November 24, 2025
Will AI make us smarter or dumber? The insights of Klöpping, Scherder and Online Dialogue
Reflection on Klöpping × Scherder by Simon Buil (Data Analyst at Online Dialogue)
At the invitation of Google, our colleague Lotte Cornelissen flew to Silicon Valley, California at the end of June for the Google Executive Summit! A 3-day summit together with some of the largest Dutch companies and preferred partners (including Online Dialogue) with the theme ‘winning in a data driven world - Future of marketing will be automated, data driven & full funnel to win in the moments that matter!’. “An inspiring, cool and knowledge-rich experience.” said Lotte.
The program consisted of introductions, knowledge sharing about growth and data-driven full funnel marketing and learning more about Google, the culture within Google, and Google's vision of continuous development from users, customers and innovation.
During 2 days Googlers like Chip Hall, Greg Corrado, Luke Wroblewski told all about: brand building, machine learning, programmatic marketing, mobile assets, culture, attribution, privacy, security, investment in startups and virtual reality. The main messages of the three days were:
One of the points Google is putting a lot of emphasis on is the value of Web data. Today we live in a world driven by data and platforms. As a business, you need to track how your brand is represented on channels such as Youtube, in search behavior and on social media. Visitors often provide feedback and comments through these channels. Use this information to improve your organization. How do you want your brand to come across? And does this match the Web data?
The tech landscape has worked in silos for years. But recently, according to Google, we have all the pieces of the puzzle, from marketer to publisher, to tie all the loose parts together. The relevance of your business grows the moment you take an automated and data-driven approach across the entire funnel. Or in other words, by using programmatic marketing: automatically buying ad space. To do this successfully, Google has designed a framework for:
Lately we have heard Google say several times that we need to focus more on mobile web. Most companies only optimize their site for desktop, and that's when an increasing proportion of conversions are made on mobile. The Q1/ 2017 Home Shopping Market Monitor shows that 11% of all online sales come from mobile. The year before, this was 8% (3.07 million purchases in Q1 2016 and 4.89 million purchases in Q1 2017). This represents a growth of a whopping +60% in a year!
So we need to start optimizing for mobile users. If we look at the customer experience on mobile websites, we see that 90% of Dutch mobile sites have a loading time of more than 5 seconds. And this while we know that consumers do not like to wait longer than 2 seconds. And this costs us a lot of money. According to Google data, 53% of all consumers leave a website on mobile if the load time is longer than 3 seconds. And for every second it takes longer, conversions drop by 12%.
Finally, our computers are fast enough to scan large amounts of data for patterns. Patterns that we as humans cannot recognize so quickly. We see the term Machine Learning popping up everywhere. Even Google is in all areas implementing the latest Machine Learning applications into their services and products. However, it is not magic. Google does describe Machine Learning as a new foundation of technology. And the rest of the world seems to agree. More and more companies are emerging that continue to boost this development. One such company is Tensorflow. They provide an open-source software library for Machine Intelligence creates tools and algorithms that are available for free.
In addition to information about the latest developments in the market, Google also shared how developments are taking place within Google itself. For example, they answered a question many people want to know the answer to: ‘What is Google's secret? Google's answer: the right culture. A culture guides people in their daily decisions. When the culture within a company is right, it has a positive effect on the employees and therefore the impact you make as a company. During the summit, Google shared their core principles:
The second point Google cites as the reason for their success is the value they place on a good team. But what makes a team good?
At the summit, Google gave a sneak peak of a new service: a new attribution model that will be launched in the near future. The model will give people more insight into different channels. For example, it will tell you what value a particular channel has, at a particular time and point in the customer journey. And of course, the operation of this model is also based on Machine Learning.
In addition to all this knowledge, we got to see the campus, ride Google bikes and explore Palo Alto. Truly an experience and definitely worth a look at Google if you are in the San Francisco area!
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