What Google Marketing Live 2026 Really Means for Marketers

Brad Stephenson (0:00)

Hello, so I am excited to be joined by Bill Buchanan, President at Level Agency, and Nicole Jennings, our EVP of Service Delivery. Thank you both for spending some time with me today. Really appreciate it. We are here to talk about the big news over the last couple weeks, which is all the announcements from Google Marketing Live 2026

So I'm just gonna start by saying, what happened and how big of a deal was it? You were both there, correct?

Nicole Jennings (0:29)

Just Bill.

Brad Stephenson (0:31)

Just Bill, and you were at Brand Performance, right, Nicole? Okay, cool. So Bill, we'll start with you. How big of a deal really is this? Everybody's talking about it right now. We're gonna be at SMX Advanced next week.

How big of a deal is it?

Bill Buchanan (0:44)

So on one level, I would say it was groundbreaking. On another level, I would say it was ho hum, nothing too exciting. So let me tell you what I mean by that. So I think anybody who's been involved in the space and watching stuff closely over the last year fully expected Google to continue to lean into AI answers and AI mode. It was a question of when and how deeply they were gonna do that. And so the fact that they chose now to sort of say that they're jumping in this deep, this fast was a shock. The fact that they did that, not a shock at all.

But they have really accelerated their thinking about this and where they are. And so that's the part that was shocking to me, is like how fast they're going. And honestly, how unprepared Google is for what they're doing. So like we're all unprepared, but they usually make these sorts of moves in a very deliberate way. And you can see they've got deep Q&A, they've got deep research, they got lots of stuff.

They are seeing that customer behavior is moving so fast that they're needing to move with the customer behavior, even though they're not prepared. And that to me was the most shocking thing out of all of it, where I'm really kind of excited.

Brad Stephenson (2:09)

Isn't there sort of a history though, like Google does rip the bandaid sometimes, like with the PMAX launch and things like that, I remember that there was a lot of like black box stuff that they had to work through and that was really stressful. Like don't they tend to, when they have big things that they want to launch, they sometimes do that rip the bandaid approach?

Bill Buchanan (2:27)

They've definitely done a rip the bandaid approach from time to time, but it's generally rip the bandaid on your big toe, not rip the bandaid like, you know, that was a massive bandaid like that.

Brad Stephenson (2:41)

Not rip the bandages off the money.

Bill Buchanan (2:43)

Yeah, like they went, like yeah, they went all in, they went all in on their core revenue generating item, the thing that most people use all the time. And so that to me is like unprecedented.

Brad Stephenson (2:57)

Yeah.

Bill Buchanan (2:57)

I don't know what you would say, Nicole.

Nicole Jennings (3:00)

Yeah, I think your PMAX example is hilarious because it was a disaster, right? I mean, it truly was. It impacted so many advertisers in such a big way.

Google was great about partnering on getting feedback on that in real time, right? They opened up a lot of avenues for that. And so we got there, but it was painful. This is bigger than that to Bill's point. And so how many things are going to be hard, right, is a little bit daunting.

Brad Stephenson (3:34)

So I guess, you know, jumping from there, if you, you know, Nicole, you, you lead our service delivery team, which means all of the various services, you know, creative and dev and SEO and media. How, you know, when, when talking to CMOs or VPs about this, if they're like, Nicole, what, what's going, what, what do I really, really need to know? Like, what are the one or two things that you would say, like, this is the thing that you really need to know about this today?

Nicole Jennings (4:00)

I am excited that it does touch this year at GML, what they announced touched almost all of the services that we deliver to clients, which is rare. And so that's exciting for me. It's one of the reasons I'm at Level, is that we get to impact clients and partner with them in so many areas, right?

If I was talking to a CMO, though, I would get pretty tactical. They don't have to know all the details, but they have to make sure that their agency is entirely focused on their YouTube strategy and their AI max strategy. Like, if that was the one thing I had to say, go yell at your agency about or go pressure test your own internal team on, those are the items.