Digital marketers love to try to predict the next big thing
Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes we’re not. But one thing is true – search disruption isn’t coming, it’s already here. Consumer discovery is no longer linear. And your search strategy shouldn’t be either. Listen as General Manager, Digital Marketing, Blake DeCola, and VP Client Success, Julia Ahrens, discuss how Brado can help your brand align with the future of online discovery.
Julia
Hey, Blake. Thanks for taking the time to chat today.
Blake
Absolutely happy to be here.
Julia
Very quickly, can you share your current role at Brado and sort of an overview of your team’s responsibilities?
Blake
Of course. So, currently, I lead Brado’s digital marketing business, which is comprised of paid media, SEO, client services, data analytics, and strategy teams. And we partner with
clients like Cardinal Health and BJC Healthcare and JPMorgan Chase to lead their media and SEO efforts.
Julia
I know you have a pretty long history in the media space, both on the client and global network side. Right?
Blake
Correct. Yeah. Prior to joining Brado, I was over at Epsilon, which is the kind of data and media hub of Publicis.
Julia
So when you think back to planning season for 2025 and where we’re going to focus our conversation today, what were some of the key things that you had your eye on to be prevalent this year, or trends that your team was monitoring?
Blake
There have been so many different variables that have been rapidly changing within the digital space, especially over the last 18 months, that there have been no shortage of different things that we’ve looked at.
I think three probably come to the top when we’re looking at what we’re looking forward to. I think the first is obviously search disruption, but not just gen AI, also voice. Traditional search growth. We’ve seen a stall in a little bit, but then you see areas like retail, media and social and YouTube just growing. And so how would that play out?
You know, Google’s status as the default search engine across a lot of different browsers and devices, is that still going to help them protect their dominance or is their fragmentation going to continue to showcase?
I think the second one is augmented reality. Or AR – those experiences were really expected to become more mainstream in marketing campaigns, and we just haven’t quite seen it yet. I think there’s obviously a bit of a barrier to entry from the consumer standpoint.
And then the last is, was cookie deprecation. So obviously the Google Chrome announcement of when they were going to be deprecating cookies. There have been several browsers that have already done it. And what would that then mean for one of kind of the main currencies within the digital ecosystem.
Julia
Absolutely. So, what would you say is kind of the biggest one that your team had to lean in on or make big bets with, and how did that look? How is it utilized in your daily work?
Blake
Definitely the disruption and search is something that we leaned into. And really looking at it from the standpoint of what does this mean? So, you know, consumers needs don’t really change but their behaviors do. And so it’s our job as marketers just get ahead of those changes to ensure we’re meeting people where and how they want to be met.
And so with traditional search clicks declining, where do we go to ensure that, you know, our brands can kind of get the same, if not more visibility so that they can hit their objectives? Over the last six months and leading into 2025, we’ve really been focused on both the omnichannel approach for that, but also really the increased importance of technical SEO and being able to ensure that on the back end, we can set our brands up to be crawled by the AI bots, for example.
Merck Manual’s is one of our longstanding clients, and we’ve been able to take them from about 56 million page views the first year we started working with them. And then now they’re well over a billion. But like all publishers right now, prevalence of Google’s AI
overviews and just the overall fragmentation of search you know, has made a huge impact on their page views.
So our strategy has been to really help them optimize their content to be AI friendly and just ensure that it can be effectively cited by AI tools. This includes working with them on their structured data implementation, enhancing their content clarity, and then collaborating with other platforms just to make sure we can integrate Merck’s, very trusted medical content into an AI driven health care solution.
Julia
And when working with them, did you find that they were open to the pivot in sort of embracing new ways of approaching search? Or did it take a bit?
Blake
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think marketers kind of tend to fall and, you know, one of two camps, they’re going to be the wait and see, or they’re going to be the ones that, want to trailblaze and try to get ahead. And obviously the wait and see approach it tends to be the safer bet.
However, in this case, we’re seeing such a shift that a lot of the investments that we’re looking at for brands are less monetary and more time focused. So, technical SEO is really having its moment in the sun. If you look at Google Trends, searches for technical SEO are at an all time high.
And why is that? Well, because they know that enable able to get the visibility on these generative search engines. The back end of the house really needs to be optimized.
I think talking to very sophisticated brands like Merck on the Merck manuals, which really is their publisher side. I think it just took a little bit of explaining to make sure that we were just very clearly communicating how we’re looking to overcome some of these challenges, because it is it’s certainly not unique to them.
I mean, the biggest publishers in the world are seeing click through rates or site visits down 20% 30%. And so for us, I don’t think it was resistance on the brand’s part. I think it was
probably just ineffective packaging on our team as to why are we need to do something so dramatically different than we’ve done for literally the past decade?
We have to somewhat abandon what we have known for so long and move in this different direction before we get left behind.
Julia
You’ve summed up a large part of our job, which is to. How do we build those relationships with clients that allow them to trust how we’re guiding with them and make them feel comfortable with that change? So they aren’t left behind?
Blake
Absolutely.
I think it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, all of us are consumers. And so what behaviors are we exhibiting in our own lives that can help us, discover what can pass that test.
So, we constantly are preaching a test budget for our clients so that we can test out new channels and tactics. Because, what works for one client certainly doesn’t mean it’s going to work for another. And, you know, we work with a lot of, regional health systems, for example, have their own unique patient demographics and payer mixes and specialties. So we have to think about aligning messaging and audiences and channels appropriately. Client by client. And I think just due to the huge fragmentation of platforms across, programmatic and social and search ecosystem, it’s becoming increasingly easier to convince brands that they should have some sort of test budget because it does allow them to get data pretty quickly, to identify whether that particular channel or tactic is going to work for them. And we’ve found a lot of success there.
Julia
Thinking back to the things that your department is really focusing on and what you’re leaning into. What do you think is, quote unquote, here to stay? What is something that is going to remain constant, that you are going to need to be monitoring and stay on top of?
Blake
We really think that we are experiencing a pretty significant paradigm shift right now with the change, And, what we’re calling the interface. And so at a macro level, I kind of liken it to 30 years ago when brands all started building websites. So it was, the new interface in which consumers wanted to engage.
And the internet went from age of directories with the yahoos of the world to then, the age of search. And now we’re really in the age of intelligence. And so each time there’s a change, the interface changes too. And so directories are going to a click and keywords to a search. And then now intelligence is to have a conversation with.
And so we think that we as marketers really need to have a plan to win at this new interface. And the game is going to be won by those who can control the inputs. And so, we talk a lot about SEO having its moment right now. And SEO is really now about training AI, about the exact inputs that you need them to know so that you can win on the new interface, where when consumers are requesting those certain outputs and stepping to the other side of it, you know, huge question is going to be, how do these companies like a Google and an open AI and a perplexity, start to monetize generative search to offset the tremendous cost of running these large language models? Google has, said that, they’re even given a specific number, but we know they’re losing billions of dollars in ads or ad revenue a year because of AI overviews and the increase in zero click searches. So once they’re AI mode that they just, announced is more mainstream, how will they transition their $175 billion search business into that?
And on the other hand, OpenAI has said that they’re going to remain a not for profit. And they’re they’ve been pretty steadfast in their claim that they won’t introduce ads. But the hiring of Fidji Simo is really noteworthy because she could be their Sheryl Sandberg.
And so how are companies going to navigate that cross-section of user experience and monetization. That will be incredibly interesting to watch, because today, paid search works because the user is still in control, right? I can decide what I want to click on, what I want to engage with. I know what’s an ad and what’s organic. But in this new shift where it’s
conversational, how can users trust that, for example, Google isn’t just going to feed me the brand, that’s paying them the most.
Julia
Conversely, do you think that there’s anything recent that sort of had a big crescendo? But either ended up being short term or not that important? What sort of something that everybody was talking about six, eight months ago that is proving not to have as big an impact as we thought?
Blake
I think the obvious answer is one of the three that that we talked about earlier on and that’s, cookie deprecation. I think it was the beginning of this year. Google announced that it was no longer going to deprecate third party cookies, but instead they would, let the industry know when they’d enable users to block cookies.
But, I mean, the fact of the matter is that you can do that now, and you’ve been able to do it for some time, and Google doesn’t really need to call attention to the functionality to be in compliance with, privacy initiatives and GDPR. And so the government just has zero interest now in pursuing the issue anymore.
So good by them. But at the end of the day, the the digital media industry really just has less to do with cookies. We go through waves in the first wave of the web browser based was very cookie dependent. And then everyone started to get smartphones. And so that second wave was very app based. And so traffic shifted to mobile amid the desire for companies to really just create a more 1 to 1 relationship with consumers.
And now, we’re in the wave of AI based and video focus. And so cookies just aren’t as important moving forward as context and content. And so the next wave of digital media circles kind of around the two functional UI changes. And so consumers are going to engage in writing or and voice with AI. And then they’ll watch video content across a multitude of channels.
And the owners of those platforms are going to continue to have the data which was previously based on cookie collection. So, while cookies are likely going to remain, quote
unquote, important in the programmatic space and because of the scale and reach that Chrome specifically has, it’s just something that completely fell off the trades.
Julia
So, lastly if you had a top piece of advice you would give to clients? What do you want them to know about the year ahead in the digital media space? If they could keep anything top of mind, what would it be?
Blake
I mean, honestly, this year, I think for the next 12 months, like all of us, and you need to buckle up because things are changing more rapidly than I’ve ever seen. And brands are competing for attention across a very fragmented landscape. And if you’re focused primarily on traditional search strategies, you’re going to lose attention.
You’re going to lose relevance. I mean, just as an example, younger consumers are really over indexing in terms of their searches for what they’re deeming as more real articles and experiences and validation from people as opposed to publishers and brands. And they’re not reliant just on one platform to do it. There was a CBI study earlier this year that said Gen Z uses, on average, 3.6 platforms before deciding, even just on the simplest of purchases. So the need to really take a close look at what you’re doing in traditional search and it to the earlier point of having a test budget. So many of our brands are spending millions and millions on what has been a very tried and true channel of paid search.
You need to continue to just think about other channels in which those consumers are seeking information and making decisions based off of.
AI is at the helm of this transformation, obviously. And so brands are going to need to embrace agility. They’re going to continuously are going to have to adapt strategies. Prioritize creating high quality, AI optimized content and invest in truly understanding AI’s role in search and content consumption. That’s going to be so crucial for just maintaining visibility and achieving long term success.
Julia
So helpful. Blake, thank you so much for talking with us. And always a pleasure.
Blake
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
