by

Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, (February 16, 2018)

Google has hosted an event, Beauty Redefined, which focuses on the beauty industry and designed to show leaders in the industry the types of storytelling tools available to them.

Beauty Redefined is part of Google’s push to support the “age of assistance,” the latest move by advertising agencies and vendors to develop a new business model that helps brands connect directly with consumers.

During the IAB Leadership conference

keynote earlier in the week, Interactive Advertising Bureau President and CEO Randell Rothenberg called this new model the “direct brand economy.”

During a session at the IAB conference, Jim Lecinski, Google vice president of U.S. sales and service, said “assistance is the new battleground for growth.”

Brian McDevitt, Google’s industry director for CPG, believes it begins with better understanding the consumer. “We like to refer to Google as having the digital truth serum,” he said, meaning that Google knows how to reach consumers with targeted information.

Searches and views on Google and YouTube for beauty care are up 65% year-over-year — about 220 billion video views, he said, citing a Pixability study from 2017. Unlocking this data gives brands a much better understanding of the beauty consumer.

YouTube videos with “how-to” in the title had more than 1 billion hours of watch time in 2017, up 75% since 2015, according to YouTube internal data.

McDevitt

pointed to the brand Make Up For Ever as an example of how companies mine data.

When the beauty brand launched a new foundation, they dug into different types of searches on Google as part of the research. The brand found that about 70% of general completion queries like “best concealer” are related to a particular brand such as Estee Lauder, while about 33% completion concealer queries like “best concealer for dark skin” are related to a brand. As the queries got more specific, brands were not as present in the query.

From the data, Make Up For Ever found an opportunity to learn more about consumers and reach a more diverse and multicultural consumer base. The brand used a variety of video formats on YouTube, from TrueView discovery, to six-second bumper ads. The campaign resulted in a 44% brand lift recall and an 18% increase in product searches, and their YouTube subscriber rate rose 11% in one month.

About 40% of shopping-related searches are for very broad terms, McDevitt said. And through its data, “Google is designing and bringing the beauty shelf to the web” though tools like Manufacturing Center where descriptions and prices live. It lets Google pull information into properties like Express and YouTube.

In time, McDevitt said, Manufacturing Center built for brands will support a variety of forthcoming advertising experiences.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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