Fast Forward: Google I/O 2021 Event Recap
Here is everything brands need to know from Google’s latest developer event
Editor’s note: This is an abridged edition of our Fast Forward newsletter. For the full version, please contact our VP of Client Services, Josh Mallalieu (josh@ipglab.com) to send a request.
Google kicked off the 2021 tech conference season on Tuesday with its opening keynote for its annual Google I/O developer event. Over the course of two hours, Google focused entirely on its software services, including new features coming to Google apps, Android 12, and a revamped Wear OS.
A common thread waving all the new services and features together is Google’s AI prowess as it weaves features powered by advanced machine learning across Google Search, Google Assistant, Google Lens, Google Photos, and more, all in service of making the user experience more intuitive and personalized.
For brands, here are five groups of announcements from Google that directly impact marketing strategies.
New Shopping Features to Move Shoppers Down the Purchase Funnel
Among the long list of announcements, the new Google Shopping features stood out as directly actionable for brands. Google has already organized the vast amount of online information into “knowledge graphs” neatly presented to users in an info-box next to the search results, and it is now building what the company calls the “Shopping Graph” — shoppable search results that currently cover around 24 billion product listings from millions of merchants worldwide. Per Google,
The Shopping Graph is a dynamic, AI-enhanced model that understands a constantly-changing set of products, sellers, brands, reviews and most importantly, the product information and inventory data we receive from brands and retailers directly — as well as how those attributes relate to one another.
Leveraging the enormous reach of its suite of free services, Google is dispersing its shoppable units across a wide range of services, including Image Search, Google Photo, and YouTube. Advanced computer vision technologies allows users to use Google Lens, now embedded in just about every Google service, to visually search for specific products and their look-alikes. For example, when you view screenshots of products in Google Photos, there will be a suggestion to search the photo using Google Lens, to help you find the item for sale.
One particularly aggressive feature is Open Carts on Chrome, which reminds Chrome browser users of the online shopping carts that they’ve abandoned across various sites with a neat section of product info cards right on the New Tab page. Intended to help users pick up their shopping right where they left off, this new feature will also add support for showing discounts and linking loyalty programs from partnered retailers. It will also have a built-in alert for price drops, which will no doubt encroach on the revenues of third-party plug-ins like Honey and CheapShark, which earn commissions on user transactions with partnering retailers.
To help onboard more online merchants onto Google Shopping, the company is teaming up with Shopify, the leading provider of ecommerce infrastructure, to allow the 1.7 million Shopify merchants to easily plug in their online inventories into Google search and other Google services, and have their products appear across Google’s “1 billion shopping journeys” that take place every day through Search, Maps, Images, Lens and YouTube.
For brands, these new Google Shopping features supercharge the shopping experience on Google services and incentivize retailers and brands selling directly to consumers to join the Shopping Graph. While Amazon still dwarfs Google in terms of sales volume, Google’s dominant position in search, along with its advanced visual search product, makes its services a common place for product discovery. All these new features aim to help brands move users down the purchasing funnel and close the gap between discovery and purchase.
Google is trying to rally retailers and online merchants around Google Shopping to build a coalition against the Goliath that is Amazon, and it is making a pretty convincing case for it. That being said, Google’s control over the shopping experience stops when consumers clicks on that product card, and without full-stack control over the delivery experience, not to mention the stickiness of Prime, Google Shopping still won’t be able to fully complete against Amazon.
New Business-Friendly Features in Improved Google Maps & AR
Google Maps is a popular utility app that has been increasingly commercialized and business-friendly in recent years, and this Google I/O continues that momentum by adding some interesting features that surfaces contextual information from businesses nearby, depending on data points such as the time of the day and personal preferences of cuisines based on saved restaurants, via a dynamic UI. The enhanced Live View of streets also now includes AR overlays that offer helpful details about local businesses, like whether they are open, how busy they are, as well as recent reviews and photos.
In addition to the more business-friendly features, Google Maps also adds more utility features, such as eco-friendly routing (which is now live) and “safer routing” that uses AI to process local road, weather, and traffic conditions to calculate the safest route for drivers. Indoor AR navigation is also coming to select train stations and airports. All these industry-leading features continue to ensure that Google Maps’ popularity among both Android and iOS users won’t be seriously challenged any time soon.
Besides expanding AR features in Google Maps, Google also added two new APIs — Raw Depth & Recording/Playback — to its ARCore developer kit to help create more realistic-looking AR experiences. It is showcasing that with a new set of AR demos, accessible via Google Search, that put famous athletes like Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and tennis star Naomi Osaka right in your room to showcase their signature moves.
For brands, the improvements on Google Maps and AR features continue to present an emerging channel and format to engage with today’s mobile-first consumers. Local businesses need to make sure their business information is properly indexed, and explore how the contextually dynamic Maps may open opportunities for targeted offers. Google claims there are now over 850 million ARCore-compatible Android smartphones worldwide, which is smaller than the 1 billion active iPhones out there, but still offers an incredible user base for brands to execute AR experiences against.
Catching up with Apple in Mobile and Wearable Features
Speaking of Apple, a lot of the new features in Android 12 and the new Wear OS are essentially Google playing catch-up with Apple. For example, in terms of cross-device compatibility, users will be able to sign into Chromebook via their Android handsets, and messages now appear on linked Chromebook too. Android Auto also added wireless support, as well as an upcoming digital car key feature for Android 12 to unlock or start your car. Similar to the NFC-powered car keys in Apple Wallet, users will be able to share their digital car keys with others via texting.
The revamped Wear OS will be built in collaboration with Samsung for a unified platform that enables new features such as Maps Navigation while multitasking, offline YouTube music, and glanceable notification tiles from third-party apps — all features that have long been available on the Apple Watch. Still, the key improvements here were faster performance and better battery life, which have often been a problem for Wear OS. In addition, FitBit reiterated they will have premium Wear OS devices in the future, which, good luck catching up to Apple’s Fitness+ service that is tailor-made for Apple Watch users.
Android TV, which Google claims to have over 80 million users, (confusingly calculated by counting the number of devices that were actively used in a month instead of, you know, actual users) now has a TV remote built into the new Android system, whereas Apple has had an integration of its Apple TV remote in the iOS control center for years.
Of course, there are some cool new things that’s not following Apple’s footsteps. Android 12 introduces a new “Material You” design language that empowers users to customize their devices with system-level color palettes, which marks the biggest design refresh for Android in years. We anticipate the upcoming Apple WWDC event next month to introduce a more customizable iOS interface too.
For brands, Google catching up with Apple in terms of mobile and wearable software means that what developers can pull off on Apple devices can now similarly be done on Android too, which helps extend the reach for brand marketers’ mobile and wearable initiatives. For example, Google says there are over 100 million compatible Android Auto cars on the road, which points to the growing audiences for brands to reach via in-vehicle media.
Reimagining the Future of Work with Smart Canvas and Project Starline
With the pandemic accelerating the adoption of remote work, a new class of digital nomads are embracing the Anyware Economy and untethering their professional and private lives from distinctive locations. Google is one of the many tech companies that have embraced remote work, and it clearly sees the big opportunities in updating its productivity products to better suit new demands from users as well.
Building on Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Google announced a “Smart Canvas” suite of interactive tools that brings together its existing Workspace tools, including video calls via Google Meet, Chat rooms in Gmail, Connected checklists with Google Tasks integration, as well as “smart chips” that act as document previews “without changing tabs or contexts.” All these features cater to a growing user base beyond the enterprise users and help Google compete against new startups like Notion and Airtable that are rethinking online collaborative tools.
Another interesting project that Google previewed was Project Starline, which created a next-gen 3D video chat booth that enables vivid video calls. Utilizing a 65" display and several sensors and cameras allowing for 3D representations of video call subjects, it is a step in developing the kind of technologies that will power virtual presence that could be useful in the future of hybrid work.
All these new collaborative work tools will empower more knowledge workers to be more productive while working remotely. More than 10 million traditional and independent workers in the U.S. have combined remote work and travel, up 48% compared the year before, according to a recent MBO survey. For brands, this lifestyle shift will no doubt impact their shopping behaviors and media habits, which means conventional targeting won’t work as well; instead, brands have new opportunities to engage with them via emerging channels such as in-vehicle digital media or wearables, and context-driven targeting.
Repeated Emphasis on User Privacy and Data Security
Last but not least, Google repeated for emphasis its commitment to user privacy and data security throughout the keynote event, as it introduced new privacy control features and data management tools to make sure it has a legible defense against any potential regulatory scrutiny. Among these new features, which includes an auto-delete feature that activates after 18 months by default for new Google users, new password management tools and alerts, and more accessible privacy control features to delete recent search history, the coolest one is probably allowing users to simply ask Google Assistant to change their passwords.
Again, the threadline of AI-powered features showed up here as well in features like differential privacy, which uses machine learning to aggregate user data before sharing and federated learning, which powers local processing features that keep user data on the devices. Google reiterated that it doesn’t sell user data and will never do that, and that it would never use sensitive data (such as healthcare data) for personalizing ads. It can afford to make those claims because Google has got enough free services collecting first-party data that it can put into its “Privacy Sandbox” to power its ad targeting via anonymized cohorts. The more people trust Google with their data, the stronger Google’s hold on the digital advertising business.
For brands, the death of cookies and consumers’ increasing privacy consciousness are rewriting the digital advertising playbook, especially for identity-based, cross-platform targeting. Google has enough first-party data to sustain its ad products, and it is finding new ways to ensure that it stays on its users’ good side. As long as Google can provide enough value to users via the free services it provides, the data flywheel will keep spinning for the company, forcing more advertisers to come to the table and play by its rules.
Curiously, this I/O keynote did not feature any hardware announcements or mention of Google’s cloud-based gaming service Stadia, which is a good indication in where the priorities lie for the search giant. Pretty much everything Google announced on Tuesday follows a clear narrative of leveraging data and AI to deliver value to users, in exchange for more data that the company can feed into its machine learning research and its ad products. In other words, it is business as usual for Google.
If you’d like to learn more about Google’s announcements and their marketing implications, or simply to chat broadly about how to adapt to changing user behaviors and future-proof your brand strategies, the Lab is here to help. You can start a conversation by reaching out to Josh Mallalieu (josh@ipglab.com).
