Google analytics chief addresses critics and plans for measurement in post-cookie world

Vidhya Srinivasan has perhaps the most powerful job in marketing analytics, but until two years ago, wasn’t in marketing at all, having started her career as an engineer. Now as VP-general manager of advertising at Google, she leads engineering and product teams focused on buying, analytics and measurement across ad products for the world’s biggest media company. She arrived with a mission to consolidate Google’s far flung measurement tools into a single offering, which she did. But making her work harder these days is Google's move to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. That puts her in the midst of some of marketing’s biggest controversies, a strange place for someone who spent most of her prior seven years before Google overseeing units of Amazon Web Services, including its Redshift machine learning pricing optimization platform. Srinivasan grew up alongside six male cousins in India who became engineers, and she wanted to do the same. After getting her engineering degree in India and computer science master's degree at Georgia Tech, she spent 10 years in engineering at IBM before joining Amazon. While that prepared her for the culture at Google, it was nothing like handling the complexity of marketing’s many constituencies. She admits since she joined Google in August 2019 it’s been a learning experience. And now she’s charged with making advertisers as happy as possible about the ever changing rules of working inside – and ideally over the top of -- the biggest walled garden in media. In an interview with Ad Age, Srinivasan talks about how she’s navigating this complicated landscape and addresses some of the criticism Google has received. What changes did you make when you came to Google? When I first arrived, until that point, measurement had really been a verticalized function. Google has all these different services, and measurement was one of the functions that got embedded in these things. It's a perfectly good strategy when you're trying to go fast, because you want to quickly make decisions optimized for that specific area and keep moving. I was really brought in to take a more holistic look at it and make it simpler and easier and more intuitive for advertisers. So it was really to be the advocate for our customers. And it was also not lost on me that another reason to do this would be all the privacy and regulatory changes. We needed a holistic view and strategy across what we were doing to again better serve our advertisers. What was your biggest surprise coming in? I did not expect the ad ecosystem to be as complex as I figured out it was, maybe six months in. This dread of regulation and browsers and operating systems and so many things coming together to create a very vibrant environment for discussion was something I didn't fully appreciate until I was right in the middle of it. It wasn’t a negative surprise. It was a very intellectually stimulating surprise. Certainly there’s criticism that Google gets about the difficulties of working within the Privacy Budget and in the Privacy Sandbox. The criticism is largely from folks in ad tech, who are looking for solutions that will let them continue to individually target people within Google properties. But hasn’t Google made it pretty clear that that’s not what you're trying to achieve? By nature of the topic, this ends up being very nuanced and very detailed. And the devil is in the details. So there is definitely dialogue that has to happen and education on both sides of the aisle to figure out exactly what is going on. From my perspective, as long as we can independently verify and have other people have mechanisms to see what exactly is happening from an advertising measurement point of view, it is still a win for us, and it gives us some common ways that customers can see what is happening, and then maybe they use that to compare to other things. But it is a complex problem because it is a paradigm shift. With paradigm shifts you end up having a phase of ambiguity, where there's a lot of education that has to go around before the industry as a whole can coalesce to a solution. It seems you have a different mindset on treatment of audience measurement and frequency capping vs. individual ad targeting. We have a set of principles. So, for example, we believe using data that is consented, first party and then modeling [around it] is in line with [people’s privacy expectations.] So we are comfortable doing that. Similarly, if you think about use cases where there is [personally identifiable information] and then doing things in an aggregated or on device fashion where the PII (personally identifiable information) does not really get out of the device in such a way that it can be used in its raw format, that provides the kind of protection that users expect. The notion [of showing] that an ad was shown to 1,000 people, and three people took action, is not something that people are intuitively allergic to. Now how all of this manifests in use cases ends up being fairly nuanced and complex. You have to be very, very thoughtful while applying this in any scenario. There's also a persistent theory -- or criticism -- that what Google is trying to achieve through changes in measurement and analytics is really to make people more dependent on Google measurement and analytics, and hence Google advertising. Is there is there anything to that? Our mission is really an open web that can also be free. Now, we've recently made announcements that essentially go against cross-site tracking for individual users, because that does erode user trust. I think there are lots of interpretations of actions. What we're trying to do is really to ensure that the internet can still thrive and at the same time we meet the expectations of our users from a privacy and trust point of view. You work with an extensive system of certified partners, and lately they've become more in demand than ever, both for services and as acquisition targets. Do you anticipate that universe can expand, or is it important to keep an established pool of certified companies that have clearly demonstrated what they're doing? We value independent verification and independent measurement, and the unique perspective that they bring to the table for advertisers. I think everybody wins when that is allowed to thrive. The more partners who can help do this, I think we would only welcome that. From the other roles I've had, I do believe that this ecosystem approach is the right one. When you have several millions and millions of customers, you do need more than just yourself to get to all of them in a way that is appropriate for the levels of service that they want. And this is a pretty critical part of the overall, overarching strategy.

Google analytics chief addresses critics and plans for measurement in post-cookie world

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