Q&A: Chris Harrison, Google

As head of egaming and financial trading at Google, Chris Harrison is at the epicentre of some of the industry’s biggest digital marketing trends. In addition to a near-monopoly on core search in Europe, through various acquisitions and in-house product development the California-headquartered technology giant now also has an established position in email, ad serving services, social networking and online video.

Prior to joining the online search giant over three years ago, Harrison learned his trade at Betfair, which he joined straight out of university in 2006 as one of two graduates hired by the operator. After moving around the business in various roles, Harrison found himself attracted to the world of online marketing, working in display and search marketing roles before heading up acquisition in the UK. Google eventually came knocking.

Harrison and his team work with approximately 30 different gambling companies spread across Europe, each with a slightly different approach and view on the future of Google’s list of marketing tools. To this end, the search engine’s egaming team largely plays the role of educator to these companies to help them achieve the optimum performance from their online marketing.

“Quite often it’s about trying to educate how they can get the most out of the channel, what they should be thinking about and how and when they should be doing it,” Harrison says. “We sit down and work with these various approaches and see how you can influence them and share a view into how Google sees the next five years.”

And with Google’s rapid expansion beyond online search, this role is becoming more and more complex. eGR Digital Marketing spoke to Harrison to find out more about his position and how the egaming landscape on Google is set to change over the coming years.

eGR Digital Marketing (eGR DM): What is it like working for a company as powerful as Google?
Chris Harrison (CH): You quite quickly become aware that you’re working with some of the smartest people around, particularly from a tech point of view. What you also notice is just how big the company has become. About 15 years ago the company could have called itself a tech start-up, whereas now it employs between 55,000 and 60,000 people. It was certainly daunting when I first joined but the environment is very welcoming because of the culture it’s been able to harness after bringing in certain types of people. This comes down to the hiring processes and the types of teams it tries to develop.

eGR DM: What relationship do you have with the head office in California?
CH: We try to get out there three or four times a year. Primarily for me it’s to go and bang the policy drum and see what kind of change we can influence out there, be it off the back of regulatory change in Europe or a customer development change. It’s just to make sure that what’s happening is being highlighted in that part of the world. We take companies out there as well, such as the senior management teams, which perhaps represent the biggest opportunity from our point of view or possibly offer the most complexity.

eGR: What does your day-to-day role entail as head of Google’s egaming team?
CH: I manage a team of four industry managers and then there’s a support network of account managers out in Dublin. We run what is effectively a consultancy. We try to work with these businesses to help them on their digital strategies and to understand Google’s full product depth. For example, this could be across Google’s core search, which is probably where we’re spending less of our time at the moment, or it could be YouTube, Android or DoubleClick stack, which will look at ad serving, display bidding, search bidding and rich media. Quite often the conversation is around how all of these different pieces of tech or media buying options can work together. So my role is to work with CMOs and CEOs and help them to understand what the next 18 months could look like and what they can be thinking about.

eGR DM: Is that shift away from core search a recent trend?
CH: Yes, search is one of those beasts where, certainly within our industry, it’s quite mature and people generally have a good understanding of how to do it. In search it’s now very difficult for Google to come up with something the sophisticated businesses we’re working with don’t have an understanding of how best to use that activity. However, with something like YouTube or display buying, that’s quite new and still very much an evolving technology and media space. It’s often an educational play that we have to make.

eGR DM: Is it just the egaming industry that understands search so well?
CH: A lot of people failed to realise that gambling is arguably one of the most technically advanced and search-savvy industries that we work with. The CPCs that we have for searches in gambling are scarily high so you can’t afford not to understand how to work within the auction. We typically work with advertisers who do a lot of this activity in-house – that’s one of the biggest differences. It means we work with them far more because they don’t have the agency to depend on for best-case scenarios or conversations about what’s happening in other industries. But it’s not so much on how to do search specifically, it’s more in line with data, understanding what’s happening next and when, and how they can take advantage.

eGR DM: Is all this education done face-to-face?
CH: We try to spend as much time with our clients as possible. We run a lot of workshops and bring the full marketing
teams and agencies in to Google and often spend the full day educating and giving concepts and analogies as to how YouTube, for example, can best work for them. More often than not it’s about letting them understand how perhaps above-the-line brand money can be spent online to achieve incremental reach metrics.

eGR DM: Is YouTube now taking up the majority of your time currently?
CH: DoubleClick and YouTube search is probably how it breaks down just because of the complexity that sits within DoubleClick and the amount of products Google touches upon. For anyone in marketing, Google has a massive breadth and touches on every stage of the media buying cycle. That means we need to have an understanding of each of those products and
how they can work for the gambling industry and any particular client.

eGR DM: Is programmatic as important as is currently being cited?
CH: Yes, and certainly within this industry. The reason is that some of the markets are so mature and the CPCs are some of the highest, which is because advertisers see the value they’re getting off the back of that. However, there’s not much headroom left within that. What programmatic gives you is an ability to create small percentage gains over the competition, which in the end can be the key difference. It’s going to be fundamental for how this industry moves forward.

eGR DM: Do you work directly with regulators?
CH: I have relationships with regulators just through my presence within the industry and more often than not the international regulators will come to us just to understand what the search landscape looks like and which brands are being searched for. You have to remember that we sit on arguably the purist form of customer-intent data in terms of what customers want, what they’re looking for and when they’re looking for it. So I’m able to show the regulator all the basic metrics that can really help to show someone who doesn’t have access to betting data a real understanding of what’s actually going on.

eGR DM: Is there any regulation currently making your life particularly difficult?
CH: Regulation in general makes my life difficult. We’re connected to the marketing teams at each and every business that we have, and their ability to advertise in any markets is heavily impacted by regulation and Google is as white as white can be when it comes down to adhering to those laws and practices. As regulation loosens, so does Google policy, and therefore we’re able to do far more with the advertisers that we work with.

eGR DM: Why did you decide to open up PPC for social gaming?
CH: Effectively what we said to the market is we’ve split out social gaming from gambling, creating a sub-section which allows us to place different policies against that. It was a big step for Google but it something we were probably two years too late on and we’re trying to open up the vast inventory sources that we have to social gaming advertisers like Playtika and Gamesys. We set up AdMob which sits on search, YouTube, Google Display Network – so we’re arguably sitting on the richest source of inventory that we’d just restricted this industry from going after.

eGR DM: Do you think the worries about ‘Mobilegeddon’ were overstated?
CH: I think to a certain degree it was but, as I said before, our industry is fairly sophisticated and I think a lot of people failed to realise that. It’s not like mobile is new to egaming. The industry had the infrastructure to deal with it and was already prepared for the changes that came. So in terms of impact, it was fairly minimal for the guys we work with which comes off the back of various algorithm changes over the last three or four years. Those have perhaps been to benefit for some of the major brands who were able to hold themselves high when the Mobilegeddon process hit.

eGR DM: Do you work with affiliates as well as operators?
CH: It’s mainly operators but we do work with some affiliates as well. I love what some of the affiliates are doing at the moment and what I really like about the space is that there are 10 different models happening. Five years ago you had a CPA business or a rev-share business and you just tried to position yourself as high up the Google search engine ranking pages as possible. Clearly changes needed to be made and I think affiliates were really quick to jump on the content push, which means we’ve now got some affiliates producing some unbelievable content at the minute. But there’s also those that are almost acting like marketing agencies and are able to set up thousands of different portals and take advantage of some really unique datasets. I think that’s the core difference. Today’s super affiliate is one which can harvest billions of rows of data at any one point to understand value and attribute that accordingly.

eGR DM: So you think the affiliate space is becoming more sophisticated?
CH: Yes but it’s because the market in general has become more sophisticated and I don’t want to be negative to those guys who were doing well five or six years ago because they were doing very sophisticated things the market allowed them to do. Typically some of the affiliates would just follow the trends we were seeing from the operators, whereas now they’re leading the pack in terms of what they’re able to do with data and how to interpret it.

eGR DM: Many affiliates were badly burned by Google’s algorithm changes. Do you feel the space has recovered?
CH: The simple fact of the matter is that the ecosystem is consistently changing and the guys who can be ahead of that change are the guys who are winning. When Panda and Penguin came around, the guys who were able to understand the power of content were the guys who were able to ride that frustration out. However, those producing a WordPress site with a ridiculous amount of paid-for links coming into it are the guys that have suffered as a result. It’s just having the ability to change and I would argue in 18 months’ time what’s working today won’t work then. From a Google point of view we spend a lot of time trying to work out what the problems of two years’ time are going to be and position ourselves accordingly.

eGR DM: Is black hat SEO becoming less common now?
CH: It’s not necessarily less common, it’s just different. Some of these guys are ridiculously smart and really intelligent and the things they’re doing probably aren’t whiter than white but it’s just that what black hat stands for has changed slightly.

eGR DM: What sort of trends do you expect to see within your line of work in the future?
CH: I think we’re going to see a lot of above-the-line money start to move online. Online video will be a huge push and I think YouTube will be a part of that but there’s three or four other big players who I think will get some of those rewards. I also believe the importance of cross-device data will increase, but there’s only really two players who understand a full cross-device graph and that’s Google and Facebook because of the login data we have. It will then be a case of which operators can, first of all, understand that and then which can action against it. There’s so much value at the moment that isn’t being attributed to the right channels. The companies which have been working on their infrastructure over the past 12 months are those who can take advantage.