Marketers recently had an opportunity to ‘learn with Google’ at an event organised in Karachi. Brand teams, agency professionals and media publishers attended the event, which was open to only a limited number of people. Learn with Google was essentially a series of presentations made by the Google Pakistan team – Jana Levine, Tania Aidrus, Simon March, Sami Kizilbash, and of course Badar Khushnood, Pakistan Country Consultant for Google.

In the first session, Levine spoke about Google and its goals, one of which is to bring the next billion people to the internet. Although the world’s population is seven billion, only 40% are online and Google is focusing on countries such as Brazil, China, India and Pakistan as a means to achieve this objective. However, the company not only envisions putting more people online and increasing numbers, it wants to improve the quality of the web experience and mobilise people online to collaborate on local initiatives and use technology for ‘good’. During the session, the Google team shared examples (including local ones related to Urdu content) about how they had brought people and technology together to create synergy and harmony.

Aidrus then spoke about the first ever third party research conducted by Google in Pakistan. The study presented some interesting findings, offering digital marketers in Pakistan a qualitative survey that validates some of the assumptions made about digital consumption. The survey (1,000 respondents) covered Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, as well as Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Peshawar and Rawalpindi. According to the survey, the respondents primarily use their PC to access the internet (expected); about 45% owned a smartphone and 26% a tablet. With the much anticipated and ever delayed launch of 3G, combined with the decline in the price of smartphones, we can expect a big increase in the number of people who will be accessing the internet through smartphones. Going by the survey results – it seems people in Pakistan, or at least those in the surveyed cities, prefer to spend most of their time on the internet. What are they doing? Using social networks mostly, followed by email and search.

Thanks to the survey along with other much needed efforts, such as mapping the digital landscape, digital marketers have facts and not assumptions to justify asking brands to include digital in the marketing mix. Respondents confirmed that they are influenced by online ads and click or search about the brands advertised. However, the survey also has some flaws; for example, more than half of the respondents were over 45 years old, meaning that the survey was not representative of our population.

March discussed how affinity segments can be used for better marketing. Affinity segments have been developed by Google (there are over 80) and are basically profiles of people online, segmented according to their interests and habits. The benefit here is the ability to specify audience profiles, and going by the birds of a feather flock together notion, people with similar interests will have similar web consumption patterns. Building on the affinity segments, digital marketers can also replicate audiences and increase their reach. Once a segment is identified, it can be enlarged (based on Google software) by predicting which other people could fall in a specified affinity segment.

Another tool discussed was ‘remarketing’ – which means that people are exposed to ads based on their web history.

As explained by Google: “Remarketing gives you a chance to bring back indecisive customers with tailored ads (across the web) and offers that relate to the experience they had on your site. With remarketing, you get another chance to close the deal.”

Although marketers will use any means necessary to gain attention and create an impact, smart ones know that it is better to have audiences choose whether they want to look at an ad or not. Recently, there has been a rise in the demand for permission-based marketing and it was good to see that Google has embraced the call by creating new ad formats that adhere to the ‘choose to view’ criteria. As Kizilbash explained, Google now offers ‘hover over’ or ‘engagement’ ads to clients around the world. Such ads are only paid for if people view the ad for 30 seconds or more; advertisers can also pay per engagement instead of per click. They are benefits for visitors as well, as these ads do not interrupt the browsing experience and will only start to play if the visitor hovers over them for two seconds. Kizilbash also talked about the Creative Sandbox which showcases the different work done by marketers around the world using Google ads.

Following the presentations, there was a panel discussion between Khushnood and marketers from the industry, moderated by Levine. An interesting point raised was that lack of education is not an obstacle to online accessibility; rather it was a lack of structure and government initiative – best exemplified by the delay in bringing in 3G. The panelists also agreed that in order to bring more Pakistanis online, local content needs to be developed.

Learn with Google turned out to be a good learning experience. It was also somewhat comforting to know that, if not the world, at least Google needs Pakistan.