The marketing funnel is officially over – according to Google, at least.
On Monday, during its NewFronts presentation in New York City, Kristen O’Hara, VP of agency, platform and client solutions, declared that Google now thinks of consumer behavior as a series of overlapping and often simultaneous activities: streaming, scrolling, searching and shopping.
Google already has the market cornered on search (for now, at least). But with new features and partnerships announced at NewFronts, Google hopes advertisers will start thinking of DV360, its demand-side platform, as their go-to platform for everything else, too.
And that goes double for CTV ad buys.
According to Google, DV360 now reaches 98% of CTV households in the US and represents 5 billion hours of ad-supported watch time per month – roughly 40% more than The Trade Desk and 90% more than Amazon’s DSP, O’Hara said.
We’re doing it live
But you can’t talk about streaming without talking about live events and sports – which will now be available as biddable inventory through DV360.
Some of the live inventory now available via DV360 comes, unsurprisingly, from YouTube, said Marta Martinez, managing director of Google’s marketing platform in the Americas.
But a fair amount will now also come from NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, which hosts thousands of hours of live programming, including “Saturday Night Live” and late-night talk show episodes.
Marketing around live events creates increased engagement rates and higher transaction values for advertisers, said Ryan McConville, EVP and CPO of ad platforms and operations at NBCU, on stage during Google’s presentation.
Moreover, the demand for more biddable opportunities brings a “democratization of access” for advertisers with smaller budgets to bid on live content, he said.
It’s not surprising, then, that the amount of biddable inventory is growing twice as fast as programmatic guaranteed within DV360, said Martinez.
“It’s clear that the old definition of CTV no longer applies, and marketers have a tremendous opportunity to show up for audiences wherever they are,” she added.
Retailers welcome
Showing up for audiences where ever they are naturally includes retail media.
Google also announced that it will incorporate its existing commerce media suite, which was previously available through Google Ads and Search Ads 360, into DV360, alongside new media partnerships with Costco, Intuit, Regal Cinemas and United Airline’s in-flight ad platform, Kinective Media.
But, more importantly, Google will also integrate its retail media offering via DV360 directly into YouTube, said Andrew Hotz, Google’s director of programmatic media.
The expansion is set to launch later this summer after a testing phase, at which point retailers and brands will be able to “bring valuable shopper data” to YouTube and fully incorporate the platform into their shopper marketing strategies, said Hotz.
For Costco, the partnership makes a lot of sense. Half of the people who signed up for memberships last year were under the age of 40, said Mark Williamson, assistant VP of retail media for Costco Wholesale.
“If we’re not reaching them on YouTube, where they’re consuming content, then we may not be reaching them at all,” said Williamson.
Getting generative
It wouldn’t be a NewFronts presentation in 2025, however, without some hype about artificial intelligence.
To close Google’s presentation, Bill Reardon, general manager of enterprise platform for Google Ads, walked the audience through DV360’s latest generative AI capabilities using a fictional Chicago deep dish restaurant as an example. (A bold choice, given Google’s history with AI and pizza.)
Google’s AI already drives a 60% reduction in the median cost per acquisition for advertisers using its audience persona and commitment optimizer (which is for streamlining upfront inventory management), said Reardon. Both of these features were introduced to the platform last year.
Using the new features, advertisers can generate curated custom inventory packages, campaign templates and reports using simple language prompts like “show me the sales and ROI for the deep dish campaign.”
The goal of these new AI tools is “faster setup, fewer errors and greater efficiency,” said Reardon – not to mention less “jumping from screen to screen.”
Because if you’re bouncing back and forth between other platforms and dashboards, you’re not spending as much time using Google’s DV360 for all your media buys, are you?
