How AI is reshaping media, with Google’s VP of marketing, Josh Spanier

0:07Welcome back to Mixed Signals, where we track the changes in this wild media age and talk to the most influential people who are right at the heart of them. I'm Ben Smith, the Editor-in-Chief of Semaphore. And instead of Max Taney this week, I have Josh Spanier, the VP of Marketing at Google, who you know from the sponsored segments on Mixed Signals every week. And I thought I'd begin by just explaining a bit of what we're doing with advertising on this show. Because one of the kind of interesting and to me really engaging parts of making the show, which is ultimately a show about media, has been to make the advertising about advertising.

0:45And in some ways eliminate the middleman. And I first got to know Josh because when you get to be editor-in-chief of a media organization, you wind up going on sales calls, which are mostly, in my experience, you kind of make your pitch. and you chime in with your partners on the advertising side about all the interesting stuff you're doing. And you're talking to people who tell you how great you are and receive it very warmly and give you really, like, no signal at all of what they think and of, like, what they make of your pitch. And then you never hear from them again much of the time. And very early on in the history of Semaphore, we pitched Google on some ad campaign.

1:21And there was this British guy on the call who, instead of sort of smiling and nodding, said something like, Like, you know, I don't think you people have your acts together at all. Why don't you call us back in six months? And so that was my introduction to Josh, which was I really valued because it's not – because the marketing industry is not always known for its absolute candor. I kind of appreciated that, got to know Josh a bit. And then when we were talking to Google about marketing for the show, we got talking about, oh, well, what if this very candid, direct Google marketing executive was himself speaking to our audience about the stuff that we are interested in and our audience is interested in?

1:58Because in some sense, the holy grail of this kind of advertising is, can you do stuff that your audience is actually interested in? And many of the people listening and watching Mixed Signals are really wrestling with all the same questions that senior marketing executives are wrestling with. Some are senior marketing executives about how much media is changing right now, how to navigate it, how to build a business around it. And Josh is in this very weird position in which he is one of the biggest media buyers in the world at Google, spending billions of dollars buying media, running a big marketing team, but doing it while he is himself an executive at the biggest advertising company in the world, Google.

2:36So he is exactly the kind of person we like to talk to on this show. And let us know what you think of this conversation. Josh, thank you so much for joining us for a full episode of Mixed Signals. I am extremely excited. I'm a little nervous, but thank you for coming to Mountain View and hanging out with Sarah at Google. To begin with, I guess I just, you and I are basically the same age, same generation. I got into the news business in the late 90s. You got into advertising in London in the 90s. And I think both of our careers have been kind of shaped by chasing this just vast wave of technological disruption that's just totally transformed the business we're in.

3:12And when I got started at the Indianapolis Star, there was a computer, which meant like a box in the middle of the room. and then there were these metal tubes that led from it to green screens at each desk. And you would input all this, your sort of stories, and you'd use the save get key to pull up old copy, and it would then go into the computer. And I guess, and so I know that from my side, what was, can you just tell us a little, like, what was your first job in advertising and kind of what was it like? So I am a failed journalist. I come from a family of journalists. My mother is a very successful journalist.

3:45My father was a very successful journalist. My brother is a successful journalist. My younger brother started out his career as a journalist, and I was like the black sheep of the family. So I ended up interviewing at a couple of media agencies, and I started to understand that side of the business. So I kind of stumbled into it, but it seemed journalist-adjacent, telling stories, creating engagement, actually being part of the media ecosystem. What was it like? You were placing ads on television? Just literally, what was a job in advertising, in media buying in the late 1990s? I started my career, I guess, in Zenith Media in London in 1998, and I was literally a TV buyer.

4:27My job was to send faxes back and forth, not emails at this point, send faxes back and forth between the TV stations and the brands I was representing, arguing over individual spots. So the number one show at the time might have been sort of Coronation Street on ITV. And so you would buy a spot on Coronation Street, and you would try and upgrade it to a better position. And I hated it, just to be clear. I wasn't particularly good at it, because that negotiation is sort of like all the stereotypes of, you know, a cigarette sticking out of your mouth and, you know, like shouting to the phone and all that sort of stuff.

4:57But media then, from a marketing perspective, was a mix of three things. You buy your TV ads, you buy your newspaper and magazine ads, and you buy your billboards. That's it. maybe a little bit of radio, but it was a very, very short portfolio of tactics of things you were doing. And everything was really about the creative, what you were saying in the spaces that you, I bought. But it was, email had only just come along. So I spent the first couple of years negotiating how to negotiate with the sellers of media on one side, hear that pitch, what was going well. And I did that for like two years, a year and a half.

5:34I didn't love it. And there was this thing called strategic planning. And strategic planning was really about the why. Why do people do what they do? Why do they buy what they buy? Why do they think what they think? And my job as a strategic planner was to understand the humans behind the sale or who are going to make the sale and then use those to develop an overall marketing strategy, which will enable you to engage those customers in totality. And I found that pretty fascinating because a lot of it is human psychology, us humans are irrational. And we operate in a world where we think everyone's being rational, making rational decisions.

6:07And clearly, there is no rational decision to buy a Ferrari, right? Not a logical rational decision. The decision is, I want a Ferrari, and they're goddamn cool. And it's like, okay, that's not, I guess it's a rational decision, but it doesn't feel totally rational to spend$400 ,000 on a car. But I'm not going to begrudge anyone who wants to do that. But it's pretty fascinating. What makes people tick? And then how do you tie that to a business outcome? How do you tie that to what humans are doing in their lives? And you find an insight, you unlock something, and it's really, really fun. One of the things that I sometimes think about in my career and yours is that when we were thinking about getting into our professions in the 90s, like so many of them in the words, like I was a blogger for a while, I would not have known what that meant.

6:46We would not have known what Google was, you know, much less TikTok, much less, you know, hyperlink. All the sort of even the language of our professions is totally new. Was there a moment when you kind of felt like, okay, this whole world is really going to change? The technology is really going to turn your career upside down? The first time I've ever really experienced YouTube, I was kind of like, kind of blown away by it, right? And this was, I guess, before I joined Google. So this is back in sort of 2004, 2005. And my job at the time, I was working at an agency in San Francisco called Goodby Servicing Partners.

7:22And, you know, And my job was to sort of identify audience behaviors and how they're using technology and what they were doing. And YouTube was this remarkable, like, there is something here. There is something happening here, in part because, oh, I'm spending four hours on YouTube myself versus watching whatever was on Desperate Housewives or whatever TV show was big in the sort of early orts. So that was a big one, just seeing, oh, this is possible. And I guess you can tie that back to the transition from dial-up to sort of the broadband. You know, it wasn't always easy to watch video. But that was a big thing for me, like the light bulb going off saying, oh, my God, you can program your own TV shows, your own network.

8:00You can broadcast yourself as well. That was pretty remarkable. Another one was, I remember when the iPhone came out, right? And the first iPhone came out, and there was a guy at the agency who was very much into technology. And he had the iPhone, and he showed me this thing called the beer app, which was ridiculous. It was just a complete novelty. But basically, you took the iPhone, and it looked like you had a pint of beer on it. I was British, and I didn't know that. And then you tilted it, and with the accelerometer, it looked like you were drinking your pint of beer. And it was probably made by some student.

8:30It showed no useful purpose. But the connection of the touchscreen, the brightness, and then, oh, the accelerometer actually allowing you to play around. It changes the paradigm. It's like the matrix, when all of a sudden you can see everything around you and sort of the different connections. That was super exciting as well. Just like, there is so much to play with and do here. It kind of blew my mind. And we're now, I mean, I think there's almost been a kind of steady acceleration through from, I don't know whether you want to say 99 or for whenever to today. And it feels like now we're in a particularly kind of high G-force moment with the birth of this new AI industry and in journalism, in marketing and technology and entertainment, everyone grappling with it.

9:11How do you, like, even, and I don't sometimes feel like a temptation to, like, maybe this is, like, where I get off the ride. I don't know. Like, how do you feel and how do you kind of stay motivated around? I mean, is it disorienting? Does it stress you out? Is it exciting? Like, how do you just engage with this just constant change? At times, it's overwhelming, right? I think it's overwhelming for everyone. The pace of technology has just the cycles of adoption of new technology just got faster and faster and faster. The thing which keeps me going is I just find this stuff fascinating. Going back to humans interact with things the way they want to.

9:48And when you start looking at that and understanding it, it's just really, really endlessly interesting in what people are creating and doing. And you look at the explosion of media from YouTube through to all these other platforms now, you know, TikTok and beyond. And it's like people are doing amazing things in whatever niche or whatever interest they have. And it's like, why are they doing that? How do they do that? And AI is the latest wave of transformation. You know, we used to be in just the mobile transformation. We used to go from big screen TV and the radio, I guess, to, OK, now we can have desktops.

10:19Then laptops were mobile, weren't really mobile, but you went to a coffee shop with your laptop. And then to mobile phones. Each stage has just sort of widened and widened and widened the aperture of where and when and how you can do things. And that's just, it's really, really fascinating. So, yes, on my down moments, it's kind of overwhelming. But I'm just really amazed at the behaviors of humans doing interesting things around the world and how that's scaling into business, how that's scaling into creativity, how it's scaling into health and medicine, right? And what in your role buying media for Google and, you know, broadly in the giant Google marketing apparatus, what is changing?

10:57What are the places that you're seeing the most change, heat, interest? I'm getting my whole team together next week. and I've got this theme in my head, which I'm going to talk to the team about. And the theme is just like always, like never before. And the fundamentals of marketing, as we've spoken about on the pod, are going to continue. Human behavior, the fears, emotions, wants that everyone has, that's all staying true. And ultimately, marketing is a motive and a sort of science-based discipline. What is changing and what is really sort of transforming things is obviously we've talked a lot about AI and cloud technology and the speed of everything being adopted and what's changing.

11:36But I'm actually seeing this sort of transformation of opportunity from AI. The ability for me to make things myself, the ability for my team just to go, oh, we have a problem here, let's fix that, and let's use a bit of AI coding to do that. We do a lot of social boosting, the notion of we've got some cool piece of content, we want to put it onto social platforms and have it be scaled. Now, Meta and most of the social platforms cap your organic reach, So you have to buy it. You have to buy reach on meta. So we get all these inbound requests from inside of Google Marketing saying, hey, can we put some money behind this?

12:10Can we put some money behind that? It takes us three or four hours to evaluate each one. That's slow and laborious. And I know this doesn't sound super exciting or sexy and stuff. But from my vantage point of if I can build an AI tool and two non-technical people went to Google Gemini, use a tool within it called Canvas, and they built a forecasting tool to evaluate these boosting requests. And it takes, instead of three to four hours, it now takes under 30 seconds, right? They can get on with their regular job and all the stuff they're doing. And it's allowed to scale exponentially. They're happier, I'm happier, our customers internally are happier.

12:44I'm really excited by that because it's just, I see some of the potential. And that's honestly within the weeds of my part of the business. Oftentimes in industry, we talk about the really big sexy stuff. The stuff that wins at can is like the really big, you know, grandfalutin sort of stuff. And that's cool as well. But I can make my job better and more fun. My personal concern with my own use of AI is that I rely on the AI and I lose my own sense of taste and judgment. These tools only get us so far. We still need to keep our judgment and our taste. And actually, they're enhancing what we're doing.

13:17This actually, you preempted. We're going to have some questions from listeners later. but you preempted one of them, which is this idea that AI sounds like, I think some people think, threatens to kind of totally homogenize, in particular advertising. You talk about needing to bring taste and judgment. I mean, is there some risk, and do you feel that suddenly all ads are starting to look the same because ultimately they're kind of made by the same machines? So, blunt talk, the marketing services industry broadly, not just Google, the entirety of every advertiser in the world, we're really good at making crappy ads.

13:54We have made a lot of wallpaper ads, which are eminently forgettable and have done for a very, very long time. So I'm not totally worried about somehow we're going to ruin the creativity of every advertiser in the world through AI. That's just not going to happen. There's going to be a lot of AI dross, just as there is already a lot of dross without AI, right? Sorry to my industry for crapping on us a little bit. But what I see is the opportunity to do more interesting things. And the cost of creativity, not in terms of actual final shoot, but the cost of testing an idea. Hey, when's if we did this?

14:27When's if we did that? Oh, Jim and I, give me a couple of ideas. When's if we have a pink unicorn run through this ad at this point? You can start doing that. And there's no consequence to doing that other than just exploring things. So I'm actually expecting more creativity, more interesting work. I know that seems like a super optimistic and positive thing. But I'm choosing to see the glass half full. And I genuinely think that unleashing true creatives' capacity to think even bigger than they have done without the consequence of having to get a client to sign off on an expensive shoot in Cape Town or something before they go there, it's going to be great.

14:59It's actually really fun. I see more creatively happening. Let's talk a little about your role at Google. You are a marketer who is, among other things, buying ads on Google properties as well as other properties while working for Google and also having input in the biggest advertising business in the world, which is how Google markets itself to everyone else. And meanwhile, buying ads on Meta and on other competitors' platforms. And I guess, first of all, all of it in the context of a famously engineering-driven organization, product-driven organization that I think has always been a little skeptical of all this other stuff.

15:33So I guess, first of all, how do you, I think it's something people in your business think about a lot, how do you sort of assert marketing's role and value in a company that I think has historically been a little skeptical of everything that is in engineering? There's a phrase we sometimes use at Google, which is data trumps opinion. Data trumps opinion. Now, it's not absolute, because at a certain point, the data only takes you so far. But the starting point is, can you prove something works? Can you show the impact? And actually, the very genesis and basis of Google's success as an advertising vehicle was someone is searching for wheelbarrow on google.com.

16:07And then a paid ad pops up for wheelbarrow. Oh, that's exactly the thing I was looking for. That intent signal was so tight and so powerful that data very quickly could show you that's a good use of the Home Depot's ad to advertise wheelbarrows to people looking for wheelbarrows, right? And all of marketing kind of stems out from there or that sort of notion. I'm doing an activity in the world. Can you prove to me that actually that activity is going to result in a business outcome that we are looking for inside of Google? So that's been the starting point. Over the years, and I think critically, marketing is a central part of what Google does.

16:43And actually, our leadership really believes in what the marketing function has been doing. We wouldn't spend the money. One, we couldn't prove it. And two, we didn't actually believe in it. What are the most successful campaigns you've run? Are there a couple where, because I think also Google Search in particular is like one of these products where it kind of sells itself, or at least that is the impression on the outside. Are there campaigns you're sort of obsessed with and think about as real successes? Back in the day, we launched Google Photos, right? And we launched it during the Olympics, I think in 2016.

17:12And it was just a very clever campaign, which kind of gently poked fun at iPhone. Because you used to get messages on your phone saying, you know, you're out of storage. And so it was people taking pictures on their phone. And at the critical moment of the picture, Sasquatch was appearing. Your kid was hitting a home run. Their message would appear on the iPhone saying, you know, out of storage and stuff. And Google Photos had unlimited storage. That was a really clever insight about people's usage of behavior and a really important, frustrating thing they felt. And Google Photos had this technological solution.

17:41And at its best, Google builds amazing technology which solves a need in the marketplace or a need for people. I've loved those campaigns where we brought that together. The people's need in something funny, clever, or witty, or just super relevant in the moment. I've really enjoyed working on the Pixel phone campaigns. And in some sense, that's a more classic kind of product marketing into a pretty competitive environment. 100%. It's incredibly competitive, and we are absolutely the challenger brand. We've had to do things differently and create interest and excitement and engagement around the world, not just in the U.S.

18:15We've launched in many, many markets around the world. But that's ended up in some really spectacular moments in my career and within, you know, for some years ago, we had Eminem performing a rap song on top of the Empire State Building, all filmed using pixel cameras, right? That was a really like, wow, what is going on here? But that was kind of a cool thing. But these are the things you have to do if you're trying to create engagement and attractiveness and positivity towards, you know, when you have an 800-pound gorilla in the room. So the pixel work over the years has been super fun, super engaging, super challenging.

18:47It's not easy business. At this point in my career, the stuff that I really admire is the stuff which is sustained, the stuff which is a larger platform. I look to some of the brands out in the world. I think Nike have done a remarkable job of positioning themselves. Just do it. I can just say that to you, and it means so much. It's so resonant, whether you be Usain Bolt or some high-performance athlete or you and me running around the local running track sort of thing. Their ability to build their brand, sustain it, and then bring it to life underneath that, that's been incredibly impressive.

19:16We've done that within Google and a number of our product lines, which I'm really just blown away by the sustained incremental step-by-step, journey-by-journey, fighting in the trenches and the big swings, which has actually transformed the business. Be it on YouTube, our NFL Sunday ticket product, a whole number of areas, Google Cloud. These are long-term strategic bets for the company, and marketing, it helps grow them. I want to talk about actually the context in which I first met you, which is the sales call. And you have this, I think, from my perspective, super interesting experience. Like I'm occasionally, you know, with Justin and with Rachel and with my colleagues on the revenue side of Semaphore showing up and talking about our products to people like you.

19:56You are on the receiving end, I assume, of nonstop pitching from people like me and more like, you know, the sales folks on my team. And I'm curious, like what are you seeing like in that market now? And I think this is of like very intense interest to many people listening to this show. What are you seeing that is interesting, that's exciting, that's of this moment to begin with? Like what do you find most compelling when someone is sitting down to, you know, pitch Jeff Spannier? Back in the day, reach and frequency were the big thing. And it was about how big an audience, you know, rooted in our TV legacy and history as a marketing industry and radio before that.

20:32But I can reach the most people. And, you know, if you reach the most people, eventually that will lead to some sales, right? And that is less and less engaging and relevant. There are lots and lots of platforms. There's lots and lots of partners who have a lot of reach. What we actually are looking for is more engagement, action. People actually showing active interest versus they're watching TV with an iPad and a phone and, you know, several other things going on at once. In terms of pitches from publishers, what audience insight can you tell me that I wasn't aware of before? So a few years ago, one of your competitors in the news space came to us and talked about an insight which I found really compelling, really, really worked on us.

21:14It was this notion that we have this great influencer news audience. There is a cohort of those people who every day between 4 and 6 a.m. get online, and the very first thing they do is open up our app and read the content on our app. Why don't you target those people in that moment? And then we'll sell you a whole load of other stuff to activate that. And it was a really clear insight. They understood who their audience was, what their audience was doing with their property. And that turned that into a compelling pitch that we go, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Right? And it worked really, really well.

21:47So that's where the best salespeople, for me anyway, work. Because they actually tell me something about their audience, who they know best, often better than I do. You know the semifore readership, listenership, and audience better than I do. So you can tell me stuff about them, and then we can tie that to an advertising experience or product. Bingo. And then conversely, I assume you hear whatever the cliche of the moment is, whatever thing everybody is saying right now. What is the absolute kind of repetitive cliche that comes up in every sales call and you kind of roll your eyes? Well, I mean, over the last couple of years, everything is AI, right?

22:23We brought you AI donuts. Everything AI up the wazoo. One of the things I've got very good at is sort of the BS meter on metrics, right? Like someone comes in and they find a way to articulate, you know, we are the most invaluable impression on a Tuesday between, you know, three and four, you know, every other month sort of thing. And then they spin that and they put that in tiny type, if at all. So one of the things you just have to look out for is the more esoteric and weird the claim is, the least likely and least credible and unbelievable it is. Well, the nice thing about dealing with you is you're terrible at disguising your BS meter.

22:57So it's sort of an instant feedback loop. I try. I also play poker, which maybe explains why I'm not winning at poker. Like any good relationship, any good interview, any good sales relationship, listening really, really matters. And the first meeting is usually a meeting where you sort of listen. And it's the second and third and fourth meeting where you actually go, you said this. I understand what your business is trying to do. Here's what our audience is doing. Here's a good idea that we could perhaps do that. Right. So when when that works out really, really well, things great things happen.