Being customer focused is end game: Google director of agency sales Dominic Allon reminds marketers to never forget their audience
Google UK's director of agency sales, Dominic Allon has highlighted the company's belief in creativity and storytelling to convey a marketing message and defended its forthcoming Enhanced Campaign PPC changes.
Speaking to The Drum at IAB Mobile Engage, Allon stated: "The key point we're trying to land is as marketers we need to be about people, it's about having conversations that understand real needs and wrapping your proposition, your statement, your story, your creative around it.".
During his on stage discussion with Mary Burris, Google's mobile solutions strategist, Allon introduced three key themes central to Google's way of working; technology is moving very fast, people are still people and should remain at the heart of thinking across all devices, and brand propositions should make life better for their audience.
Allon claimed that despite the evolution of technology and devices evolving faster than ever, the people they're designed to serve remains the most important factor and "technology and marketing communications should be rendered around the audience to succeed across all devices, including mobile, and all marketing channels."
He added: "Being customer focused has got to be the end game, and the fact that 43 percent top 100 advertisers don't have a site rendered for mobile is like promising your customers a first class experience, but delivering an economy seat."
Allon described Google's philosophy as "user first" and said that in order to deliver that he believed was a mobile rendered site is "the number one starting point" and reinforced this philosophy up with findings from analysis of over 6,000 US mobile searches. Conducted with Neilsen the 'Mobile Search Moments' study revealed 75 per cent of mobile searches trigger a follow up action and over half (55 per cent) of conversions on mobile happen within one hour of a search.
Allon's emphasis on the importance of mobile at the centre of customer interaction led the discussion onto Google's Enhanced Campaigns proposition which is set to launch in July. Introduced as a 'simpler and smarter' upgrade to the popular AdWords platform a number of critics have said the platform may be simpler but it isn't smarter. Allon rebuffed such criticisms saying: "What advertisers need is for their campaigns to disseminate across all devices seamlessly without any effort, and Enhanced Campaigns allows you to do exactly that and as a marketer it allows you to manage your campaign across all devices in one place. That's very powerful and very important to us."
"Enhanced Campaigns has mobile at the heart and I don't see any argument on whether it's the right thing to do or not. It's fast moving and we've put mobile centre stage and integrated everything else into that, we're trying to make it as easy as possible for our partners to manage the migration to Enhanced Campaigns but what we're focused on, and what we believe, is that this one time switch will be a much better position for everyone," he concluded.