Take a look at the opening keynote from Neal here

The best analogy of the two days was from Neal Mohan who likened the web to the old style stack we would have at home in music and TV. We would layer on more and more pieces of tech, with music systems, game consoles, and more recently the likes of Apple TV and Google TV.

We work hard to make it all appear seamless and sometimes it all works but often it involves getting on your knees and digging around behind the TV to swap plugs and find wires, we all know that experience. The web has been like this generally with a constant stream of extra tech layers to integrate and ad serve and ultimately try and track.

Google have been guilty of this within their own ecosystem with Dart Search, DFA, google Analytics and more recently Invite and Terracent. They have been on quite a journey, the first part of that has been improving the individual products. Dart Search had a 50% dissatisfaction rate which is now down to sub 10% and you can see why. The system improvements have been significant.

The next stage has been how they work together and this is the real win and the approach that feels like Google are tightening the noose on the competition. The fully integrated stack is something genuinely powerful and will be a big sales point. The inter connections between exchange trading, search, remarketing Ad creation and analytics are going to revolutionise how we buy in both search and exchanges. We are seeing a world where you still have ten devices on your Tv table and yet only one wire and it all just works.

These two days have shown a frictionless web, a world where one tag, one consumer is all we are working with avoiding the dedup issues and discrepancy issues and allowing us to build comms strategies around a true single view. Google have been challenged by the industry to improve and to some it may have come a little too slowly but I believe they have learned their lessons. The Invite 2.0 releases are an example of where they did not want to repeat a Doubleclick scenario.

The chance to discuss with the Product Managers all the new developments both in the sessions and in the bar make this a pretty unique session. Thanks to Google for the Invite.(excuse the pun)