The Google approach to marketing in the age of AI (with Google and BCG)

**Jon Evans** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO and this limited series with BCG, looking at the impact AI is having on marketing. Now, in this episode, I'm going to be joined by Josh Spanier from Google and Lauren Wiener from BCG. And we're going to be looking at how Google are using AI themselves in their marketing, what's going to be changing. And I'm also asking Lauren what their CMO survey revealed about the impact it's having on marketing and what the very best CMOs are doing to take advantage of this transformation. Fascinating episode. There is a lot to learn. Here it is.
Lauren from BCG and Josh from Google. Welcome to the show.

**Lauren Wiener** (0:41)
Thank you.

**Josh Spanier** (0:41)
Thank you, I'm excited to be here.

**Jon Evans** (0:43)
It's great to have you, yeah. And also Josh, it's nice that you have your own podcast as well, talking to CMOs. So this is kind of quite of a meta conversation.

**Josh Spanier** (0:51)
I'm very intimidated having listened to most of your episodes. I'm a super fan, but I feel like I'm learning from the best from my own podcast Frontier CMO.

**Jon Evans** (1:00)
Oh, thanks man, and massive congratulations. I mean, you've had some amazing guests on your show already, and it's an amazing listen.

**Josh Spanier** (1:07)
The power of Google, and then I'm learning along the way.

**Jon Evans** (1:10)
Brilliant. Well, as you're here, we're talking about AI and how AI can transform marketing and what marketers can learn from that. And Lauren as well, you've just launched this week a new CMO report as well, haven't you? Which is very informative. I think you've launched it this week in Cannes, if I'm not mistaken.

**Lauren Wiener** (1:24)
Yes, and this is our third annual CMO survey. And so we not only have a great snapshot of where we are today with AI, but also the trends.

**Jon Evans** (1:35)
That's really interesting. One of the questions in my mind is, where are we on the hype cycle? Because if you go back two years ago in Cannes, everyone was like, AI is going to become this big transformation, right? Feels like last year, Gentic, and we're starting to see what's possible. And this year we're into what's actually changing. So where do you guys feel we're at in terms of the hype cycle here?

**Josh Spanier** (1:57)
I'm pretty excited, right? I've really seen AI starting to be used in interesting and engaging ways. And it feels to me like we're sort of the end of the beginning, right? So the first era of AI, for me, was really being defined by, and I'll say the first three years of this AI journey we've been on, kind of fear, am I losing my job? Uncertainty, what is my job? And sort of economic squeezing. I just have to deliver more for less for my CFO.
And the whole mindset has been, what is AI going to do to me? And what I'm seeing now, what I'm seeing and speaking with CMOs and with good marketers around the world is this sort of mindset shift from that, what is AI going to do to me to more, what can I do with AI?
And great creative teams are putting out work and inventing new ways of doing things, which I find really compelling and exciting. Now, that is a super positive spin on it. Of course, I'm going to put a positive spin on it, but genuinely think that for all the challenges, all the concerns, all the fears, all the worries about AI, which are real are still there, the potential for doing interesting things is really, really exciting. And I'm seeing that starting to manifest for real here on the beaches of Cannes.

**Jon Evans** (3:03)
That's exciting. I know in your CMO survey as well, one of the interesting things is I think CMOs have felt AI is something that's being done to them, isn't it? It's like they're having to cope with the consequences of saving cost. But I think what's interesting in your survey is there's a, there's a real shift happening where CMOs are a lot more in the driving seat now.

**Lauren Wiener** (3:20)
I think that's right. I mean, I think CMOs, half of them are saying that they are in the driver seat. They're also at a moment where they are getting political capital, they are getting actual investment capital. 43% of our CMOs this year said that they were spending 15 million or more on their AI transformations. That's up from 28% last year, so that's a huge lift.
But at the same time, if you look at where they are actually in the transformation, about a third of them are getting points on the board, 20 to 30% cost savings, demonstrable ROI of like 3X, and speed improvements. But a lot of them are still stuck in pilots. And so we, I think the leaders are really emerging from this group and getting points on the board, but there's a whole group that are still earlier on their journey. So it's much more of a mixed picture than I think this time last year in Cannes.