• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 17, 2024

Google has been working on its latest strategy to match agencies with ad-sales reps that create ideal advertising teams, but as part of this change, a few hundred professionals in advertising sales have had their roles eliminated.

The change comes after recent layoffs of more than a thousand workers in Google's software, hardware and engineering teams working on Google Assistant, Pixel, Fitbit and Nest, and other products.

More changes are coming. Google's continued layoffs, automation challenges, absent undocumented and unsupported hacks maintained by systems that support campaigns are an obvious play to reduce Google's overhead with artificial intelligence (AI) that minimizes the effect marketers may have optimizing accounts, Amber Deedler, senior integrated ad operations manager at Aimclear, wrote in an email to Media Daily News.

"Auto-changes are all about making money for Google with dumbed down tactics that often don't work with any size datasets," Deedler wrote in an email to Media Daily News. "In pay per click advertising, one size does not fit all, and the auto implementations can be pretty dumb in all their supposed smartness."

Some reps at agencies like Deedler say customer service in Google's advertising business has been lacking support for years, even as new systems "hit the market prematurely" resulting in inadequate performance and incomplete features. 

"New AI chat bots severely limit our agency's ability to even speak with a human, and that's a problem because it's quite common for Google to misunderstand website assets, incorrectly and (hair-trigger) reject ads and pages for compliance issues that don't exist, screw up feeds, overspend, and more," Deedler wrote. "For the better part of a decade Google advertisers have lost gobs of money during time periods during which perfectly fine ads and pages were not allowed to run for hours, days, weeks, and even months."

The bottom line is that Google does not seem to respect its customers, she wrote, adding that Google’s approach does not seem to be based on client needs and performance, but is based on an artificial scale to determine how much spend is needed for the company to care about its customers.

The company seems to be less invested in client performance and instead to be focused on the agency or brand spending as much as possible to achieve mediocrity.   

Digital marketing agency NP Digital was not at first aware of any Google changes to its client account support. "We've recently had new reps at Google reach out to support our clients who did not have reps assigned previously," said Brooke Hess, vice president of paid media at NP Digital, but within a few hours, she came back and said, "one of them told us they might get a new rep depending on how they restructure the organization."

"Given the state of things at Google and the news being shared pertaining to organizational changes, I am going to cancel our call today and will reach out by end of week to reschedule for next week," a Google rep told Hess.

Calling the changes fluid, all the back-and-forth communications led Hess to believe that not even the reps understood the fallout from the layoffs.