Great expectations
So did her predecessor. In a 2019 internal email (disclosed as part of the antitrust trial that wrapped up on May 3), Google’s former head of its ads business Jerry Dischler gave a sense of the pressure that the advertising division was under to meet Wall Street’s expectations. “If we don’t hit plan,” he wrote “… we get punished pretty badly in the market.”
But Srinivasan insisted: “I have never felt any kind of external pressure to do anything just for revenue.”
Even so, the expectations of the job are obviously there. Revenue, Srinivasan said, is “one aspect of it. [But] it is also a social responsibility because of the role ads play in society [and] for all the businesses we support—especially the smaller businesses and businesses run by marginalized communities. For them, it’s harder to be discovered.”
She added: “if you care about your user—in my case, both consumers as well as advertisers—it gives you energy and motivation.”
Nazli Alagheband, who’s now Srinivasan’s chief of staff, picked up on these qualities when she first saw Srinivasan host a town hall in 2019.
“The thing that’s unique about Vidya is she’s able to go from the highest level of [talking about] how a product is used with our advertisers, all the way down to the code level, and in a very graceful way,” said Alagheband. “She’s engineer, product manager, customer support agent and salesperson all at the same time.”
The challenges accumulate
While Google still has a grip on some 90% of the search market, it is no longer an unassailable monolith. According to marketing platform SOCi, 62% of Gen Zers searching for something use TikTok and 67% turn to Instagram. “Amazon is also a search engine,” said Sujata Ramnarayan, marketing lecturer at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, “and if people start using ChatGPT more, that itself becomes a search engine.”
There’s also Perplexity AI—part chatbot, part search engine—whose backers include Jeff Bezos. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has told Reuters that “Google is going to be viewed as something that’s legacy and old.”
Srinivasan is quick to say that Google’s challengers are many: “More than ever, people have an incredible amount of options.” But she maintains that “continuous innovation and evolution”—and the Search Generative Experience specifically—will allow Google to hold onto its ground.
Another issue looming large on Srinivasan’s horizon is Google’s replacement for the third-party cookie, a means of tracking consumers that privacy advocates have forced into retirement. The Privacy Sandbox, Google’s collection of tools intended to take the cookie’s place, is generating mixed reviews. In April, Google had to delay cookie deprecation for a third time, pushing back the deadline to 2025.
Srinivasan said that “the team … are trying to reconcile the feedback across industry regulators and developers. When that happens, we’ll be ready with our Sandbox offerings.”
Meanwhile, Srinivasan must also contend with conflicting views advertisers have about Google’s AI-powered ad tools, which can “be used to choose or generate creative assets—engaging text, eye-catching images and compelling videos,” Srinivasan wrote in a March post for Think With Google.