Google rebrands its adtech suite to simplify its offering for marketers and media owners

Meanwhile, Google Ad Manager will serve as a unified platform for media owners to monetize their content with the update bringing together DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

This fundamental overhaul will also involve the retirement of the 18-year-old Google AdWords brand which will now be known as Google Ads in a move that represents the behemoth making insights from its owned and operated media offerings – such as Google Play, YouTube, and third-party websites – to improve keyword targeting on Google Search.

In a blog post announcing the overhaul, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google, vice president of ads and commerce, explained that the moves were geared towards simplifying its monetization offering, as well as further extending the appeal of its buy-side wares to the long-tail of advertisers.

“These new brands will help advertisers and publishers of all sizes choose the right solutions for their businesses, making it even easier for them to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels,” reads the post.

It goes on to state: “For small businesses specifically, we’re introducing a new campaign type in Google Ads that makes it easier than ever to get started with online advertising. It brings the machine learning technology of Google Ads to small businesses and helps them get results without any heavy lifting.”

Speaking with journalists at a roundtable event to mark the launch, Ramaswamy conceded that there has historically been confusion surrounding Google’s multi-tiered adtech offering.

These integrations were driven by “real demand”, he said, adding that it had received feeback from clients’ such as “I don’t want two products, I want things to work well” when it was researching the shift in strategy.

When asked if Google had debated phasing out its AdMob and AdSense products as part of its adtech overhaul, he said that company leadership elected to continue said products due to users’ familiarity with those brands.

Speaking at the same event, Dan Taylor, Google, managing director, global platform solutions, said consolidating its offerings under the Google Marketing Platform, was geared towards helping marketers get the most of its products as advertisers get those most out of things "when they use them together."

Previously, their products operated independently, he said. “We want to help marketers connect the dots.”

Taylor added that the consolidation came from efforts to better understand customers in how they put together their digital media plans, and also because of requests from top customers like Adidas and Sprint.