at 7pm on a Friday night wants something different (suggestions for a quick 'do') than the same
woman making the same search at 10am on Saturday morning (ideas for a salon appointment). The winning brand will offer
her the content she needs to make her hair look great in each case. It will build brand affinity by being there with engagingly
creative options – perhaps a brand site, YouTube channel, Facebook page or hashtag.
The marketers who join these dots are those whose brands will become part of people's lives in the future.
So, how do you shift search from a performance to a brand medium? The secret is not just in thinking about search differently
but also in measuring it differently.
Performance search campaigns are commonly measured by efficiency metrics such as click-through rate, cost-per-click and
cost-per-conversion. For brand campaigns, though, marketers should use brand metrics that are common to other media in the
plan: impressions, website visits (clicks), engagement metrics (such as video views or time on site) and perception metrics
such as awareness.
Search's unique accountability can be its enemy in the shift to brand marketing, since search practitioners have become used
to connecting individual impressions and the clicks they drive directly to individual sales. As every brand manager knows, this
isn't always possible with brand marketing. You need to invest in tests and media mix modelling at scale to correlate with sales
increases, geographically or over time. The same approach should be used for brand marketing on search.
In future, it may become commonly understood that search ads can drive brand perception. Early results are positive. A meta-
analysis of 61 experiments undertaken by Google and Ipsos MediaCT compared awareness before and after seeing brand
ads on a search engine results page. The analysis showed top-of-mind awareness increased by an average of 6.6 percentage
points, from 8.2% to 14.8% – an 81% lift. When participants were asked to recall up to five brands, unaided awareness
increased by an average 9.2 percentage points, from 17.5% to 26.7% – a lift of 53%. These kinds of results hint at a bright
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6. branding future for search ads, but what of the tool itself?
In just 20 years – within memory for most brand managers – search has gone from nonexistent to ever-present. Its footprint
grows every day. From its limited beginnings on desktops and a few laptops, search is now present on mobile, tablets, and
even people's wrists. As search expands, so will the ways we interact with it. From ten blue text links, we've seen search
expand to deliver instant results on maps, images and videos.
We're seeing the next step with voice search: your answer will be just an 'OK Google' away. The technical challenges there
are fascinating. If you're about to fly to Heathrow Airport and ask your phone 'How do I get to London?', search must interpret
that question, expressed out loud and potentially in dozens of different ways. What if you're also wondering whether to pack an
umbrella? Those with the latest Android phones and Google Search app can simply follow up with 'What's the weather like
there?' Google knows it's in a conversation about London and will provide the answer you wanted – the weather for where
you're going, not where you are.
As search provides access to the world's information at any time, from anywhere and in any way, its importance in our lives will
only grow.
The brand marketers who can grasp and use search, will be there for their customers' and potential customers' moments of
need, building brand love and driving sales. Brands have always wanted their products to be part of people's lives. With
search, their marketing can be too.
About the Author
Matthew Maltby is head of thought leadership in Google's Performance Ads Marketing group. He works with Google's clients
and account managers to communicate the latest techniques used by advertisers in a connected world.
mmaltby@google.com
Visit the Admap@50 page for more, including…
The future of the agency service model
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP
Creativity ain't what it used to be
James Hurman, Previously Unavailable
The end of dumb digital marketing
Ben Wood, iProspect
The future of insight gathering
Eric Salama, Kantar
Marketing in the age of fragmentation
Scott Symonds, AKQA
Social's future is not community
Darika Ahrens, Grapevine Consulting
Build trust in a post-privacy era
Neil Dawson, SapientNitro
The post-disruptive advertising era
Gareth Kay, Zeus Jones
Programmatic: the risks and rewards
Rob Norman, GroupM
The agile brand
Lois Jacobs and Thomas Ordahl, Landor
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