Consumer Packaged Goods

How Mars Wrigley uses agile media experiments to measure sales lift with EPAM and Cortex Framework

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Consumer packaged goods brands invest significantly in advertising, driving brand affinity to boost sales now and in the future. Campaigns are often optimized as they run by monitoring media-in-progress metrics against strategies like targeting specific audiences cohorts. However, because most sales happen in physical stores, accurately linking media sales lift to target audiences while ads are running can be a challenge.

Many solutions use “total ad sales” for measurement, but this metric doesn’t always correlate to incremental sales, which is Mars Wrigley’s gold standard key performance indicator (KPI) for media effectiveness.

So how do you know if your current ad spend is paying off while it’s still possible to optimize your in-flight campaigns?

Mars Wrigley is working with EPAM, and using Google Cloud Cortex Framework, to make significant progress tackling this issue with an approach that introduces an agile way to accurately measure in-flight audience effectiveness based on incremental sales.

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The Mars Wrigley approach: Connecting data for actionable audience insights

After exploring many solutions, Mars Wrigley decided to look inward and harness the power of its own data. However, this data was siloed in various media and retailer platforms.

To solve this, the company adopted Cortex Framework, using its pre-built data connectors and standardized data models to quickly integrate media data from sources like YouTube with sales information from retailers, creating a unified view of ad impact within a central, AI-ready cloud data foundation in BigQuery.

By combining data in BigQuery and using built-in data science tools like BQML, Mars Wrigley can now better understand how specific audience targeting strategies in its media investments are driving incremental sales lift across key customer groups.

For example, by identifying stores with similar sales patterns, the company can create geo-targeted control and expose Designated Market Areas (DMAs) for running audience testing.

By dividing its audiences into distinct segments, each with a control group, Mars Wrigley can experiment and monitor live campaign performance to optimize its investments for maximum sales lift.

Google Cloud Cortex Framework: Accelerating insights and decisions

The accelerated access to a consolidated AI-enabled data core represents a valuable addition to Mars Wrigley’s portfolio of media effectiveness tools. Cortex Framework provides instant insights with its predefined and customizable analytics content as well as seamless integration with major media platforms like Google Ads, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, and more.

“Before, we were struggling to get an accurate in-flight view of our audiences’ performance. With Google Cloud Cortex Framework, we realized that the answer was within our internal data. We partnered with EPAM Systems to harness the synergy of our internal data sources, enabling us to run timely experimentation based on actual sales lift. This filled an important gap within our portfolio of measurement tools and allowed us to continue making data-driven decisions when it matters.”
- Lía Inoa Pimentel - Sr. Global Manager, Brand Experience & Media Measurement, Mars Wrigley.

By embracing Cortex Framework, Mars Wrigley is not only gaining a clearer understanding of media impact on sales but also paving the way for a more data-driven and agile approach to marketing in the consumer packaged goods industry.

This approach includes some of the following key benefits:

Agile hypothesis testing: Bringing insights in-house significantly accelerates the ability to test hypotheses and adapt strategies quickly.
Scalability: The architecture allows for easy expansion to encompass more media investment insights and a broader range of retail customers.
Versatility: Beyond audience testing, Mars Wrigley can also leverage Cortex Framework for other use cases, such as media formats, content variations, shopper media, and more.

To learn more about solutions that can help accelerate your marketing journey in the cloud visit the EPAM and Google Cloud Cortex Framework websites.

Where’s the beef? For São Paulo’s agricultural secretariat, it’s on Cloud SQL for SQL Server

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:00:00 +0000

When most people think of São Paulo, business and culture usually come to mind, not beef and chicken. But the state of São Paulo isn’t only home to the largest city in the hemisphere — it’s also the second largest producer of meat in a country that’s the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Given the importance of agribusiness to Brazil’s economy, the Secretariat of Agriculture and Supply of the State of São Paulo (SAA-SP) plays a fundamental role in the development of agribusiness across the region and, by extension, the country.

With the mission of promoting the sustainable production of food, fibers and bioenergy, SAA-SP offers support to rural producers in several areas, such as technical assistance, research, agricultural defense, and access to markets. The Secretariat is also responsible for ensuring food security for the population, monitoring the quality of agricultural products and promoting nutritional education actions.

As the world’s food systems have evolved and grown more complex, organizations have looked to technology to help meet the goals for food security and sustainability. In the case of SAA-SP, the secretariat needs to securely manage increasing amounts of confidential data and ensure its critical systems are available 24/7. These systems include the Rural Environmental Registry (a mandatory electronic registry for all rural properties), and GEDAVE (a management system for animal and plant monitoring).

To give a sense of just how complex the system is, in one example, GEDAVE would handle controls for the management of poultry production, whereby each chick, after birth, needs to be transferred to a new location within 24 hours — and the entire process must be rigorously documented to ensure food safety.

If it wanted to meet the needs not only of its aging IT infrastructure but also the needs of a growing global population in need of safe, reliable food sources, the SAA-SP knew it was time to modernize some of our most important systems.

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The growing pains:

Our team in the Department of Systems Management sits within the Information Technology Coordination organization of the SAA-SP. We’re in charge of operating GEDAVE, which is a crucial system for SAA-SP that’s responsible for controlling and monitoring animal and plant health throughout the state of São Paulo.

GEDAVE records and manages data on animal movement, plant production, use of pesticides, vaccination, pest and disease control, among other information relevant to São Paulo's agriculture. GEDAVE assists in issuing documents such as the Animal Transit Guide (GTA) and the Phytosanitary Certificate of Origin (CFO), which are essential for the trade of agricultural products.

GEDAVE's back-end was developed in Java and connected to a SQL Server database. It contains sensitive information about rural producers, such as production data, management strategies, and financial information. Previously, this database was hosted on-premises, which caused a series of issues, including:

Difficulty in keeping the database up to date: Applying patches and security updates in the on-premises environment required time and planning, resulting in periods of system unavailability, directly impacting producers who depend on SAA-SP services.
Complexity in performing regular backups: Ensuring data security with regular and reliable backups was a complex and laborious process in the on-premises environment.
Challenging high availability: Maintaining high availability of the on-premises database required investments in redundant and complex infrastructure, increasing management costs and complexity.

In addition, SAA-SP needed to ensure the 24/7 availability of these systems to help producers meet market demands, including such complex issues as quality control for export and monitoring internal production.

Data security was also crucial, as information on types of herds, vaccination strategies, pest control, among others, is highly sensitive and requires rigorous protection.

Sowing the seeds of innovation:

SAA-SP decided to modernize its data infrastructure to address these challenges, choosing Google Cloud. They felt the Google Cloud platform's high performance could ensure application availability and efficiency, while its ease of management would simplify database administration and allows the IT team to focus on other priorities.

As a first step in this modernization, SAA-SP migrated its SQL Server database to Cloud SQL for SQL Server on Google Cloud. A crucial factor in the choice was the ease of enabling high availability (HA) in Cloud SQL for SQL Server. With just a few clicks, SAA-SP configured automatic database replication and failover, ensuring service continuity in the event of failures and compliance with SLAs, without the need for complex configurations. In addition, the migration to Cloud SQL for SQL Server was carried out quickly and easily, minimizing the impact on SAA-SP's operations.

This strategic change brought a series of benefits, allowing Java applications to connect to a more modern, scalable and secure database environment.

Harvesting success:

Simplified updates: Cloud SQL for SQL Server makes it easier to apply patches and updates, minimizing downtime and ensuring that systems are always protected with the latest versions of the software.
Automated backups: The service offers automated and managed backups, ensuring data security and recovery in the event of failures.
Simplified high availability: The simplified configuration of high availability in Cloud SQL for SQL Server reduced the effort of the IT team and ensured compliance with service SLAs.
Enhanced security: With data encryption at rest and in transit, Cloud SQL for SQL Server protects SAA-SP’s confidential information from unauthorized access.
On-demand scalability: SAA-SP can adjust Cloud SQL for SQL Server resources according to demand, ensuring optimal performance of Java applications, even during peak periods.
Focus on innovation: SAA-SP’s IT team can now focus on strategic projects, such as developing new features for Java applications, instead of worrying about managing the data infrastructure.
Reduced IT costs: The migration to Cloud SQL for SQL Server eliminated the need to invest in hardware and software to maintain the on-premises database, reducing operational costs.

Cultivating a future of innovation in agriculture with Cloud SQL for SQL Server:

The migration to Cloud SQL for SQL Server was a strategic decision that allowed SAA-SP to overcome the challenges of on-premises data management and ensure the availability, security, and scalability of its critical systems. The ease of enabling high availability and the simplicity of the migration were determining factors for the success of the project.

But more than that, Cloud SQL enabled innovation at SAA-SP, opening doors to integration with generative AI for more assertive and efficient analysis and decision-making. For example, SAA-SP is leveraging the power of Gemini with Looker to provide C-level executives with real-time data insights hosted on Cloud SQL, facilitating data-driven decisions.

Furthermore, SAA-SP is empowering its customers with Gemini Database, allowing them to harness AI to enhance database performance and maintenance.

SAA-SP plans to continue modernizing its infrastructure and services, undertaking:

Migration to microservices: Launch an updated version of the microservices-based application to increase the flexibility, scalability and capacity of the system.
Data analysis with generative AI: Enable the use of generative AI to perform predictive analysis and obtain real-time insights from Cloud SQL for SQL Server data, assisting in strategic decision-making for the agricultural sector.
Data management with Gemini: Use Gemini to facilitate data management and analysis, extracting relevant information and simplifying access to complex data.

SAA-SP’s move towards intelligent management of operations, coupled with the advancements in analysis, has consolidated SAA-SP's position as a reference in technology and innovation in the agricultural sector, driving the development of agribusiness across São Paulo and serving as a beacon for those around the world.

Get Started:

Discover how Cloud SQL for SQL Server can enhance your application performance and ensure uninterrupted availability.
Read more on how others like Ford and Visual Research are modernizing their workloads with Cloud SQL for SQL Server, resulting in high performance and cost reduction.
Ready to unlock the power of Cloud SQL? Start a free trial today!

Streamline digital commerce with the Integrated Commerce Network from Kin + Carta

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 17:00:00 +0000

At Google Cloud, we’re always looking for ways to help our retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and B2B and B2C customers along their digital commerce transformation, no matter the starting point. Whether you’re an enterprise manufacturer who needs to modernize and deliver a consumer-like commerce experience to your B2B customers, or a leading CPG company that is delivering new commercial models, the ideal commerce solution is one that can incorporate multiple best-in-class solutions into a composable but tightly integrated whole. There’s a need for enterprises to combine their data with powerful design, and create the moments that matter for their clients. The result is greater customer loyalty, with a personalized experience, and ultimately, increased profitability. Finding the right independent software vendors (ISVs) to meet your needs and connecting them to create a holistic solution can be challenging.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce the Integrated Commerce Network, a pre-integrated digital commerce solution from a curated group of our digital commerce ISV partners and delivered by systems integrator partner Kin + Carta. The Integrated Commerce Network is part of Google Cloud’s industry value network (IVN) strategy, and makes building an end-to-end digital commerce solution to support ongoing growth and innovation much easier.

What is the Integrated Commerce Network?

The Integrated Commerce Network brings together three essential pillars of modern commerce: a commerce personalization platform (Bloomreach), a truly cloud-native composable platform (commercetools), and an advanced digital experience and analytics platform (Quantum Metric). Kin + Carta, a digital transformation consultancy, brings deep expertise working with these solution providers and Google Cloud. Kin + Carta will develop a technical accelerator that enables faster deployment of these solutions on Google Cloud and facilitates data analysis in BigQuery. Collectively, the Integrated Commerce Network aims to deliver a modern commerce architecture that allows businesses to focus on innovation and differentiation for their customers.

The Integrated Commerce Network is part of Google Cloud’s IVN initiative and is the first such solution developed for digital commerce. IVN solutions combine expertise and offerings from systems integrators (SIs), ISVs, and content partners to create comprehensive, differentiated, repeatable, and high-value solutions that accelerate time-to-value and reduce risk for customers. By pre-integrating partner solutions on Google Cloud, the Integrated Commerce Network, an IVN solution for digital commerce, minimizes the need for clients to build bespoke solutions for common challenges. Each component is curated by layering focused solutions provided by our best-in-class, built-on Google Cloud SaaS partners, tailored to an enterprise’s specific challenges — whether they be retailers, CPG brands, manufacturers, healthcare or more.

The new Integrated Commerce Network solution from Kin + Carta and built on Google Cloud packages powerful capabilities from our partners including:

Bloomreach - an AI-powered commerce personalization platform that seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud BigQuery. Powered by a customer data engine, Bloomreach drives commerce growth with multichannel marketing automation and intelligent product discovery solutions. It unifies real-time customer and product data so businesses understand what customers really want.
commercetools - a cloud-native, component-based, tech-agnostic composable platform that gives you all the components you need to build and run outstanding shopping experiences across all digital and physical touchpoints. It delivers improved scalability, high availability and uptime, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to on-premises solutions.
Quantum Metric - a digital experience analytics platform that offers in-depth customer understanding, quantified and tied to core business objectives. It does so by providing real-time analytics, allowing you to monitor, diagnose, and optimize critical digital journeys. With Quantum Metric, you can easily discover when, where, and why customers struggle along their journey, reducing guesswork and time to resolve your customers’ digital friction so you can create compelling and easy-to-use websites and apps.
Kin + Carta - a global digital transformation consultancy and a Premier Partner with Google Cloud. With 20+ years of experience in commerce delivery, Kin + Carta's experts are able to drive beyond customer expectations to build omnichannel experiences that drive revenue and convert customers from anonymous to advocates.

How it works

Independently, Bloomreach, commercetools, and Quantum Metric provide extensive API connectivity to each other as well as numerous third-party solutions. Each partner enhances the others by leveraging shared data to add value.

Bloomreach can use commercetools data to curate personalized purchasing experiences, customizing ads, emails, and mobile notifications. Additionally, it transforms behavioral analytics from Quantum Metric into valuable insights, fostering customer loyalty, satisfaction, and conversion.

commercetools can augment its robust commerce engine with AI-powered site search, intelligent product and content recommendations, and 360-degree content delivery from Bloomreach. You can also optimize the conversion funnel in commercetools by identifying areas where potential customers are abandoning their digital commerce journey with data from Quantum Metric.

The Quantum Metric platform can be used to identify what parts of a customer’s digital experience need improving, quantify the impact of that experience, and inform decisions around redesign, replatforming and more.

Finally, these critical components for modern digital commerce are integrated and deployed by Kin + Carta. Kin + Carta is building a technical accelerator to speed deployment of Bloomreach, commercetools, and Quantum Metric solutions as part of the Integrated Commerce Network and consolidate data analysis via BigQuery.

Built on Google Cloud

Because these tools are built and run on Google Cloud, customers can take advantage of all the benefits that Google Cloud brings to the table, including speed, scale, and security; advanced AI and ML tools; and commitment to open-source. In addition, enterprises can take advantage of our Industry Solutions team of experts and their leadership experience at top retailers, CPG brands, and manufacturers across the globe.

With BigQuery, businesses are empowered to leverage their customer data and unlock insights to improve customer experiences and boost revenue. When data from commercetools, Bloomreach and Quantum Metric is combined in BigQuery, businesses can uncover new insights into:

Customers’ propensity to purchase
Pricing optimizations
Customer churn avoidance
Marketing campaign optimization to understand customer segmentations, retargeting, and promotions

BigQuery also offers built-in machine learning which enables data analysts to operationalize ML models at scale. Further supercharge your data, allowing your commerce organizations to better uncover, summarize and make predictions into customer purchase behaviors.

The Integrated Commerce Network brings the best of Google Cloud’s partner-forward approach to an easy-to-adopt packaged solution for digital commerce transformation. Thanks to our partners, commerce organizations from industry incumbents to scrappy newcomers can take advantage of a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution that improves the customer experience and commercial outcomes while establishing a solid foundation for future growth and innovation.

Learn more about the Integrated Commerce Network delivered by Kin + Carta and built on Google Cloud.

^{Special thanks to the Google Cloud ISV Partner team, including Frank Napoletano, ISV Sales Specialist, George Keller, Partner Engineer, ISV, Tina Feng Liu, Global ISV Partner Marketing, and Liz Seidner Davidoff, Global ISV Partner Marketing, for contributing to this post.}

Reckitt: Unifying consumer data with Google Cloud

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:00:00 +0000

At Reckitt, we exist to protect, heal and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner and healthier world. We work tirelessly to get our products into the hands of those who need them across the world because we believe that access to high-quality health and hygiene is a right and not a privilege. The markets in which we operate can be very distinct with the need to understand our consumers in respective regions, run adapted campaigns leading to a need of capturing and using relevant consumer data. To ensure that everyone, everywhere, has access to the health and hygiene products they need, our regional marketing and ecommerce teams require relevant data insights for each market in which Reckitt operates.

The challenges of navigating a fragmented data landscape

Before we created our consumer data ecosystem with Google Cloud, regional insights and achieving this level of data reporting was challenging. We had good insights into certain markets, brands, or aspects of our business, but because our data was fragmented across consumer databases it was impossible to connect data points across the business for comprehensive views of customers, campaigns, and markets. Our activation data was also stored separately from our sales data, making it difficult for us to understand the efficacy of our marketing campaigns.

Targeting relevant users with consolidated customer data

We needed a more unified approach to leverage consumer data effectively. Working with Google Cloud partner Artefact, we built what we call Audience Engine, which is designed to help us with audience activation. The Audience Engine uses Ads Data Hub to consolidate the consumer data from various sources such as websites in BigQuery, allowing us to analyze the path of consumers through our sites in far more detail than before. With the help of Vertex AI, our audience engine then builds models to show which users are in the market for which product, enabling us to build lookalike audiences and provide the right message on the relevant channels to more consumers. The more data that goes into the engine, the more accurate the modeling becomes, allowing us to channel our marketing resources more effectively. As a result, we have seen an average incremental increase in ROI of between 20% and 40%, depending on the campaign.

Once we realized just how powerful a tool our audience engine was, it was obvious that we should migrate all our consumer data to this newly created consumer data ecosystem with Google Cloud, that would form the backbone of our consumer marketing at Reckitt, while staying true to our Responsible Consumer Data Principles.

Modeling results of future campaigns with historical data

The migration began at the end of 2022, so our data transformation is still very much in its infancy, but we have already started to build some highly effective tools that are helping us to make our marketing operations more efficient.

A good example is our marketing ROI modeling tool, which allows us to predict how effective a marketing campaign will be before it goes live. With our historical marketing data unified in BigQuery, we are able to model potential results of specific planned campaigns to give our marketing teams the insights they need to adjust their campaign before it goes live. This helps us deliver a better ROI when scaling up those campaigns. Again, with our data previously fragmented across databases, such insights would have been impossible, making it harder to target our media spends effectively.

Analyzing campaign performance in near real time

Having all our data in BigQuery also enables far more effective reporting on our marketing performance. We can now deliver an analytics tool that enables our media departments to analyze the performance of everything from cost-per-click to ROI.

With these insights, our teams are not only able to optimize media spends or enforce compliance, they can also gain insights into a campaign’s performance in almost real time. This allows them to respond quickly, adjusting a campaign within hours, instead of days.

Becoming a data-driven organization

As we migrate more and more consumer data into Google Cloud, we have noticed a change in the way we work. We are now able to try out new things more quickly: we have been able to test new approaches with our audience engine in less than a month. We build innovative tools and products in a more agile manner, and are more creative in how we use Google Cloud solutions to achieve our aims. As a result, we feel more empowered to experiment and learn at speed.

For example, we are currently building advanced solutions using Google Cloud for predictive and measurement marketing solutions, helping us to master such capabilities internally.

Unifying all our consumer data in Google Cloud has given Reckitt the foundations we wanted. While we still have some way to go towards full data democratization, this backbone will eventually empower all our departments, and particularly our regional marketing and ecommerce teams, to access, understand, and make use of relevant data whenever they need it, to make timely, informed business decisions. That means empowering local teams to make decisions based on the data specific to local markets, helping us to get more health and hygiene products into the hands of those who need them, wherever they are in the world.

How B2B digital commerce will unfold in 2023

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Google Cloud partner commercetools shares how modern technologies like composable commerce, cloud-native infrastructure and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) will lead the way in business-to-business (B2B) digital commerce this year.

Digital commerce in B2B has been predicted as the next big thing for years; yet, at the start of COVID-19, 60% of B2B companies had zero or limited eCommerce capabilities. The pandemic accelerated digitization and eCommerce has finally taken off: As of February 2022, 65% of B2B companies offered eCommerce capabilities.

The behavior of B2B buyers is also changing: Consumer-like expectations are at the heart of successful B2B commerce, and this is how manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers will shape their customer experiences. Today, 73% of B2B buyers want a personalized business-to-consumer or B2C-like experience. 83% prefer ordering or paying through digital commerce and 72% are eager to purchase across channels.

With digital commerce dictating how B2Bs will grow in 2023 and beyond, what trends will spur digital transformations across this business model? Here’s what the team at commercetools expects to unfold in B2B eCommerce this year.

#1 B2B firms are switching to cloud-native, composable commerce

B2B players still plagued with manual processes and siloed backend systems will move away from monolithic platforms and choose composable commerce. In a nutshell, composability enables businesses to select best-of-breed components, such as search, cart or checkout, and “compose” them into a custom application.

B2B firms will modernize their commerce backend, interoperating siloed systems like Configure Price Quote solutions (CPQs) for sales and enterprise resource planning solutions (ERPs) for order entry with an API-first and composable commerce stack. They will also pivot from on-premise deployments to cloud-native architectures as the baseline for auto-scaling capabilities instead of pre-provisioning online capacity during traffic peaks. That way, B2Bs can customize customer-centric experiences to boost revenue while reducing the complexity and cost of in-house IT infrastructure, as well as gaining operational efficiencies.

B2Bs will maximize the cross-section of composable commerce and cloud-native infrastructure by leveraging a commerce backend like commercetools Composable Commerce hosted on Google Cloud. This combined solution provides commercetools’ ready-to-use components built as microservices and exposed as APIs, such as product information management (PIM) and unified cart, integrated through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

#2 Strong focus on data quality and personalization

Focusing on data quality continues to be a big trend in 2023. B2B buyers expect product, pricing, inventory and shipping data points to be accurate across every touchpoint so they can make better purchasing decisions, such as when to order products and calculate quantities.

With so many data points to capture throughout the customer journey — product, inventory, pricing and customer data — we’ll see more B2B companies reorganizing their vast information pools to elevate customer experiences. They will pivot to modular and API-first solutions, plus flexible data models, so they can break data silos from legacy monolithic platforms and access such data when needed.

We also expect to see more customer analytics to unlock data on buyer behavior. By understanding what customers see, click and add to their shopping lists, B2B businesses get valuable insights into how buyers behave, using this data in the shopping journey according to product interests. That way, it’s possible to offer personalized experiences across touchpoints without hassle.

“It is important for B2B companies to look at their data as if it is one of their products; invest in its upkeep and integrity while finding ways to continuously improve it. Using advanced analytics powered by AI and ML to identify patterns from large amounts of data, B2B companies can activate insights into customer decision journeys to maintain loyalty, personalize experiences to improve satisfaction and boost revenue, while also finding ways to optimize costs. For example, with analytics, enterprises can streamline spend to focus on the highest-performing channels and reduce waste.” — Carrie Tharp, Google Cloud VP of Retail and Consumer

With data-driven tools coming into play like Google Cloud’s Discovery AI, Recommendations AI and Vision Product Search connected with composable commerce, B2B players can boost customer analytics to personalize experiences, improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

#3 The B2B customer experience will be redesigned

B2B players are taking a page out of the B2C playbook to elevate experiences throughout the customer journey. While intense work needs to happen in the backend commerce engine, B2B players will also redesign their digital frontends. That means boosting website performance, while mobile responsiveness and personalization will be at the forefront of these advanced digital initiatives.

More than ever, B2B companies are looking for digital storefronts delivered as progressive web applications (PWAs) for optimized performance and responsiveness across devices, as well as fast-loading and responsive experiences to boost your digital presence, SEO rankings and conversion rate. B2Bs can further streamline frontend development with solutions natively connecting to Google Cloud Marketplace, which supports a variety of storefront providers, including commercetools Frontend.

Leveraging Google Cloud’s unique capabilities, such as PWA web app development, Google Cloud Discovery AI solutions that include Retail Search and Vision API Product Search, among many others, B2B companies are well positioned to boost digital commerce in the years to come.

What’s next in 2023?

2022 was already a turbulent year; for better or worse, 2023 is expected to have a similar fate. For B2Bs, even the ones with tight budgets, investing in digital commerce can help future-proof businesses for whatever’s happening this year. To dive deeper into all predictions and insights by commercetools in collaboration with Google Cloud, read the guide Pivotal Trends and Predictions in B2B Digital Commerce in 2023.

Looking back at Retail’s Big Show: Google at NRF 2023

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Enabling retailers and brands to use technology to discover new opportunities for growth, innovation and productivity is one of our greatest passions here at Google Cloud. Every year, we look forward to the National Retail Federation (NRF) annual conference and expo, and Retail’s Big Show did not disappoint.

To celebrate NRF 2023 being back in full swing, we published a number of posts sharing product announcements , customer stories, and best practices - all with a focus on shining a spotlight on technology that is helping shape the future of retail. Whether you are looking to transform the retail shopping experience by making it more personalized and frictionless or secure your omnichannel footprint, we have you covered!

To keep things simple (just the way we like it), we’ll be highlighting each post here in one place so you can bookmark it for later. We’ll continue to update this post as more content is published, so you check back for our latest insights, lessons, and stories from the retail event of the year.

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aside_block: <ListValue: [StructValue([('title', 'Why retailers choose to build on Kubernetes'), ('body', <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7f658c2cd7f0>), ('btn_text', 'Read now'), ('href', 'https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/retail/how-kubernetes-is-enabling-digital-transformation-for-retailers'), ('image', None)])]>

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aside_block: <ListValue: [StructValue([('title', 'How The Home Depot gets a single pane of glass for metrics across 2,200 stores'), ('body', <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7f658c2cda30>), ('btn_text', 'Read now'), ('href', 'https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/how-the-home-depot-uses-a-managed-service-for-prometheus'), ('image', None)])]>

aside_block: <ListValue: [StructValue([('title', 'Introducing Spresso: A new solution to balance profit and conversion'), ('body', <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7f658c2cd580>), ('btn_text', 'Read now'), ('href', 'https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/retail/introducing-spresso-a-new-solution-to-balance-profit-and-conversion'), ('image', None)])]>

We hope you’re as inspired as we are by these stories! Stay tuned for more stories, best practices, and tips and tricks from the partners, customers, and communities across our retail and CPG ecosystem.

L’Oreal enables a global developer workforce with secure cloud development environments

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:00:00 +0000

With many dramatic shifts in the world of retail over the past two decades — from the explosion of e-commerce to the COVID pandemic — digitalization is no longer just a strategic choice for companies in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, but a necessity for survival. In this blog, we discuss how the world’s leading cosmetic company, L'Oréal, uses Google Cloud solutions like Cloud Workstations to accelerate digitalization, empowering global developers with increased productivity and security.

Retail digitalization calls for increased developer productivity

Developers are a key element in enabling a digital-first strategy and shortening time-to-market. However, developers often have heavy workloads and are under a lot of pressure to deliver. A recent study shows that 94% of ecommerce developers took on additional work during the pandemic, which is likely to remain or even increase post-pandemic. This makes increasing developer productivity a key agenda item for many companies. Instead of developers spending time on peripheral tasks, you want to give them the right resources so they can focus on writing core business logic and driving the bottom line. According to a McKinsey study, retailers with higher developer productivity can increase revenue up to four times faster than their peers.

However, increasing developer productivity is neither easy nor straightforward. There are many factors that can hold developers back, for example, prolonged onboarding, unnecessary friction to accessing the right tools, inconsistency between environments, and security-related disruptions. Moreover, the rise of the remote workforce, and the increasing number of software supply chain security attacks early at the development stage, add to the complexity.

The developer productivity challenge

As the world’s largest cosmetics company, L’Oréal manufactures and sells beauty and hair products across 150 countries through e-commerce, travel retail establishments and physical stores, and has 35 global beauty brands under management and more than 85,000 employees.

As a global leader in the beauty business, L’Oreal runs at the forefront of digitalization utilizing advanced IT technologies. Partnering with Google Cloud, we built our Beauty Tech Data Platform, a next-generation data platform that delivers data products “as a service” to empower decision-making with instant, sophisticated analysis using big data and serverless technologies.

We have hundreds of developers working on this platform, across many different countries in many different teams, collaborating on different projects, while trying to share the same way of working.

Early on, many problems surfaced with the existing development environment set-up, and our data team realized that we needed a better solution to make work more efficient for developers.

First of all, developers coded on local physical laptops where all the files were stored, which made setting up new environments very time-consuming and error-prone. Developers had to install many things, such as code editors, libraries and utilities on their laptops before they could start coding. The physical laptop became a single point of failure, and could lead to potential security risks like code exfiltration — unauthorized code transfer from the computer.

Also, developer teams worked in different ways at different speeds with different levels of maturity, which made the code rationalization super time-consuming at the final stage. In addition, cost management was a big headache since teams all used their own development solutions that were licensed differently. On top of all this, it was almost impossible to maintain a consistent security posture across the board: teams used disparate tools with different security features, making it very difficult to configure security to the same level.

We started to look for a solution that could help us break these silos and increase developer productivity and security as a whole.

Google Cloud’s solution

While searching for a solution, our goal was to enable developers to work anywhere, anytime on any device in a consistent, efficient and secure manner. With such a bold vision, we partnered with Google Cloud again, this time, with Cloud Workstations.

Cloud Workstations is a key part of Google Cloud’s Software Delivery Shield, and is focused on accelerating developer onboarding and increasing developer productivity in a secure manner. It provides fully-managed, cloud-based development environments with advanced security features, support for multiple integrated development environments (IDEs), customizable development environments, and many popular developer tools, addressing the needs of enterprise developer teams like L’Oreal’s data team.

With Cloud Workstations, developer onboarding is now measured in days instead of weeks or even months. Deploying a new development environment is as simple as clicking a button. Within just a few minutes, a brand new development environment is ready to go in the cloud. With a cloud-based solution, there is no longer the need to store code on developers’ local laptops. They can access fast development environments anytime via a browser or from their preferred local IDE, no matter where they are located.

In addition, development environments can be pre-configured consistently across global teams with commonly used development tooling and the same level of security configuration. Compliance is no longer a goal that is hard to achieve. Cloud Workstations enables us to enforce security configurations and policy control consistently across various teams with features such as VPC Service Controls, IAM, and private ingress/egress, etc. Updating or patching hundreds of developer environments is also made simple. The platform team centrally updates the Workstation image, and Cloud Workstations service handles all the updates on the individual workstations in a fast and scalable manner.

While providing a single solution for global developer teams to work in a consistent and efficient manner, Cloud Workstations also offers flexibility and customization to accommodate teams’ different needs. It supports specific environment profiles such that, for example, frontend and backend developers can request workstations with different CPU, RAM or storage settings according to their specific needs. It also supports multiple popular IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Rider, Code-OSS, and CLion, as well as popular developer tools, so developers can choose familiar tools for faster coding.

“Cloud Workstations removes the technical barriers by providing a powerful and scalable solution for all the developers we have across the world.” — Sebastien Morand, Head of Data Engineering, L’Oréal

Summary

Developer productivity is key to a successful digital transformation. The traditional model of development on physical machines not only negatively impacts developer productivity, but also poses security risks. Cloud-based development environment solutions like Cloud Workstations enable our bold vision for our developers, allowing them to work anywhere, anytime on any device in a consistent, efficient and secure manner.

Learn more about Cloud Workstations and try it today.

Beating inflation: 5 tips for retailers heading into the holidays

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Budget concerns and inflation shock are causing noticeable shifts in consumer behavior, a head-spinning turnabout since the pandemic days of 2020. We went from not having access to enough goods to now not having the right goods at the right price points. Heading into the holiday season, retailers will need to look sharp and be able to deliver value to the increasingly cost-conscious consumer — with frictionless product discovery and digital shopping experiences, relevant inventory, and personalization.

Those are a few of the insights gleaned from a recent eMarketer webcast on how retailers can better combat the effects of inflation, with pragmatic recommendations from experts including Amy Eschliman, managing director of retail solutions strategy and industry engagement at Google Cloud; Alexis Hoopes, vice president and head of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) at Mattel Inc; and Elissa Quinby, head of retail insights at Quantum Metric. We’d like to share five key takeaways that retailers can adopt.

1. Be prepared for earlier holiday planning. Budget-conscious buyers are planning their purchases earlier than ever. According to our partner Quantum Metric’s latest Retail Benchmarks research, 40% of U.S. consumers and 30% in the UK have already started their holiday shopping¹. At Mattel, Alexis noted, “We’ve learned to be nimble and early for our consumers, and to have products available for them when they’re ready to shop.” With higher prices, she added, “Consumers are preplanning and researching more, viewing product detail pages multiple times to check a higher-price item before adding it to their basket.”

Quantum Metric’s same research also shows that while average cart values grew between January to July 2022 — larger than they were at the same time last year1 — consumers were shopping less frequently. Because of higher prices, 37% of shoppers are now pre-planning and purchasing items all at once to help keep to their budget1. Amy observed. “That means retailers need to make it super easy for customers to find what they want to avoid shopping-cart abandonment.”

Retailers who make it easier for shoppers to find the right products, by providing Google-quality search and recommendations, can help reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions.

2. Get a handle on out-of-stock issues. While many of the supply-chain issues that surfaced during the pandemic have cleared up, inventory continues to be a challenge in retail. During the 2021 holiday season, Google/Ipsos research shows that consumers saw a 253% increase in “out of stock” messages versus pre-pandemic². Elissa further pointed out that a great majority of both U.S. and UK consumers experience out-of-stock issues several times a month. It’s a fluid situation, however, with retailers facing bloated inventory as consumer demands quickly pivot from, for example, branded goods to generic or white-label items. “In the next six months or so, you really need to make sure you have the right inventory to meet consumer demands,” she advised.

The need for end-to-end visibility and the ability to act in real-time across the supply chain has never been more pressing. Google Cloud and our partners are tackling the top supply chain issues head on with solutions that enable end-to-end visibility, analytics and alert-driven event management as well as AI solutions and automation to streamline processes like procurement, fulfillment, and delivery.

3. Introduce value: communicate the quality of the product and the experience. While rising prices are paramount for many shoppers, it’s a common misconception that consumers are making purchase decisions based solely on price. Alexis remarked, “In e-commerce, we talk about price, product, service, and experience. Price is only one of the pillars for consumers. At Mattel, we are fully focused on product and experience. What makes this special? How do we connect directly in new ways to the consumer? Create ‘wow’ moments and deeper connections. When we think about value for our consumers, it’s the strength of the products that will drive the purchase.”

Elissa also noted that while consumers are doing a lot of comparison shopping, it’s really about value, whether a high-quality product or a high-quality experience. Quantum Metric’s Continuous Product Design solution, which is built with BigQuery, ingests data across multiple digital touchpoints, including from mobile and web applications, and connects customer signals to every stage of the product lifecycle to help deliver the products and experiences that customers actually want.

4. Ensure consistent experiences across channels. Today, consumers crave the cross-channel shopping experience. “The channel experience has gone from online to in-store to now everywhere,” Amy commented. “We call it ubiquitous digital shopping.” Elissa added that 75% of consumers do most of their shopping digitally. However, mobile drives 67% of digital traffic, but just 49% of sales.¹ “Recent trends in traffic and conversion rates by device show that we can expect the most traffic for the big sale days on mobile,” she said. “People are looking for discovery and awareness, maybe even adding items to the cart as a placeholder or reminder. But they prefer to complete a sale on a desktop. It will be critical for retailers to offer a consistent experience, especially on major sale days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.” Elissa also advised wrapping up any experiments with product and site design early, making sure to understand the customer experience holistically across the organization and prioritizing efforts to eliminate friction.

Consumers now expect to be able to shop wherever and whenever best fits their needs, whether in a store, on your website, through your app, or from within a social media ad, and have it be a consistently good experience no matter how they first entered or exited your commerce site. Google’s 2022 Retail Marketing Guide provides useful insights and tips on how to grow your online and in-app sales.

5. Personalize touchpoints to build loyalty. Connecting with your customer base and making sure they understand the value of your offering is essential. Alexis noted that the key is to keep your messages fresh as the holiday shopping season expands, providing new messages as they keep coming back to your store. “We need to engage them by helping them find what they are looking for at the right time,” she said. “Recognize that they are doing more planning and wish-list building early, then buying last-minute gifts at lower prices towards the end. Make sure those are front and center.”

Alexis also pointed out that today, consumers are providing more data points with the products they view or the items sitting in their carts. “What's so great about e-commerce is that we can use all of this to create more personalized, direct messages targeted to those consumers,” she commented.

Amy recommended continuing to focus on conversion with product discovery and personalization, harnessing customer data to drive insights and action. “Any company’s biggest asset is their data. Using it in as many ways possible and activating it across the company is incredibly important,” she remarked. “Take advantage of your first-party data to activate everything from marketing campaigns to a more efficient supply chain. For every customer who comes to one of your digital properties, make sure your product discovery is as easy as possible. Pay attention to your recommendations, driving personalization to make that experience as unique and fruitful for the customer as possible.”

Achieving these objectives requires a modern cloud data warehouse and activation of a customer data platform. Retailers can explore how Google Cloud's advanced data capabilities and our ecosystem of partners can power a customer data platform that supports more personalized marketing, shopping experience, and customer service.

While these are our key takeaways, we invite you to register to watch the on-demand webinar, “5 Ways Retailers Can Combat the Effects of Inflation,” for even more insights.

^{1. Quantum Metric Retail Benchmarks, “Adjusting for Inflation.” The report is based on aggregated browsing behavior from January to July 2022, paired with a survey of 3,400 consumers in the U.S. and UK.
2. Google/Ipsos, Holiday Shopping Study, Oct 2021 – Jan 2022, Online survey, US, n=7,253, Americans 18+ who conducted holiday shopping activities in past two days}

Accelerating SAP CPG enterprises with Google Cloud Cortex Framework

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 16:00:00 +0000

In a rapidly changing Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, business agility and digital innovation are essential to achieve business outcomes. Cost pressures, rising demand, and new consumer expectations have led to whiplash for CPG companies who need to accelerate digital transformation to remain competitive. Google Cloud has a tradition of delivering solutions specifically designed to help CPGs deliver on these imperatives.

With all of these industry inflection points, CPG companies face an additional challenge: making sense of huge volumes of data, typically siloed within multiple disparate sources inside and outside the organization. They need to tie this data together and enrich it with outside signals to improve insights and forecasts that help them meet market demands and disruptions more efficiently.

To address these challenges and opportunities, CPG enterprises can leverage Google Cloud Cortex Framework which provides reference architectures, packaged solution content, and deployment accelerators to help organizations kickstart insights and reduce the time to value with Google’s Data Cloud. CPG solutions built on top of Cortex Data Foundation combine SAP data and other key data sets such as trends, weather, and more, to solve common challenges across the supply chain. Today, we are announcing new, predefined analytics content and extending our partner solution offerings for CPG organizations that build on our recent content releases.

Demand Sensing - Gain a clearer picture of demand

CPG organizations rely on historical sales and other data to predict demand - weeks, months, and even years into the future. A key challenge, however, is detecting and responding quickly to unexpected changes and shifts in the market during production and delivery schedules. An accurate demand plan is essential for reducing business costs and maximizing profitability, but what happens if weather suddenly changes, consumer trends vary, or marketing efforts create demand spikes or dips? Current models do not reflect these new signals, even as they materially impact the demand plan. Identifying near term changes in demand is mission critical to better match demand with supply. Unlocking greater business opportunities starts by combining data and understanding diverse signals beyond historical sales.

Google Cloud Cortex Demand Sensing helps CPG companies better understand and shape demand by consolidating data from SAP ERP, Google, and third parties to enable demand planners to make proactive business decisions based on the latest market signals. With Cortex Demand Sensing, businesses can get started quickly with a modern cloud-based solution that includes the best of Google’s data cloud services like BigQuery, Vertex AI, and visualization capabilities with Looker. Our new solution accelerator content helps CPGs detect who the customer is, what product attributes are driving sales, and what factors may impact demand. The solution includes sample data, predefined analytics and machine learning models and Looker dashboarding templates to help deliver insights and highlight impact alerts to demand planners faster. By bringing together SAP and non SAP data sets, the solution helps organizations to be more nimble, through a more holistic view across demand drivers.

By augmenting demand planning with additional demand signals and contextual data like weather anomalies, search trends and more, CPG companies can improve visibility into factors that influence forecasting and lower inventory holding costs, or drive greater sales thanks to improved near term demand alignment and management.

At Google Cloud we understand the challenges of forecasting demand in today’s landscape and are developing products and solutions that empower CPG companies around the world to quickly gain insights and improve accuracy. We have options for companies of all sizes, whether you have in-house talent that can build upon our existing architectures and accelerators or are interested in leveraging something more “out of the box” from our partner ecosystem.

A growing partner ecosystem of solution offerings

One of the most exciting aspects of Google Cloud Cortex Framework is that it can also accelerate the onramp of data to advanced analytics and AI solutions to further accelerate business outcomes that directly deliver Top-Line and Bottom-line financial impact for customers. We are delighted to recognize several leading partners in this space including:

C3 AI: A comprehensive suite of enterprise AI applications that works with Google Cloud’s leading AI tools, frameworks, industry solutions, and services. Example use cases include:

Inventory Optimization: applies advanced AI, machine learning, and optimization techniques to enable companies to minimize inventory levels of parts, raw materials, and finished goods while maintaining confidence that they will have sufficient inventory available to meet customer service level agreements.
Supply Network Risk: Identify and mitigate current and future disruptions across the whole supply chain including inbound supplier delays, order delivery delays, and manufacturing bottlenecks.
AI Demand Forecasting: leverage advanced AI techniques to help generate and maintain the most accurate forecasts and demand plans to maximize sales while minimizing costs.

Palantir Foundry is a leading platform for data-driven operations and decision making. Example use cases include:

Assortment Recommendation Engine: Optimize product assortment planning level via a recommendation engine. Incorporate planogram performance and sales metrics to specify product placements
Product Fulfillment Optimization: Create a single source of truth for y demand forecasting and logistics teams to collaborate to ensure products are manufactured and delivered to the right locations at the right time.
Inventory Management & Out-of-Stock Prevention: Predict out-of-stock events and resolve through dynamic recommendations. Simulate supply chain trade-off decisions, and proactively reroute based on dynamic demand.
360 Visibility into Key Assets: Virtualize your entire value network with 360 visibility into the most valuable assets in your business, including Customers, Stores, Products, and more.

What customers are saying

Already, CPG companies around the world have taken advantage of Google Cloud Cortex Framework powered solutions to accelerate time to insight and time to value with less risk, complexity, and cost. Here’s what they have to say:

“Operating from Chile with exports of fish and shellfish to more than 50 countries across 5 continents worldwide, makes supply chain and sustainability insights critical to our company. We chose to implement Cortex Data Foundation to leverage our SAP data with other data sources in BigQuery for deeper visibility into our business. We migrated and upgraded our SAP ERP system to S/4HANA on Google Cloud in just 3 months and completed Cortex solution content installation and integration in parallel in just 2 weeks! We have been truly amazed by both the innovation and simplicity of the solution and were able to get started quickly. With new insights across our business, we can forecast faster and more accurately, which has unlocked innovation and agility not possible before." — Pedro Aguirre, CIO, Camanchaca SA

Google Cloud Cortex Framework continues to grow in exciting new ways, and we look forward to announcing more of them soon. Right now, CPG companies can leverage Cortex content provided and our Partner ecosystem to power next-level intelligent operations with the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. Cortex lets organizations ingest high-volume data from multiple sources securely, quickly, and cost-efficiently. Combine SAP and external data into a single unified system where it is easily accessed to fuel smarter business intelligence.

To learn more about Google Cloud Cortex Framework, visit our solution site and tune in to our Google Cloud Next ’22 session. Get hands on with our Cortex Data Foundation and Cortex Demand Sensing solutions today.

Using data advocacy to close the consumer privacy trust gap

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 16:00:00 +0000

As consumer data privacy regulations tighten and the end of third-party cookies looms, organizations of all sizes may be looking to carve a path toward consent-positive, privacy-centric ways of working. Consumer-facing brands should look more closely at the customer data they’re collecting, and learn to embrace a first-party data-driven approach to doing business.

But while brands today recognize the privacy and consumer consent imperative, many may not know where to start. What’s worse is that many don’t know what consumers really want when it comes to data privacy. Today, 40% of consumers do not trust brands to use their data ethically (KPMG)¹.There is room, however, for improvement.

Although the gap between how brands and consumers think about privacy is evident, it doesn’t need to continue to widen. Organizations must begin to treat consumer data privacy as a pillar of their business: as a core value that guides the way data is used, processes are run, and teams behave. By implementing a cross-functional data advocacy panel, brands can ensure that the protection of consumer data is always top of mind — and that a dedicated team remains accountable for guaranteeing privacy-centricity throughout the organization.

Why a data advocacy panel?

Winning brands see the customer data privacy imperative as an opportunity, not a threat. Consumers today are clear about what they want, and it’s simply up to brands to deliver. First and foremost, transparency is key. Most consumers are already demanding more transparency from the brands they frequent, but as many as 40% of consumers would willingly share personal information if they knew how it would be used (KPMG)1.This simple value exchange could be the key to a first-party data-driven future. So what’s deterring businesses from taking action?

Organizational change can seem like a daunting undertaking, and many businesses who do recognize the importance of consumer data privacy simply don’t know how to move forward. What steps can they take? Where do they start? How can they prepare? In addition, how can they make sure the improvements they invest in have an impact now and in the long term? A data advocacy panel, woven into the DNA of the organization, can serve as a north star for consent-positivity.

How can I implement a data advocacy panel?

A data advocacy panel’s mission focuses on building and maintaining a consent-positive culture across an organization. It can serve as a way to hone the power of customer data for your business while also giving the power of consent to your customers. And in an era when most business decisions are (and should be) driven by data, having a data advocacy panel makes a world of sense.

But what exactly does a data advocacy panel look like? Importantly, you need to include the right players. Your data advocacy panel should include representatives from every business unit that has responsibility for protecting, collecting, creating, sharing, or accessing data of any kind. These members might include marketing, IT/security, Legal, HR, accounting, customer service, sales, and/or partner relations.

These team members should then come together to tackle two key goals: to set the strategy and policies for how data is handled throughout the organization, and to react quickly to new data developments such as:

a potential data breach,
shifting market sentiments, or
new compliance requirements

It should be the responsibility of the data advocacy panel to help decide how, when, why, and where data is used in your business.

Once a company has established a data advocacy panel, they’ve also built a foundation upon which to create a new and future-ready organizational structure that will provide maximal transparency and auditability, explainability, and expanded support for how first-party consumer data is collected, joined, stored, managed, and activated.

The value of consumer consent, data advocacy, and privacy-centricity

How do you become, not just a privacy-minded, but a consent-positive brand?

According to Google Cloud’s VP of Consumer Packaged Goods, Giusy Buonfantino, “The changing privacy landscape and shifting consumer expectations mean companies must fundamentally rethink how they collect, analyze, store, and manage consumer data to drive better business performance and provide customers with personalized experiences.”

The changing privacy landscape and shifting consumer expectations mean companies must fundamentally rethink how they collect, analyze, store, and manage consumer data to drive better business performance and provide customers with personalized experiences. Giusy Buonfantino
Google Cloud’s VP of Consumer Packaged Goods

Companies are adopting Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to enable a privacy-centric engagement with their customers. Lytics’ customer data platform solution is built with Google Cloud BigQuery to help enterprises continue to evolve how they capture and use consumer data in our changing environment. Lytics on BigQuery helps businesses collect and interpret first-party behavioral customer data on a secure and scalable platform with built-in machine learning.

Reggie Wideman, Head of Strategy, Lytics noted, “By design, traditional CDPs create enormous risk by asking the company to collect and unify customer data in the CDP system, separate from all other customer data and outside of your internal controls and governance. We think there’s a better, smarter way. By taking a composable CDP approach we enable companies to layer our tools into their existing martech ecosystems, rather than being forced to build around a proprietary, external CDP toolset."

By design, traditional CDPs create enormous risk by asking the company to collect and unify customer data in the CDP system, separate from all other customer data and outside of your internal controls and governance. We think there’s a better, smarter way. Reggie Wideman
Head of Strategy, Lytics

Wideman continues, ”This allows us to enable developers and data managers to create a ‘Customer 360’ in their own secure, privacy-compliant data warehouse. The advantage of this approach is a privacy-centric architecture that collects and unifies customer data creating a profile schema that is synced to the customer’s data warehouse, helping internal data teams build and manage a secure, persistent ‘Customer 360’, while also providing a direct sync to marketing tools and channels for targeted advertising and activation.”

In short, it’s not just about small tweaks and minor changes. It’s about starting with a catalyst that will drive larger-scale change. That catalyst is your data advocacy panel, and it is and will continue to be at the center of the value exchange between your brand and your customers.

“The importance of ‘consumer consent’ and ‘value exchange’ is front and center in the conversations we are having with our customers,” shares Buonfantino, “And first-party data done right can help drive more meaningful high-value consumer engagement.”

For more information on data advocacy panels, how to implement them, and how they bring the power of your customer data to every employee, read the whitepaper. In addition, we invite you to explore the Lytics CDP on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

^{1. KPMG: Corporate Data Responsibility}

Solving for food waste with data analytics in Google Cloud

Thu, 05 May 2022 16:00:00 +0000

With over ⅓ of the food in the USA ending up as waste according to the USDA, it is a compelling challenge to address this travesty. What will happen to hunger, food prices, trash reduction, water consumption, and overall sustainability when we stop squandering this abundance?

Beginning with the departure from the farm to the back of the store, the freshness clock continues to run. Grocers work very hard to purchase high quality produce items for their customers and the journey to the shelf can take a toll in both quality and remaining shelf life. Suppliers focus on delivering their items through the arduous supply chain journey to the store with speed and gentle handling. The baton is then passed to the store to unload and present the items to customers with care to sell through each lot significantly before the expiration or sell by date. This is to ensure that the time spent in the customer's home is ample to ensure a great eating experience as well. Food waste is a farm to fork problem with opportunity at every step of the chain, but today we will focus on the segment that the grocery industry oversees.

With the complexities of weather, geopolitical issues, distribution, sales variability, pricing, promotions, and inventory management, it seems daunting to impact waste. Fortunately, data analytics and machine learning in the cloud is a powerful weapon in the fight against food waste. Data Scientists harness knowledge to draw meaning from data turning that data into decision driving information.

One key Google has been working on to accelerate value is to break down data silos and leverage machine learning to realize better outcomes, using our Google Data Cloud platform. This enables better planning through demand forecasting, Inventory management, assortment planning, and dynamic pricing and promotions.

That sounds great but how does it work?

Let's walk through a day in the life journey to see how the integrated Google Data Cloud platform can change the game for good. Our friendly fictitious grocer FastFreshFood is committed to selling high quality perishable items to their local market. Their goal is to minimize food waste and maximize revenue by selling as much perishable fresh food as possible before the sell by date. Our fictitious grocer in partnership with Google Cloud could build a solution that will take a significant bite out of their food waste volume and better satisfy customers.

Sales through the register and online are processed in real time with Datastream, Dataflow to keep an accurate perpetual inventory by minute of every single item.
A Demand forecasting model using machine learning algorithms in BigQuery then identifies needs for back room replenishment, so Direct Store Delivery and daily store Distribution Centers manage ordering more efficiently to ensure just the right amount of each product each day.
Realtime reporting dashboards in Looker with alerting capabilities enable the system to operate with strong associate support and understanding. The reporting suite shows inventory levels into the future, daily orders, and at risk items.

The pricing algorithm could also alert store leadership concerning any items that will not sell through and suggest real time in store specials resulting in zero waste at shelf and maximized revenue.

This approach is not just for perishable categories and is a pattern that works well for in-store produced items and center store items. The key point is that by bringing ML/AI to difficult business problems grocers are reinventing what is possible for both their profitability and sustainability.

The technical implementation of this design pattern in Google Cloud leverages Datastream, Dataflow, BigQuery and Looker products, it is detailed in a technical tutorial accompanying this blog post.

In partnership with Google Cloud, retailers can solve complex problems with innovative solutions to achieve higher quality, lower cost, and provide great customer experiences. To learn more from this and other use cases, please visit our Design Patterns website.

Curious to learn more?

We’re excited to share what we know about tackling food waste at Google, a topic we’ve been working on in the last decade as we’ve embarked on reducing our own food waste in our operations in over 50 countries in the world. The Google Food for Good team works exclusively on Google Cloud Platform with our partners on this topic. Two additional articles below.

Silos are for food, not for data - tackling food waste with technology
This business Cloud blog directly addresses information silos that currently exist across many nodes in the food system and how to break down cultural and organizational barriers to sharing.

“Unsiloing” data to work toward solving food waste and food insecurity
This follow-on technical Cloud blog articulates the path to setting up data pipelines, translating between data sets (not everyone calls a tomato a tomato!) and making sense of emergent insights.

New research shows consumers more interested in brands’ values than ever

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Consumer Goods Technology Magazine

Shifting work habits, more online shopping options, rising inflation, and stretched supply chains are just a few factors making it harder to discern what’s top-of-mind for shoppers today.

But we’re starting to get a clearer picture of what consumers say they value most right now. New Harris Poll research commissioned by Google Cloud reveals how U.S. shoppers are thinking about consumer goods brands in new ways—from apparel, electronics, and beauty products, to food and beverage.

While price unsurprisingly continues to be a major consideration in purchases, the average shopper is increasingly paying close attention to the values of consumer goods brands and how eco-friendly their products and practices are.

Shoppers want to buy from brands aligned with their values

COVID-19 drove people to reflect on their priorities, elevating concepts like community service, equity, and sustainability. A decade ago, most consumer goods companies would not have made these front-and-center, operational priorities. But today’s consumer not only wants savings and convenience, they also want that good feeling that comes from spending their money with a company that aligns with their values.

Our new research reveals that 82% of shoppers prefer a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don't feel a match. Three-quarters of shoppers reported parting ways with a brand over a conflict in values.

Even with their favorite consumer goods products, a majority of shoppers will not compromise on principles. If there’s a value mismatch, 39% of shoppers said they’d permanently boycott their favorite brand, and 24% would break ties at least temporarily. Most won’t be quiet about their concerns either: 28% of consumers that found their values at odds with a brand said they have shared their concerns with friends and family, and another 15% have shared their qualms on social media.

Consumer goods companies need to prioritize sustainability

A majority of today’s consumers (52%) are especially interested in supporting sustainable brands. They want to know how companies are managing their resources, specifically whether they are sourcing responsibly. These shoppers want to see meaningful, measurable efforts from CPG firms to save energy and reduce waste, like how Nuuly, URBN’s digital rental and resale business, has woven sustainability into its business operations, from its distribution centers to reusable packaging.

In fact, 66% of shoppers are now seeking out eco-friendly brands, with 55% saying they would pay more for more sustainable products. But these same shoppers are skeptical too: 72% think that companies and brands overstate their sustainability efforts. And they’re right to question brands’ practical application of their values. According to another Harris Poll survey recently commissioned by Google Cloud, 58% of executives polled across 16 countries admit that their organization has overstated its sustainability efforts.

Product availability is table stakes

A final point from the research: The global supply chain has stretched past its limits, and 60% of consumers are voicing some level of concern about it. At the end of the day, if a preferred brand isn’t actually on the shelves of a real or digital store, it doesn’t matter what the brand’s values or sustainability efforts are. A staggering 98% said they’d either buy from a different brand or search other stores or websites.

What’s a brand to do?

After more than 25 years working in the consumer goods industry in roles ranging from marketing and product development to business strategy and technology, at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Carter’s, and now Google Cloud, I’ve seen successful brands do four things well when it comes to their values:

1. Don’t be generic.

Your brand’s values need to be authentic, and they need to have teeth. But being too bold could run the risk of alienating some consumer segments. This is where technology can help. Personalizing your messages and outreach to specific shopper profiles is one way to ensure that your core values reach the right customers at the right time.

2. Make your values clear and consistent.

When focusing on which values to highlight with your consumers and the world, make sure they make sense for your brand and that you’ll stick to them over time. For example, it’s painfully obvious when a brand is being opportunistic and inserting itself into conversations around values like sustainability or social justice, when it doesn’t have a history of voicing those values. The key to clear and consistent messaging of values is balancing authenticity with relatability and the appropriate amount of promotion.

3. Develop sustainability practices and communicate their impact to everyday people.

How everyday people perceive a consumer goods brand’s sustainability initiatives is different from how an investor or general business audience does. Shoppers don’t read business sustainability plans or impact reports. To increase awareness of your brand’s sustainability efforts, consumers need to identify and interact with your brand and products directly. Some of my favorite examples are how I love that Google Maps gives me the choice of eco-friendly driving directions, and that I know I can buy low-waste, packaging-free cosmetics from a company like Lush.

4. Reward customer loyalty.

Shoppers have more choices than ever before, and supply chain woes are testing preferences even further. But when someone chooses a specific brand because they feel aligned with their values or like their eco-friendly products, that shopper doesn’t always get recognized or thanked. Implementing a rewards program or following-up with customers after their purchases is one way you can make loyal shoppers feel appreciated while creating a lasting relationship that extends as long as possible.

Ingestion as a Service: How Tyson Foods reimagined their Data Platform

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:00:00 +0000

As data environments become more complex, companies are turning to streaming analytics solutions that analyze data as it’s ingested and deliver immediate, high-value insights into what is happening now. These insights enable decision makers to act in real time to take advantage of opportunities or respond to issues as they occur.

While understanding what is happening now has great business value, forward-thinking companies are taking things a step further, using real-time analytics integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence (BI) to answer the question, “what might happen in the future?” Arkansas-based Tyson Foods has embraced AI/BI analytics to enable predictive insights that unlock new opportunities and drive future growth.

Creating a digital twin for connected intelligence company wide

Before using AI/BI, Tyson’s analytics capabilities consisted of traditional BI solutions focused on KPIs and simplifying data so that humans could understand it. Tyson wanted to leverage its data to uncover ways to improve current processes and grow its business. But with BI alone, Tyson struggled to use data to run the simulations and scenarios essential to make educated decisions. To keep growing, it had to embrace the complexity of its data, building ways to analyze it and use it to inform decision making.

Tyson’s on-premises analytics solutions limited its ability to be aggressive and make intelligent, timely, prescriptive decisions. The solution was to create a digital twin to scale optimizations within business processes, moving from local optimizations to system-wide connected optimizations. Doing so meant shifting entirely to cloud computing, with an initial focus on building the ingestion component of the digital twin platform.

Investing in a digital twin enabled Tyson to accelerate new capabilities like supply chain simulation “what-if” scenarios, prescriptive price elasticity recommendations, and improvement of customer intimacy.

Solving the ingestion problem for faster time to insights

Before its migration to Google Cloud, analytics projects that Tyson suffered from uncertainty over how to obtain the data. This problem was prolific and caused project times to be extended for weeks or even months due to the need to write and support one-off data ingestion processes at the front end. This problem also prevented the IT team from delivering analytics solutions fast enough for the business to take full advantage of them.

To solve this analytics problem, the team created Data Ingestion Compute Engine (DICE). DICE is a Google Cloud-hosted, open-source, cloud-native ingestion platform developed to provide configuration-based, no-ops, code-free ingestion from disparate enterprise data systems, both internal and external. It is centered on three high-level goals:

Accelerate the speed of delivery of IT analytics solutions
Enable growth of IT capabilities to produce meaningful insight
Reduce long-term total cost of ownership for ingestion solutions

Creating DICE ingestion platform with Google Cloud services

Teams use DICE to set up secure data ingestion jobs in minutes without having to manage complex connections or write, deploy, and support their own code. DICE enables unbound scale, highly parallel processing, DevSecOps, open source, and the implementation of Lambda Data Architecture.

A DICE job is the logical unit of work in the DICE platform, consisting of immutable and mutable configurations persisted as JSON documents stored in Firestore. The job exists as an instruction set for the DICE data engine, which is Apache Beam running Dataflow to instruct which data to pull, how to pull it, how often to pull it, how to process it, when it changes, and where to direct it.

Two of DICE’s primary layers include the metadata engine and the data engine. The metadata engine is responsible for the creation and management of DICE job configuration and orchestration. It is made up of many microservices that interact with multiple Google Cloud services, including the job configuration creation API, job build configuration helper API, and job execution scheduler API.

The data engine is responsible for the physical ingestion of data, the change detection processing of that data, and the delivery of that data to specified targets. The data engine is Java code that uses the Apache Beam unified programming model and runs in Dataflow. It is comprised of streaming, jobs, and Dataflow flex template batch jobs. Logically, the data engine is segmented across three layers: the inbound processing layer, the DICE file system layer, and the target processing layer, which takes the data from the DICE file system and moves it to targets.

Rolling DICE for thousands of ingestion jobs each day

DICE was first deployed to a production environment in November 2019, and just two years later, it has more than 3,000 data ingestion jobs from more than a hundred disparate data systems, both internal and external to Tyson Foods. Most of these jobs run multiple times a day. On a daily basis the DICE environment sees more than 25,000 Dataflow jobs running and an average of 3.25 terabytes of new data being ingested.

DICE @ Tyson Platform in Numbers

DICE supports ingestion from many different types of technologies, including BigQuery, SQL Server, SAP HANA, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, Db2, various types of file systems, and FTP servers. Additionally, DICE supports target platform technologies for ingestion jobs that include multiple JDBC targets, multiple file system targets, and BigQuery and queue-based store and forward technologies.

The platform continues to see linear growth of DICE jobs, all while keeping platform costs relatively flat. With increasing demand for the platform, Tyson’s IT team is constantly enhancing DICE to support new sources and targets.

This intelligent platform keeps adding new value and makes it simple for Tyson to take advantage of its data. This innovation is a necessity in this fast-changing world of digital business in which companies must transform a high volume of complex data into actionable insight.

The technology and climate science helping CPG brands with sustainable sourcing

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 17:00:00 +0000

In the competitive world of consumer goods, sustainability matters more than ever. In recent Google survey, 82% of consumers said sustainability is more top of mind now than it was before COVID-19¹ and 78% said that big businesses have a role to play in helping to fight climate change.² As well as delivering on customers’ heightened expectations, sustainable business practices can help organizations reduce waste and lower operational costs and even help attract top talent.

Not only is sustainability good for business performance and the bottom line, it’s great for the planet, too. And it’s something we care deeply about at Google. Since our earliest days, we have focused on developing services that significantly improve the lives of billions of people while operating our business in an environmentally sustainable way. In 2007, we were the first major company to become carbon neutral, and in 2017 we were the first to achieve 100% renewable energy. Today, we proudly operate the cleanest cloud in the industry. We’ve also been powering humanitarian, scientific, and environmental initiatives studying geospatial information and making it available for analysis via Google Earth Engine.

Powering the future of responsible sourcing

How does all this relate to CPG supply chains? The world relies on raw materials like palm oil, soy, and cocoa to produce the items we consume every day—such as coffee, chocolate, frozen foods, shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, and even household cleaning products. Yet as demand for these materials continues to grow, forests are under threat. Change is needed.

As sustainability moves further into the spotlight, in-demand crops face increased supplier scrutiny. Environmentally conscious companies want to know what percentage of their raw materials is sourced from deforestation-free suppliers—and how they can improve that number. Until recently, many CPG brands have found it hard to get real-time, reliable visibility into operations at a local supplier level, globally.

Google Cloud, in partnership with NGIS, is helping brands gain a deeper understanding of raw material sourcing practices across supplier networks, so they can improve supplier performance and compliance in the fight against deforestation. The TraceMark solution, developed by NGIS, uses Google Earth Engine and BigQuery to analyze and visualize how suppliers behave over time.

Google Earth Engine is the world’s largest archive of open Earth data. It combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities to help people detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth’s surface.With Earth Engine, organizations can analyze the potential social, and environmental impacts of the decision they make.

Together, TraceMark, Google Earth Engine and BigQuery help companies visualize, monitor, and measure the impact of suppliers’ farming practices. The process starts with Earth Engine, which aggregates and harmonizes planetary data into images that it has been collecting for decades. Then, boundary maps for different suppliers are created and NGIS applies climate data science and machine learning to turn pixels into insights. Finally, BigQuery and Vertex AI -Google Cloud’s unified artificial intelligence platform are used to produce supplier scoring, which is integrated into downstream ERP and procurement systems to support more informed decision-making.

These efforts support the responsible sourcing of raw materials by making supply chains more agile, transparent and traceable.

“NGIS is thrilled to work with Google Cloud and its partners to enable business accountability for sustainable practices at all levels of their supply chain,” said Nathan Eaton, Executive Director, NGIS. “Google Earth Engine provides unique geospatial capability that [gives] leaders visibility and control over their environmental footprint and that of their suppliers in a way that was not previously possible.”

Unilever commits to working towards a deforestation-free supply chain

Unilever is a great example of a company committed to using technology in the quest to become more sustainable. Since 2020, Unilever has partnered with Google Cloud to use data for eco-friendly decision-making, particularly when it comes to sustainable commodity sourcing.

By combining the power of cloud computing with satellite imagery and AI, we’re helping Unilever build a more holistic view of the forests, water cycles, and biodiversity that intersect its supply chain. By gaining a complete picture of these ecosystems, Unilever can detect deforestation while simultaneously prioritizing critical areas of forest and habitats in need of protection.

The cleanest cloud for your sustainable transformation

We are excited to bring Google Earth Engine and NGIS to our CPG customers to help them meet their sustainability goals. Looking ahead, we’re committed to furthering our own ambitious sustainability goals and empowering CPG brands with the technology to do more for our environment and our shared future.

Contact your cloud seller to learn more about Tracemark sustainable sourcing solutions and how Google Cloud can help you advance your sustainability initiatives.

Explore TraceMark on the Google Cloud Marketplace

To know more about how we are helping CPGs transform digitally read this ebook

^{1. Google/C Space, BR, FR, DE, IN, MX, U.K., U.S., qualitative survey activity, n = 528, Nov. 24–Nov. 26, 2020.
2. Google/Ipsos, Google Sustainability, BR, FR, DE, IN, JP, U.K., U.S., n=16,959 online population 18–70, July 2021.}

Fresh updates: Google Cloud 2021 Summits

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:00:00 +0000

There are a lot of great things happening at Google Cloud, and we’re delighted to share new product announcements, customer perspectives, interactive demos, and more through our Google Cloud Summit series, a collection of digital events taking place over the coming months.

Join us to learn more about how Google Cloud is transforming businesses in various industries, including Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Retail & Consumer Goods, and Financial Services. We’ll also be highlighting the latest innovations in data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), security and more.

Content will be available for on-demand viewing immediately following the live broadcast of each event. Bookmark this page to easily find updates as news develops, and don’t forget to register today or watch summits on demand by visiting the Summit series website.

Upcoming events

Government & Education Summit | Nov 3-4, 2021

Mark your calendars – registration is open for Google Cloud’s Government and Education Summit, November 3–4, 2021.

Government and education leaders have seen their vision become reality faster than they ever thought possible. Public sector leaders embraced a spirit of openness and created avenues to digital transformation, accepting bold ideas and uncovering new methods to provide public services, deliver education and achieve groundbreaking research. At Google Cloud, we partnered with public sector leaders to deliver an agile and open architecture, smart analytics to make data more accessible, and productivity tools to support remote work and the hybrid workforce.

The pandemic has served as a catalyst for new ideas and creative solutions to long-standing global issues, including climate change, public health, and resource assistance. We’ve seen all levels of government and education leverage cloud technology to meet these challenges with a fervor and determination not seen since the industrial revolution. We can’t wait to bring those stories to you at the 2021 Google Cloud Government and Education Summit.

The event will open doors to digital transformation with live Q&As, problem-solving workshops and leadership sessions, designed to bring forward the strongest talent, the most inclusive teams, and the boldest ideas. Interactive, digital experiences and sessions that align with your schedule and interests will be available, including dedicated sessions and programming for our global audiences.

Register today for the 2021 Google Cloud Government and Education Summit. Moving into the next period of modernization, we feel equipped with not just the technology, but also the confidence to innovate and the experience to deliver the next wave of critical digital transformation solutions.

Digital Manufacturer Summit | June 22, 2021

Together we can transform the future of our industry. At Google Cloud’s Digital Manufacturer Summit customers will hear from Porsche, Renault Group, Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, GE Appliances and Landis+Gyr who are boosting productivity across their enterprise with digital solutions powered by AI and analytics.

Google Cloud recently launched a report and blog on AI Acceleration, which reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic may have spurred a significant increase in the use of AI and other digital enablers among manufacturers. We will continue this thought leadership in the summit.

Hear from forward-thinking business executives as they discuss the latest trends and the future of the industry. Participate in focused sessions and gain game-changing insights that dive deep into customer experience, product development, manufacturing operations, and supply chain operations.

APAC Technical Series | June 22 - 24, 2021

IT and business professionals located in the Asia Pacific region can continue their cloud technology learnings by taking part in a three-day deep-dive into the latest data and machine learning technologies. This event will help you harness data and unlock innovation to build, iterate, and scale faster and with confidence.

Security Summit | July 20, 2021

At Google Cloud Security Summit, security professionals can learn why many of the world’s leading companies trust Google Cloud infrastructure, and how organizations can leverage Google’s cloud-native technology to keep their organization secure in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments.

During the opening keynote, engaging sessions, and live Q&A, customers will learn about how our Trusted Cloud can help them build a zero-trust architecture, implement shared-fate risk management, and achieve digital sovereignty. Join us to hear from some of the most passionate voices exploring how to make every day safer with Google. Together, we’ll reimagine how security should work in the cloud.

Retail & Consumer Goods Summit | July 27, 2021

Are you ready for the continued growth in digital shopping? Do you understand how leveraging AI and ML can improve your business? Join your peers and thought leaders for engaging keynotes and breakout sessions designed for the Retail and CPG industries at our upcoming Retail and Consumer Goods Summit on July 27th.

You’ll learn how some of the world’s leading retail and consumer goods companies like Ulta, Crate & Barrel, Albertsons, IKEA, and L’Oreal are using Google Cloud AI, machine learning, and data analytics technology to accelerate their digital transformation. In addition, we’ll share announcements on new products and solutions to help retailers and brands succeed in today’s landscape.

Now available on demand

Data Cloud Summit | May 26, 2021

In case you missed it, check out content from the Google Data Cloud Summit, which featured the launch of three new solutions - Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream - to provide organizations with a unified data platform. The summit also featured a number of engaging discussions with customers including Zebra Technologies, Deutsche Bank, Paypal, Wayfair and more.

Watch on-demand now: Global

Financial Services Summit | May 27, 2021

We launched Datashare at the Financial Services Summit; this solution is designed to help capital markets firms share market data more securely and efficiently. Attendees can also view sessions on a range of topics including sustainability, the future of home buying, embedded finance, dynamic pricing for insurance, managing transaction surges in payments, the market data revolution, and more. Customers such as Deutsche Bank, BNY Mellon, HSBC, Credit Suisse, PayPal, Global Payments, Roostify, AXA, Santander, and Mr Cooper shared their insights as well.

Watch on-demand now: NORTHAM & EMEA

We have also recently launched several new blog posts tied to the Financial Services Summit:

Applied ML Summit | June 10, 2021

The Google Applied ML Summit featured a range of sessions to help data scientists and ML engineers explore the power of Google’s Vertex AI platform, and learn how to accelerate experimentation and production of ML models. Besides prominent Google AI/ML experts and speakers, the event also featured over 16 ML leaders from customers and partners like Spotify, Uber, Mr. Cooper, Sabre, PyTorch, L’Oreal, Vodafone and WPP/Essence.

Watch on-demand now: Global

Why retailers should run in our trusted cloud

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Whether they were ready for it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed many retailers into digital businesses. Retailers made huge investments into commerce technologies, customer experience tools, sales and fulfillment technology, and improving digital experiences to continue providing their goods and services to their customers. Now, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, digital retail is the new normal. In fact, many retailers are planning on expanding their digital investments. However, as their digital footprint expands, so do their threats and security concerns.

As a digital-focused retailer, your website is the most visible part of your attack surface. Your website is where your customers search for goods or services, make payments, or learn more about your brand. However, your website does not operate in isolation. There is an underlying infrastructure as well as the services that run on top of it that need protection from a wide array of attacks that may seek to compromise your data, internal employees, business, and customers. During this week’s Google Cloud Retail Summit, we’ve shared why Google Cloud is built to be the most trusted cloud for retailers. From providing you with control over your data as you move from your own data centers to the public cloud to giving you built-in technology to protect your applications all the way to your end users, Google Cloud helps you safely migrate to and operate in our Trusted Cloud.

Trusted Cloud Gives You Control, Transparency, and Sovereignty

Access Transparency: We offer the ability to monitor and approve access to your data or configurations by Google Cloud support and engineering based on specific justifications and context, so you have visibility and control over insider access.
Certificate Authority Service (CAS): CAS is a highly scalable and available service that simplifies and automates the management and deployment of private CAs while meeting the needs of modern developers and applications. With CAS, you can offload to the cloud time-consuming tasks associated with operating a private CA, like hardware provisioning, infrastructure security, software deployment, high-availability configuration, disaster recovery, backups, and more, allowing you to stand up a private CA in minutes, rather than the months it might normally take to deploy.

Confidential Computing: We already encrypt data at-rest and in-transit, but customer data needs to be decrypted for processing. Confidential Computing is a breakthrough technology which encrypts data in-use—while it’s being processed. Confidential VMs take this technology to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. With the beta launch of Confidential VMs, we’re the first major cloud provider to offer this level of security and isolation while giving you a simple, easy-to-use option for your newly built and “lift and shift” applications.

Cloud Key Management: We allow you to configure the locations where your data is stored, where your encryption keys are stored, and where your data can be accessed from. We give you the ability to manage your own encryption keys, even storing them outside Google’s infrastructure. Using our External Key Management service, you have the ability to deny any request by Google to access encryption keys necessary to decrypt customer data at rest for any reason.

Trusted cloud Helps You Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Threats

BeyondCorp Enterprise is Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering. Google has over a decade of experience managing and securing cloud applications at a global scale, and this offering was developed based on learnings from our experience managing our own enterprise, feedback from customers and partners, as well as informed by leading engineering and security research. We understand that most customers host resources across different cloud providers. With this in mind, BeyondCorp Enterprise was purpose-built as a multicloud solution, enabling customers to securely access resources hosted not only on Google Cloud or on-premises, but also across other clouds such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Armor: We’re simplifying how you can use Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, you will get access to DDoS and WAF services, curated rule sets, and other services for a predictable monthly price.

Chronicle: Chronicle is a threat detection solution that identifies threats, including ransomware, at unparalleled speed and scale. Google Cloud Threat Intelligence for Chronicle surfaces highly actionable threats based on Google’s collective insight and research into Internet-based threats. Threat Intel for Chronicle allows you to focus on real threats in the environment and accelerate your response time.
Google Workspace Security: Used by more than five million organizations worldwide, from large banks and retailers with hundreds of thousands of people to fast-growing startups, Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education include the collaboration and productivity tools found here. Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education are designed to help teams work together securely in new, more efficient ways, no matter where members are located or what device they use. For instance, Gmail scans over 300 billion attachments for malware every week and prevents more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching users. We’re committed to protecting against security 1 threats of all kinds, innovating new security tools for users and admins, and providing our customers with a secure cloud service.
Identity & Access Management IAM: Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage Google Cloud resources centrally. For enterprises with complex organizational structures, hundreds of workgroups, and many projects, IAM provides a unified view into security policy across your entire organization, with built-in auditing to ease compliance processes.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise: reCAPTCHA has over a decade of experience defending the internet and data for its network of more than 5 million sites. reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds on this technology with capabilities, such as two-factor authentication and mobile application support, designed specifically for enterprise security concerns. With reCAPTCHA Enterprise, you can defend your website against common web-based attacks like credential stuffing, account takeovers, and scraping and help prevent costly exploits from malicious human and automated actors. And, just like reCAPTCHA v3, reCAPTCHA Enterprise will never interrupt your users with a challenge, so you can run it on all webpages where your customers interact with your services.

Security Command Center: With Security Command Center (SCC), our native posture management platform, you can prevent and detect abuse of your cloud resources, centralize security findings from Google Cloud services and partner products, and detect common misconfigurations, all in one easy-to-use platform. We have Premium tier for Security Command Center to provide even more tools to protect your cloud resources. It adds new capabilities that let you spot threats using Google intelligence for events in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) logs and containers, surface large sets of misconfigurations, perform automated compliance scanning and reporting. These features help you understand your risks on Google Cloud, verify that you’ve configured your resources properly and safely, and document it for anyone who asks.

VirusTotal: VirusTotal inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content. Any user can select a file from their computer using their browser and send it to VirusTotal.

Web Risk API: With Web Risk, you can quickly identify known bad sites, warn users before they click infected links, and prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site. Web Risk includes data on more than a million unsafe URLs and stays up to date by examining billions of URLs each day.

Trusted cloud Plays an Active Role in Our Shared Fate

Our trusted cloud provides a shared-fate model for risk management. We stand with retailers from day one, helping them implement best practices for safely migrating to and operating in our trusted cloud.

We hope you enjoy the sessions we’ve created for you with Google Cloud Retail Summit and that they help you understand the ways our trusted cloud can help secure retailers all over the world.

How to grow brands in times of rapid change

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 16:00:00 +0000

2020 saw an unprecedented change in consumer behaviour around the world, with shoppers finding new ways of discovering, evaluating and buying products. This has created fresh expectations for both brands and retailers to drive consumer closeness, embrace the digital moment and transform their operations to be more agile and sustainable. These themes have been top of mind in my conversations with our CPG customers, and set the tone at Google Cloud Summit for Retail and Consumer Goods, which concluded this week. I couldn’t be more proud of our team and thankful for our customers that supported us by participating in our sessions and attending the event.

I joined Google Cloud in January 2021 after a long career in the CPG industry, and as I shared in my CPG keynote at the summit, I am thrilled to be helping bring the power of Google to drive industry innovation in CPG. At Google we call this ‘new normal’ the transformation cloud era, where we’re working with customers who want to not just save money on storage or compute, but to use cloud and digital technologies to drive agility across their business. I also call it the era of ‘consumer switching’, because Covid-19 has accelerated the likelihood of consumers to switch brands or the way they shop. Some of these changes are still happening; over 40% shoppers in a recent Google survey reported that in March 2021 they changed brands or shopped online for something they were previously buying in store.

At Google, we have an amazing team of strategists who have been researching, observing, and analyzing the many facets of consumer behavior over the last few years. In the opening keynote at the Summit Capturing the Hearts and Minds of Today's Consumers, Google’s Human Truths Team kicked off the Retail & Consumer Goods summit by sharing some of their consumer insights, including what behavior patterns they think will “stick” as we move into a post-pandemic world. I think these insights are especially relevant for brands, as they speak to some of our latest findings on the CPG shopper’s mindset.

Accenture estimates that there could be a 3 trillion dollar shift in value between companies as a result of consumers shifting brands and behaviours. While it is not known who the winners of the shift will be, one thing is certain - those who will be able to leverage data and analytics fastest will benefit the most from these times of rapid change. I shared some of the implications for the CPG industry in my keynote How to grow brands in times of rapid change along with the three key areas in which Google cloud is helping CPG companies drive brand success:

Unlocking consumer growth with data powered insights
Transforming go-to-market in the omnichannel ecosystem
Driving connected, efficient, and sustainable operations

Let’s take a quick look at each of them:

Unlocking consumer growth with data-powered insights

The digital marketing ecosystem is transforming for a privacy centric world, and brands are seeing a direct impact in marketing effectiveness. As the CPG industry becomes more consumer-centric and shifts more toward direct-to-consumer (D2C) business models, acquiring and activating consented first-party consumer data presents a clear opportunity to capitalize on new consumer demands.

As a result, CPGs are turning to consumer data platforms (CDPs) to help them unify, manage, enrich, and secure all of their disparate data from different marketing tools, website analytics, email campaigns, loyalty programs, and more. Google Cloud and our ecosystem of partners can help CPGs build a privacy-centric CDP which brings together all their customer and marketing data into a modern data warehouse, with built-in predictive data visualization tools and models. With a CDP built on Google Cloud, you can integrate data from Google Marketing Platform to drive predictive marketing and media effectiveness. And with pre-built connectors you can also easily integrate non-Google media and data from other enterprise platforms like SAP and Oracle to leverage consumer data for more integrated decision making. Democratize access to data across the organization with our Business Intelligence tool Looker to enable faster decisions in real-time from marketing to supply chain to product innovation.

At the Retail & CPG Summit we shared how retailers and brands can drive consumer closeness in a privacy-centric world featuring Procter & Gamble’s experience building and activating consumer data in a privacy-safe way to serve consumers better and maximize marketing effectiveness and drive growth across their business. And in a demo, Constellation Brands shared how they’re leveraging real-time data from several commercial sources using Looker to unpack insights and develop action plans.

Transforming go-to-market in the omnichannel ecosystem

Amidst COVID-19 restrictions and rolling lockdowns, ecommerce activity has surged past a point of no return. Direct to consumer (D2C) or digitally native brands were able to minimize consumers switching during the pandemic by offering a great online experience. While in-person shopping remains important, consumers are expecting more digital and omnichannel experiences and many will continue to explore new brands and purchase online. CPGs that want to maintain their market leadership can no longer afford to ignore the key role omnichannel capabilities will play in capturing the attention of both retailers and consumers. Even if D2C sales are not a big portion of your business, you will benefit from first-party data that can help you drive insights and product innovation.

CPG brands want to transform their older, clunky ordering processes into modern digital shopping experiences. Re-platforming legacy solutions on Google Cloud not only accelerates application innovation, but also makes it easier to quickly launch new features and products. At Google Cloud we have transformed ecommerce for large D2C brands and traditional retailers, so we know what a best in class D2C experience looks like. And we can bring it to your brands. We already help some of the biggest brands in retail modernize ecommerce and enhance product discovery with solutions like Visual Search and Recommendations AI. All of these can help you build a best in class omni channel presence for your brands.

We had several sessions on improving your omni channel experience, including

Why search abandonment is the metric that matters featuring Macy’s and Conversational Commerce with Google with Albertsons, where we shared how Google's conversational experiences can help consumers message businesses from wherever they are, and whenever they need them.

Driving connected, efficient, and sustainable operations

The superpowers of AI/ML are not just for marketing. Did you know that research from MIT and Google Cloud has found companies that use AI/ML can drive 2x more data-driven decisions, 5x faster decision making, and 3x faster execution? By connecting your operations in real time with demand signals like search, trends, weather, mobility and supercharging this data with AI and ML, you can make smarter and quicker business decisions. For example, you can use search trends to drive demand forecasting and ramp up manufacturing for popular products.

Google Cloud can help you modernize legacy business applications by migrating them to the cloud and using AI/ML and smart analytics to drive business outcomes. Take SAP for example - a Forrester study found that modernizing SAP with Google not only resulted in 56% more efficient IT teams - it also generated 160% 3-year ROI.

SAP data on Google Cloud breaks down silos across SAP, marketing, manufacturing systems, and external data sources for next-level intelligent operations. For example, with SAP and Google Cloud, you can combine product, media, CRM, digital commerce and site data from SAP and non-SAP sources to uncover stronger consumer insights and fuel product discovery along the path to purchase. You can merge SAP product and sales data with consumer, market data and Google geo trends to drive targeted promotion outcomes, maximizing the ROI of promotional dollars across retail channels. You can also integrate supply chain and manufacturing data from SAP systems with consumer, marketing and Google geo market data to improve demand forecasting and optimize supply chain logistics. The possibilities are endless. This is why we describe SAP modernization as The Gift That Keeps On Giving. Check out the session on SAP from the Summit and hear from Rodan + Fields on their experience of modernizing SAP on Google Cloud.

Another solution that excites me is Vertex AI, which transforms the demand forecasting process. Traditional demand forecasting accuracy is a challenge for most CPGs. Current forecasting methods do not take into account granular factors that impact demand, like local weather, demographics, or unforeseen events. With our recently launched Vertex Forecast, Google is making it much easier to start using cutting-edge machine learning models for demand forecasting. In our session Demand Forecasting: Time for Intelligence, Not Intuition featuring American Eagle Outfitters, we share how you can adopt a data science approach to demand forecasting that’s customized to your unique needs.

CPG organizations come to Google for help solving their toughest problems, whether it be driving new consumer growth, unlocking new routes to market, or building connected, sustainable operations. And we bring the best of Google: innovation, culture, infrastructure, AI/ML, and a deep understanding of consumer behaviour to help them build best-in-class brands.

I’d like to end with a topic that’s very close to my heart. This is around Solving for Sustainability in Retail and Consumer Goods. Our research shows that 62% of shoppers cared about at least one sustainability aspect when purchasing online in 2020. In addition, the events of the past year have triggered consumers to re-evaluate their relationships with brands and prioritize those that are more sustainable in the context of the pandemic. Watch this session to learn more about how retailers and consumer goods companies can leverage technology, data, and machine learning to help make sustainability a core part of the recovery.

All our session content is available on demand. Ready to learn more about how we’re helping CPG brands and manufacturers drive results? Learn more about Google Cloud’s consumer packaged good solutions and reach out to your Google Cloud sales executive to set up a deeper conversation on how we can help you grow your brands today and in the future.

Transforming the consumer goods industry with SAP on Google Cloud

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry was facing disruption. Consumers have come to expect personalized and seamless experiences at every point in their relationship with a brand. Additionally, consumers are expecting CPG brands to meet rising standards for sustainability, social responsibility, and transparency. Business models are shifting as well. Direct-to-consumer and subscription models have been gaining ground on traditional business models. Add in the CPG industry’s ever-present pressure for wider profit margins and the effects of the global pandemic, and you get a perfect storm of disruption.

Leading CPG companies are responding to these changes by capitalizing on the potential of emerging technologies and leveraging the power of the cloud to create digital enterprises. In doing so, they can unlock value through reduced operational costs, faster innovation, improved marketing ROI, and greater transparency and sustainability—among other benefits. For businesses that run on SAP, accessing these benefits requires creating a digital enterprise with SAP at its heart.

What CPG can expect from SAP on Google Cloud

SAP drives core business processes across most enterprise functions in CPG companies, and modernizing these operations is step one in unlocking next-level data and analytics capabilities. Creating a digital enterprise with SAP at the core requires establishing a digital foundation on a cloud platform capable of supporting and optimizing SAP workloads well into the future. From there, CPG companies can leverage the combination of SAP data and additional data signals to support high-value use cases utilizing the advanced analytics capabilities of the cloud

For CPG companies, running a successful digital enterprise in this climate depends on the power of the cloud because of the unmatched agility, security, scale, and flexibility offered by cloud technologies. More and more, consumer brands are turning to Google Cloud to host their applications—including core enterprise applications such as SAP—to drive business agility and maximize the value of data through smart analytics and machine learning. Google Cloud establishes a digital foundation for SAP customers by simplifying SAP deployments and offering a suite of applications that integrates with and enhances SAP functionality. A Forrester study on the total economic value of Google Cloud for SAP customers found an average payback of less than six months and a total ROI of over 160%. By turning to Google Cloud to run their SAP systems, companies are able to:

Maximize insights
CPG enterprise data is often fragmented across disparate systems. Google’s analytics tools including BigQuery and Looker allow businesses to connect customer, operational and business data at scale by unifying data from SAP systems with other Google data signals such as Ads, Maps, Shopping or Google Marketing Platform. This precious data is fully democratized, allowing for complex queries to be completed rapidly so companies can uncover and analyze insights and create an end-to-end view of the consumer and the business.

Create an intelligent organization
Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities allow businesses to create built-in intelligence. Instead of reacting to trends, they can accurately predict them. For marketing teams, this could be the ability to evaluate promotions and effectiveness of marketing spend. For forecasting, product quantities and restock timing can be better planned. Supply chain optimization can include external data sources to closely monitor inventory and eliminate stock outs.

Future-proof your business
Running SAP systems on Google Cloud creates an agile, secure and highly available environment that scales quickly as a business grows and as the CPG market evolves. A recent study conducted by IDC showed that SAP on Google Cloud deployments resulted in a 46% lower three-year cost of operations with 83% less frequent unplanned downtime and 56% more efficient IT teams. This frees IT resources to drive innovation and customer centricity.

Deliver on sustainability
Around the globe, consumers are becoming more and more demanding regarding sustainability. The impact of climate change and the abundance of plastic waste is only fueling this trend. Consumers are leaning into social signalling, and CPG companies are taking note. Sustainable IT is step #1, significantly advanced by moving applications to Google Cloud, the cleanest cloud in the industry. We've neutralized all of our carbon emissions since our founding in 1998 and matched 100% of our electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases since 2017. Google Cloud allows SAP enterprises to further drive sustainability compliance and business objectives with AI and ML tools that can drive down waste and provide real-time decision making power to support proactive green initiatives.

Rémy Cointreau is in high spirits after deploying SAP in the Google Cloud

Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned international maker of fine spirits, has products that can take up to one-hundred years to produce. But this long production cycle presents some unique challenges in today’s hyper-competitive premium beverage brands market. Since 1724, the company has been consumed with putting its customers first. In 2020, the company realized it was failing to capitalize on the benefits that the cloud can provide and began searching for a business partner that could help with this transformation.

Rémy Cointreau made the move to Google Cloud for many reasons. First, the company could connect its SAP backbone to key SaaS applications like Salesforce. This enabled the creation of a 360-view of data among its ecommerce platform, SAP, and Salesforce to deliver sophisticated customer experiences that reflect the heart of the brand. The Rémy Cointreau team quickly realized they now had the ability to be more agile in their finance, manufacturing, and supply chain functions with easy access to valuable SAP system data that drives decision-making. Sebastien Huet, the company’s CTO, explains: “Now that we’re fully deployed on Google Cloud Platform, anything is possible. We can pull data in from multiple sources via integration and analyze it in a matter of days. We don’t need a three-month project to see value.”

In today’s on-demand, omnichannel world, it's not enough for CPG brands to understand their consumers. For companies like Rémy Cointreau, it is mission-critical that they anticipate consumer preferences and deliver personalized experiences. The winners will be the companies that can reduce time to insights by treating all their data as strategic assets, breaking down data silos to enable real-time business intelligence. With SAP on Google Cloud, CPGs are transforming consumer relationships and business outcomes.

Are you ready to change how your CPG brand operates? Check out this video and read the Google Cloud for SAP CPG customer white paper and ebook. Learn more about how your peers are leveraging SAP on Google Cloud to evolve their businesses.

Google Cloud EMEA Retail & Consumer Goods Summit: The Future of Retail

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 17:00:00 +0000

The way consumers make their everyday decisions is evolving, as digital ways of working, shopping and communicating have become the new normal. So now it's more important than ever for companies in the retail sector to prioritise an insights-driven technology strategy and understand what's truly important for their customers.

Through its partnerships with some of the world's leading retailers and brands, Google Cloud provides solutions that address the retail sector's most challenging problems, whether it’s creating flexible demand forecasting models to optimize inventory or transforming e-commerce using AI-powered apps. Over the past few years, we've been observing and analyzing the many facets of changing consumer behaviour. We are here to support retailers and brands as they transform their businesses to adapt to this new landscape.

Featuring consumer research and insights from your peers, Google Cloud's Retail & Consumer Goods Summit will offer candid conversations to help you solve your challenges. We'll be joined by industry innovators, including Carrefour Belgium and L'Oréal, who'll discuss the future of retail and consumer goods.

Bringing together technology and business

The Google Cloud Retail & Consumer Goods Summit brings together technology and business insights, the key ingredients for any transformation. Whether you're responsible for IT, data analytics, supply chains, or marketing, please join! Building connections and sharing perspectives cross-functionally is important to reimagining yourself, your organization, or the world.

Capturing consumers with an insights-driven approach

At the Google Cloud Retail & Consumer Goods Summit, you can choose from sessions that are tailored specifically to retail or to consumer goods, as well as the following:

Keynote: Our Human Truths team will kick off the summit by sharing insights into consumers' hearts and minds to help inform your transformation strategy. Learn what consumer behaviors they think will be around for the long-term as we move into a post-pandemic world.

“Hey Google, Show Me the Future of Retail” (featuring Carrefour Belgium): The Retail landscape is challenging, changing and full of possibilities. Join us for a transparent conversation about transformation roadmaps and how retailers should be planning for the future.

How to Grow Brands in Times of Rapid Change (featuring L'Oréal): For consumer brands, this past year has been a catalyst of digital transformation that was already under way for several years. At Google, we’ve been closely studying a rapidly evolving landscape and will share with you our findings on where the high growth opportunities are for your brands so you can drive innovation across your organization.

You'll also be able to learn from experts who are leading transformations in their own sectors. These include German wholesaler METRO Digital, which is transforming the hospitality industry by making its digital solutions available to customers, and French retailer Maisons du Monde, which is taking a data-driven approach to personalize its customer experience.

Developing your transformation strategy

To round off the day, you are invited to join MasterChef 2020 winner Thomas Frake. While retailers are using cloud technology to forecast the hottest products on the shelves and avoid shortages, Thomas will demonstrate how to cook like a chef using ingredients that you should already have at home.

The Google Cloud Retail & Consumer Goods Summit will take place on Thursday, 22 April from 9:30am GMT+1. Please join us and register today by visiting our event landing page. You'll leave the day inspired and ready to start your transformation journey.

How sweet it is: Using Cloud AI to whip up new treats with Mars Maltesers

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Google Cloud AI is baked into our work with customers all over the world. We’ve partnered with organizations to use AI to make new predictions, automate business processes, forecast flooding and even combat climate change and chronic diseases. And sometimes, we even get to help our customers use AI to invent new things—tasty new things.

When legendary confectionery manufacturer Mars, Inc. approached us for a Maltesers + AI kitchen collaboration, we couldn’t resist. Maltesers are a popular British candy made by Mars. They have an airy malted milk center with a delicious chocolate coating. We saw this opportunity as a way to partner with a storied and innovative company like Mars and also a chance to showcase the magic that can happen when AI and humans work together.

Good AI, or good design for that matter, happens when human designers consider the capabilities of humans and technology, and strike the delicate balance between the two. In our case, our AI pastry chef offered a helpful assist to its creator—our very own amateur baker and ML engineer extraordinaire, Sara Robinson!

Hunkered down in 2020, Sara and millions of others started baking. And, like a good dough, that trend continues to rise. According to Google Search Trends, in 2021 baking was searched 44% more compared to the same time last year. Sara hopped on the home baking trend to investigate the relationship between AI and baking.

AI + Google Search trends create a quirky dessert

This time around, Sara trained a new ML model to generate recipes for cookies, cakes, scones, traybakes, and any hy-bread of these. Armed with a dataset of tried-and-true recipes, Sara set out to the kitchen to find ways to infuse her own creativity and Mars’ Maltesers into the model’s creation.

After hours of model training and baking experiments, Sara cleverly combined chopped and whole Maltesers with her model’s AI-optimized cake and cookie recipes to create a brand new dessert.

But the team didn’t want to stop there. Our recipe needed a creative twist to top it off. We searched for something savory, creamy, and UK-inspired that we could use to balance the sweet, crunchy Maltesers. Enter, Marmite-infused buttercream!

With some help from Google Search Trends, we discovered that one of the top searched questions recently regarding “sweet and salty” was “Is Marmite sweet or savory?” A popular savory spread in the UK, we decided to incorporate Marmite into our recipe. Sara headed back into the kitchen and whipped up a Marmite-infused buttercream topping. Yum!

So, how exactly did Sara build the model? She started by thinking more deeply about baking as an exact science.

Building a sweet model with TensorFlow and Cloud AI

Our goal for the project was to build a model that could provide the foundation for us to create a new recipe featuring Maltesers and Marmite. To develop a model that could produce a recipe, Sara wondered: what if the model took a type of baked good as input, and produced the amounts of the different ingredients needed to bake it?

Since Maltesers are primarily sold in the UK, we wanted the recipe to use ingredients common to British baking, like self-raising flour, caster sugar, and golden syrup. To account for this, Sara used a dataset of British recipes to create the model. The dataset consisted of four categories of popular British baked goods: biscuits (that’s cookies if you’re reading this in the US), cakes, scones, and traybakes. To create a cake recipe, for example, the model inputs and outputs would look like the following:

Sara looked to Google Cloud for the tooling to build this model, starting with Cloud AI Platform Notebooks for feature engineering and model development. Working in AI Platform Notebooks helped her identify areas where data preprocessing was needed. After visualizing the data and generating statistics on it, she realized she’d need to scale the model inputs so that all ingredient amounts fell within a standard range.

With data preprocessing complete, it was time to feed the data to a model. To build the model, Sara used TensorFlow’s Keras API. Rather than using trial and error to determine the optimal model architecture, she made use of AI Platform Hyperparameter Tuning, a service for running multiple training job trials to optimize a model’s hyperparameters. Once she found the ideal combination of hyperparameters, she deployed the model using AI Platform Prediction.

AI and human creativity: better together

The deployed model returns a list of ingredient amounts. If you’ve ever baked something, you know that this is far from a finished recipe. To complete the recipe, we needed to turn ingredient amounts into recipe steps, and find a creative way to incorporate both Maltesers and Marmite.

Our model was pretty good at predicting recipes for each of the distinct baked goods, but, thanks to the magic of its architecture, could also generate hybrids! The model’s best recipes were for biscuits and cake, which sparked the idea: what would happen if you combine two ML-generated recipes into a single dessert? The end result was a ML-generated cake batter sitting atop an ML-generated cookie.

We wanted the recipe to feature Mars’ Maltesers, and since the model outputs only included basic baking ingredients, deciding how to add Maltesers to the cake and biscuit recipes was up to us. Maltesers are delicious and versatile, so we decided to incorporate them in a few different ways. We chopped and incorporated them into the batter, and three whole Maltesers are hidden between the cake and biscuit:

Finally, to top off the dessert, Sara wanted to find a tasty way to include the salty addition of Marmite. After a few trials, she landed on a frosting combination that paired Marmite with a buttercream base and golden syrup (a popular ingredient in the UK). The final product features this sweet and salty frosting, made even better with extra Maltesers for garnish:

Digital experimentation is encouraged and embraced at Mars. “The ease and speed of bringing this idea to life has already sparked multiple ideas around the endless possibilities of how AI can bring innovation to the kitchen by creating a foundation for recipe development,” said Sam Chang, Global Head of Data Science & Advanced Analytics at Mars Wrigley. “We have long looked for ways to connect consumers with their favourite brands. By collaborating with the Cloud AI team, we discovered new avenues to inspire more creative cooking moments at home,” said Christine Cruz-Clarke, Marketing Director at Mars Wrigley UK.

Want to start baking?

The only thing left to do is bake! If you want to make Maltesers® AI Cakes (4d6172730a) at home, the recipe is below. And if making cake dough, cookie dough, and frosting sounds like a daunting task, you can make and enjoy any of these three components on their own (even the frosting, we won’t judge). When you make this, we’d love to see your creations. Share photos on Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BakeAgainstTheMachine.

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Harvesting success:

Cultivating a future of innovation in agriculture with Cloud SQL for SQL Server:

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Analyzing campaign performance in near real time

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#2 Strong focus on data quality and personalization

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2. Make your values clear and consistent.

3. Develop sustainability practices and communicate their impact to everyday people.

4. Reward customer loyalty.

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Fresh updates: Google Cloud 2021 Summits

Upcoming events

Government & Education Summit | Nov 3-4, 2021

Digital Manufacturer Summit | June 22, 2021

APAC Technical Series | June 22 - 24, 2021

Security Summit | July 20, 2021

Retail & Consumer Goods Summit | July 27, 2021

Now available on demand

Data Cloud Summit | May 26, 2021

Financial Services Summit | May 27, 2021

Applied ML Summit | June 10, 2021

Save the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12-14, 2021

Why retailers should run in our trusted cloud