Google's AI General on How to Show Up in AI Search, with Marvin Chow, VP of Consumer and AI Marketing, Google | Ep. 440

0:01Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Market Millennials Podcast. I am here with Marvin Chow of Google. We're excited to chat. I'll let him give a quick intro of how he got into marketing and what he's doing now. And then we'll get into the conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Marvin.

0:42Marvin Chow:Hey, thanks, Daniel. Excited to be here. You want to give a little like, what are you doing at Google right now? And then we'll start chatting. Yeah, I mean, I've been at Google for, God, like 16 years at this point. I've had a bunch of different jobs, but now I get to work on the most exciting stuff. Search, Gemini and AI. That is my remit on the marketing world. So it's been an exciting three or four years. I want to get into the topic. I know you've said recently that the marketing hire of the year is a marketing engineer. Could you just go like, what is a marketing engineer for people who haven't hired a marketing engineer yet or are thinking of hiring a marketing engineer?

1:22What does that role entail?

1:25Marvin Chow:You know, marketing, we love labeling things. So it's a little bit of a label for probably a hodgepodge of things, given how early we are and everything. One, I have to give credit to Dylan at Profound, who really came up with the idea of a marketing engineer. I stole from him. I credited him in the post. But, you know, we just hired one. His name is John. And, you know, I think at its core, in the future, when you look at what AI is doing, it's collapsing a lot of the executional capabilities. just like all technology, where it's like, you don't have as many handoffs between, you know, like a marketing manager and a research person and a UI person and things like that.

2:01Marvin Chow:It's getting all consolidated. So market engineer is essentially a marketing person who thinks like a systems architect, who doesn't think in just handoffs and briefs, but it thinks in as a system of like, how does something get output into the world? I think that's what it is at its most basic level. I think given where you are, like our marketing engineers, they have a handful of tasks. Some of them are really about teaching marketers how to be systems thinkers, how to be using AI beyond chat in different ways. Some of them are actually building systems for us. When you look at the marketing process, what systems do we need to go faster, to be more efficient, to get more output in what we do?

2:44Marvin Chow:And so it touches on all of those things right now. But I think at its core, it is that marketing person that kind of thinks like a systems architect. What do you foresee? I know, because AI has changed a lot. So what do you foresee in the next three years, your org looking like with new hires or new roles or new responsibilities with the speed that AI is developing? Yeah, I think, I mean, no one knows. And if I knew I would be much richer than I am now, but I think you're probably going to see like this barbell effect, right? Like you're going to have, you're still going to need marketing leaders.

3:21Marvin Chow:You're still going to need creative people. You're still going to need people with taste and judgment and conviction to decide what should we be doing for a brand or for a campaign. And that has always been true for marketing leaders, no matter what the technology. I think on the other side of the barbell, I think you're going to have a set of tools and people that are really going to be focused on like creative execution, efficient execution, targeting insights and things like that. And those will be using a very high amount of new tools or AI agents or whatever you want to call them in the next two or three years.

3:57Marvin Chow:And I think that that's going to be a way things are going to be structured. And I think what that risk becomes is like middle management. You know, like we've all worked at these companies where it's like, oh, you work for a person who has a boss, who has a boss, who has a boss, who works for a decision maker. And an idea has to kind of travel up that chain and get opinions all like that middle of opinion will start to collapse dramatically, both because of how fast you're going and how good the tools you're using will get. Where eventually, you know, potentially like a person with two years or three years experience working together with a group with a bunch of tools, it'll just go to like a lot of a director be like, yes, we love it.

4:36Marvin Chow:Let's just go. And I think that velocity and that execution is really going to be how we optimize to get the best marketing work out with the AI tools we'll have. And I know talking about the execution side of it, I know you've also said that execution has become like way cheaper, but when you say that, like what part of execution has got a lot cheaper? I think one, I mean, there's two ways to think about it. I think one on time, You know, I think of anything where if something used to take four or six weeks and now takes two weeks, that's cheaper in one way where it's like it just takes less people hours, less time to get things done.

5:14Marvin Chow:And I think you've seen this. You know, I've worked in marketing for almost 30 years where you should take nine months to make a spot and traffic it. And then the Web came along. It's like, you know, you have a social video out in a day nowadays. So like that compression of time is one thing. I think, you know, the cost factor of a lot of things, it's tricky, right? Whether you're paying an agency, you're paying freelancers, you're paying tokens, it may be cheaper, it may not be cheaper. I think it will get cheaper, though. But I think at the end of the day, when you think about having an idea in your head to getting a concept to a prototype to an end work product out the door is a thousand times easier it is today than it was five years ago, than it was a year ago at that point.

5:56Marvin Chow:And when we think execution is getting simpler, cheaper for everyone, that's kind of what we mean. let's do the other side of the barbell so if that has got cheaper what is becoming more expensive i think you know you know the word that everyone throws around now is taste you know like i think of it as like judgment i think of it as conviction i think of anything is when execution is super easy when you can just put anything into the world if you put everything that comes into your mind in the world everything is kind of crap at some point and you saw this in the early days of like social right?

6:27Marvin Chow:Like, it's just like you just, I ate a banana and I'm taking a picture of it and I'm posting it online. It's like, everything is so easy to share with the world. But then as creators got more sophisticated, they're like understanding, okay, when I post this type of content, it gets this kind of engagement. When I cut, when I, when I say this, or when I act in this way, or this is how people respond, they're developing a sense of judgment and conviction of like what they think is important for their audience. I think that's still going to be a very high bar. Like if you're a brand, if you're Google, your audience is only going to respond to certain things that you that that they like about you, that they feel are relevant to you.

7:02Marvin Chow:And choosing those things is still going to be someone's job. And then beyond that, you know, the best creative in the world is not something that sails through a committee of 10 people and is built by an AI. It's that idea that a small group of people are like, this is the coolest thing. We have to do this. And they fight for that. and they overcome all the naysayers and all the people that are scared of risk-taking and they put it in the world. And then at the end of the day, people like that was amazing. That's still gonna be someone's job to fight for what they believe is pushing the boundaries of what's next.

7:39Marvin Chow:And whether that's a marketing leader, whether that's like a 27-year-old producer, that amount of judgment and conviction is still gonna be really important in any creative field. That's why whether it's social content or movies or marketing creative great work just in just like happenstance like people have to believe i want to also go into the creativity side of it because i think one of the there's that creativity of like creating great creative great ideas but there's also we're talking a little bit about systems design and i think that's going to take a lot of creativity to like create good systems that have never been created before because ai has re you could do pretty much anything with it.

8:23So what is like, and I think the best leaders are going to be great, like system managers, but what are, what are, what is a great system design starting to look at? What is like a marketing system look at?

8:35Marvin Chow:I mean, I think, look, you were the one, I think that says something along the lines that great marketing is built on the unsexy work behind the scenes. And I think that is the systems that AI is that we're starting with, you know, that is the easiest part. So everything from, you know, what is, what does market research look like? What is, you know, personas look like? How do we test work? How do we test prototypes? How do we, you know, even briefing is evolving where it's like, it's really not the days of just like writing a brief and handing it to an agency and waiting six weeks to get back.

9:06Marvin Chow:Everything's becoming more iterative in the system as things collapse, like, you know, and so a lot of what we're doing is like going through the marketing teams and like, what are the pain points? Like, you know, I'll say one pain point at Google is like approvals, like just there's so many approvals and like legal and checks and it's like all done like over like chat or email threads. And it's like, can we just have a very simple system where everyone just approves everything and can see everyone's comments at once? And so I think just reducing the pain points and the friction, because marketing, particularly at a company like Google, where it's like, you know, we're still a young company and, you know, the marketing functions grown up over the last 15 or 20 years.

9:48Marvin Chow:It's a very bespoke function. You know, like if I, you know, when I went from Nike to Google, like the marketing works totally differently and they're two different companies, they're different processes. And because marketing is such a bespoke function, there's a lot of room for, for lack of a better word, optimization. Like there's a lot of friction that we've introduced because there's a lot of people trying to move something through the system. And I think that's why I think in some ways marketing is right to benefit from AI, but also it's going to take a while because we don't have an infrastructure in place at all.

10:20Marvin Chow:A lot of these companies of how things work, like what's your digital asset management tool? What's your briefing mechanism? What's your, you know, how do you work with international markets? So all those things I think is a chance to relook at all of that work that happens before the output starts. And how do you make that easier so that people can work on the things they want to work on? There's so many marketing people, they get the job and they're like, they thought I'd be working on this, like making things like social assets or ads or whatever, but they actually work on like a ton of somewhat like busy bureaucratic work.

10:53Marvin Chow:And I think, how do you, can we get rid of that? Especially in like companies like Google where it's like the, but it's true. Like 50 % of a lot of jobs are, especially when I was in marketing office was just making sure like it's ticket management and like making sure like prove they are prioritizing people agree are the priorities and goes back and forth back and forth and it's just waste so much time that doesn't need to be but i think one of the i wouldn't call it really a system but one of the things that everybody's trying to figure out right now and this is going to be like since you're at google it's a good there's a question that's on everybody's mind is like like how should we rethink all the buzzwords like SEO, AEO, GEO, because that's like on the top of everybody's mind, because that's one of the biggest changes is how you show up in search.

11:46So how should we start, how should marketers start thinking about this new wave of like how people are discovering information?

11:54Marvin Chow:Yeah. I think for us, I mean, obviously as a search company, we think a lot about this. And one of the things that at least we hope is easier for brands and marketers is everything we do like with Gemini and like, you know, quote unquote, GEO is rooted in search, right? So like still the classic work you've been doing for with your web pages and indexing that stuff, the products you put into our product graph, like if you're in our shopping area, all those things feed into Gemini. A lot of it, when you search on Gemini, it's grounding in search if you're looking for a particular thing. So you will benefit from all of your kind of traditional search work as Gemini grows and like uses those products and uses those assets to pull in.

12:39Marvin Chow:And so that is how we approach it, because obviously, you know, we have a long history in search. We've been doing it very well. We understand how indexing in the web works. And so it will continue to evolve, no doubt. But that will be our foundation because it's also our foundation for credible information. Like, you know, obviously, all the all the LLMs hallucinate to a degree, we feel like in our research that people trust ours better because it is grounded in a certain amount of knowledge and search and credible information in that sense. And so that's an approach that we've taken since the very beginning.

13:10Marvin Chow:And I think it's been paying off recently because both advertisers, content publishers, and credible information benefit. Talking about the web and product is, I think that one of the other things that people are talking a lot about is like how it's also indexing a lot of things that are outside of your websites are like reddit like getting pr mentions which like pr is like having a more of like a comeback now because of this aeo yeah so how much does how much does that matter in this new world of like making sure like you're creating where everywhere where your audience is acting versus just your before it was just like this like only think about our web page and now it like becomes like, I have to create on LinkedIn, I have to create on, I might have to be on Reddit or show up on Reddit, or I might have to show up here.

14:00Like how much does that actually matter?

14:02Marvin Chow:I think those things have always mattered for the brand, maybe not as much for search, but definitely for the brand. I think Reddit, there's been a lot of research like Reddit is like, I think people, you know, advertisers think it's like 30 or 50 % of these things are coming from Reddit. It's actually not, Reddit is no more a source than anything else on the web right now. So Reddit's a good source. I think social is a good source, but a lot of them, a lot of the LLMs actually don't get to troll, don't get to scrape closed ecosystems. So like TikTok or Instagram and things like that. So you may not be benefiting from that as much as you think because they don't have access to those things.

14:39Marvin Chow:They may not have access to LinkedIn content. It depends on the publisher and how they're putting information on the web, because most LLMs are using publicly available content in that sense, or they're buying content from like a company like Reddit. So it will vary across the board. But I think, you know, you have to imagine these AI systems are pretty sophisticated. it. You know, they're, they're smart enough not to look at like, Oh, one person said one thing on a Reddit board. So that's the truth. Like, you know, that's the same way search works. Our job, the product's job is to triangulate what the content across these things are to get to the best answer you have.

15:15Marvin Chow:And so of course these things help. I still think from a Google standpoint, your own website is still very important. Your own product listing pages are still going to be really important because that is first party data on your product. Now, when you get to, if you're selling a product, you know, review sites may get important as well, because if you're, if the question is about, is this better than this, it's going to be, they're going to look at people's opinions and things like that. So it really depends on what people are looking for, what kind of product you have, but you know, I think it is still fluid, but I would still say that your product listing sites, your own website still play a pretty big role, but definitely, you know, doing more on PR, doing more on, you know, content creation, that's been a trend for the last like five or 10 years.

16:00Yeah. I've always thought, I mean, like the, like everything that people are saying in AEO and geo are like behaviors that markers just should have been doing 10 years ago. And then they weren't doing it. Now they just are realizing they could have been doing it because it's indexing these things more. No, no, not saying a Reddit and stuff, but you should have been creating content all over the internet. You should have like been like being distributing. You should have been updating your, your blogs to be more latest information. You should have like added more customer reviews and social proof and all that stuff onto your website.

16:35It's just now people are talking about it more.

16:38Marvin Chow:Yeah. I think it also, I mean, look, there was a, there, there was a chapter of brands that kind of came up in the age of social. And that made sense. Like, you know, It's like you could build a brand on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, and that was a very fast content management system to get to reach to a lot of people. And it's still very effective. But with LLMs, because they look at the web, a lot of those brands had kind of forgotten about the web. They forgot about their own websites. They forgot about their own blog posts. They forgot about publicly available information on the web. Most people equate like, oh, it's on Instagram, it's public, but actually it's not public in the same way.

17:17Marvin Chow:where YouTube is public in a lot of ways and your YouTube content actually plays a big role in how Search and Gemini look at it. And so I just think it's a little bit of a correction from the days where brands were just 100 % all in on social, kind of closed social platforms, now having to reset and look broadly across, okay, well, where does my brand live across the entire digital ecosystem? I was going to ask, in this age of AI, Like what are like skill sets that people, marketers need to like start leveling up on? Like, do there's a marketer like need to like learn how to code as a marketer.

17:55How do they need to get more technical or is it that going to be the role of the engineer or like, what are some things that we like marketers should start leveling up on right now?

18:06Marvin Chow:Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. I think there's a couple things and it depends on where you are in your career. I think one of the, the macro things that I think is important for, for many jobs, but including marketing. And I've benefited myself is like this growth mindset. I mean, like I've had to learn the web, I've had to learn social, I've had to learn AI. And I think being open to somewhat like unlearning the way things were done in the past and embracing how things can be done in the future is a very valuable skillset as things shift, you know, because there are a lot of people, and we've worked with people like this, where it's like, they just don't want to evolve with wherever the technology is going and look at it from a positive point of view.

18:46Marvin Chow:Like there's definitely going to be risks, but you're opening up a whole new world of opportunity. And I think people that see that are going to be really important. I think on the functional side, like I don't think people need to code. I think coding is a great skill, but coding teaches you more than anything else. Problem identification, scaled solutions to problems. That's what a lot of engineering coding has to look at when you're building a product. And I think marketing, once again, is a more bespoke function, having that skill set to look across an enterprise and say, here is where these frictional pain points are.

19:21Marvin Chow:Here is where we need to really think about solutions as a problem solution. That kind of systems thinking, I think, is going to be beneficial for people. It doesn't really it's rooted from coding, but doesn't have to be from coding necessarily. But I think learning how to use the tools that way is going to be where it is because it's going to move very fast or it's already moving fast from kind of like chatbot prompting to like agents and systems and like recurring, you know, kind of agents that will help you with certain things. And being able to think in that framework, I think, is going to be a very valuable skill moving forward.

19:56and i always i've always said that just like in any role like you should be learning what everything how everything works in marketing and you shouldn't like even if you are like the best social person you should know how what paid social is doing you should know what marketing ops doing you know if you're the best like paid social you should know what seo is doing you should know what this person is doing just because you need to need the whole picture and and like now the whole system to understand like, where does my functionality fit in the system? How do I attach to the system? How does it work?

20:29And if you're not thinking like that, it's, it's hard to play a bigger role in the system or like be beneficial to like making sure like your role grows in this like ecosystem.

20:41Marvin Chow:That's, I think where I a hundred percent agree, but I think that's also where the challenge for marketing is going to be because like I said, you've worked at a company, it's like, it's like, oh, your job is organic social. And that, that person's job is paid social. And that person's job is social insights reporting, you know, and it's like, well, the three of you have to get into a room to do something. Right. And so, you know, well, AI tools solve that where it's like, you can do the boosting and get the insights and get the real time analytics as one person now, you know? And so like, that just means we have to rethink what is the structure of a marketing organization?

21:14Marvin Chow:What is the role of different partners? And what What is the role of different tools? Because we have built an industry made up of like hundreds of specialists, basically, you know, and I think that and it's a little bit some of them are very necessary. If you go on a shoot like a producer and a director and a photography, whatever, those are all necessary. But also a YouTube creator can do it with two people, you know, I mean, like they'll shoot back rooms with like far less people than they did. They shot Odyssey with, you know, and they're very different. Obviously, I'm not comparing them, but I just think it's like technology is collapsing.