Google is ditching its Adwords and Doubleclick advertising software brands, in favour of adopting a more streamlined approach for advertisers and sales teams.
The changes mean that Google's advertising effort will now be repositioned into three main brands, reflecting what senior vice president Sridhar Ramaswamy referred to as the change in the way marketers approach various formats in online advertising.
Firstly, Google Adwords will now just be known as Google Ads, aimed at representing a single entry point for buyers to the company's full range of advertising capabilities across Google's own sites and its 3m partner sites.
This means that from today, advertisers will buy onto any of Google's platforms in one single purchase, with machine learning determining where those ads will appear and what they might look like on Youtube, in the Google Play app store, or on Google Maps.
New campaign types will also be introduced over time for specific groups like small businesses, simplifying the process of advertising even further. No fees are set to change as a result of the switch, with the Adsense and Admob brands for sales technologies staying in place alongside the new Google Ads.
The news comes as Google awaits a fine from European antitrust regulators about market dominance of its Android software, in addition to claims that its advertising business should be split into separate companies to prevent it gaining an industry monopoly.
Read more: Google to be hit by EU fines of up to $11bn over Android market dominance
Google's second brand move absorbs the Doubleclick brand and the Google Analytics 360 Suite, bringing them under Google Marketing Platform as a single brand umbrella.
Ramaswamy said this was due to push from marketers that wanted to use ads and analytics tech together, allowing internal company teams on brand, performance marketing and engagement to work on one suite.
Display and Video 360, a new product which combines features from old brands to make executing ad campaigns more end-to-end on one platform, will go live in the coming weeks.
Finally, Google is pushing its Doubleclick for Publishers and Doubleclick Ad Exchange into a third stream as part of a new programmatic platform called Google Ad Manager.
"As the opportunity to engage consumers has grown and become more complex, we are simplifying our products for advertisers and publishers of all sizes so they can more easily reach consumers anywhere, at any moment and on any channel," Ramaswamy wrote in a statement.
Adwords itself launched in 2000 to place text ads into Google's search functions, but it became the place where advertisers were sent to buy ads for a range of Google's platforms. Today's move, Ramaswamy said, is designed to end that confusion.
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