Google Search Honours Awards 2024 host, search strategy lead at Google Canada, Aidan Wilks, kicks off the celebration at Evergreen Brick Works on November 14th.

On November 14th, the second annual Google Search Honours Awards brought together the country’s top Canadian performance marketers and their agency partners. The awards celebrate marketers using AI-powered search marketing to find new and innovative ways to drive meaningful business impact.

This year, a total of six gold winners were chosen from a list of 25 nominees across three awards categories: Measurement & Analytics Leadership, Performance Marketing Excellence (each with separate awards for mid-sized and large organizations) and AI Top Honours, which included the coveted AI Agency of the Year and AI Marketer of the Year awards. 

“This evening is all about seeing marketers and AI working in harmony,” said Aidan Wilks, search strategy lead at Google Canada. “This year’s theme – Symphony of Innovation – is a reflection of the best in class performance marketers in Canada using a mix of AI and their own creativity to achieve outstanding business results. Congratulations to the winners for their leadership in AI-powered search marketers and we hope they serve as an inspiration for others along their AI adoption journey.”

Check out some key highlights in the sizzle reel from the Google Search Honours Awards:

All of the evening’s nominees were winners – but six cases really stood out. Read on to find out who took home gold and what elevated their use of AI-powered search marketing to gold status. 

Koho’s small and resourceful team led the way to gold in the Measurement & Analytics Leadership category for mid-sized organizations, which used predictive AI modeling to anticipate customer value based on online and offline data. Koho set up experiments that helped drive more high-value customers at a lower cost, achieving remarkable results.

Koho accepting the Measurement & Analytics Leadership Award.

The gold award for Measurement & Analytics Leadership, large-sized organizations, went to Lululemon Athletica for taking AI-powered first-party data and putting it to work across its measurement “trifecta.” The team combined audiences, propensity modeling, omnichannel bidding and value definitions, all to make smarter decisions that drive business results.

Lululemon Athletica accepting the Measurement & Analytics Leadership Award.

Triton and their agency Pulsion took home gold (mid-sized organization) in the Performance Marketing Excellence category, for building a culture of testing and learning – refining their budgeting approach to position marketing as a profitable growth engine for the business.

Triton | Pulsion accepting the Performance Marketing Excellence Award.

The gold for Performance Marketing Excellence for large-sized organizations went to Hyundai Auto and their agency Innocean for tackling a challenge many of us are familiar with: bringing stakeholders along for the ride. They thoughtfully engaged stakeholders – not just in their headquarters but around the country – to rethink silos and improve agility.

Hyundai Auto Canada | Innocean Canada accepting the Performance Marketing Excellence Award.

The 2024 AI Agency of the Year award went to Saatchi & Saatchi / Synergize for consistently demonstrating thought leadership in performance marketing and AI. They tested new products, delivered new insights, and developed best practices for all of their clients.

Saatchi & Saatchi / Synergize accepting the AI Agency of the Year Award.

For the highly anticipated AI Marketer of the Year award, the awards saw its only double winner, Lululemon Athletica for embodying a true innovative mindset. The brand modernized its customer journey with AI, built its own Large Language Model, and achieved even more efficient growth – and the team scaled it all from Canada to the US.

Lululemon Athletica accepting the AI Marketer of the Year Award. 

“We’re thrilled to see how this year’s winners unlocked growth and creativity using Google’s AI tools”, said Sabrina Geremia, vice president and country managing director at Google Canada. “They were able to successfully scale business with speed and meet their customers where they are in this complex marketing ecosystem with multiple touchpoints. We congratulate them on leading the charge in AI-powered search marketing as collectively we are all pushing the industry forward in this new age of AI.”

Overall, the awards gala was an immersive experience centered on the potential unlocked when human creativity and AI technology come together. Guests enjoyed an evening filled with music courtesy of the Toronto Concert Orchestra, including a two-minute piece that they co-composed with MusicFX (powered by Google’s MusicLM). This experimental performance underscored the evening’s core themes: embracing new thinking, experimenting with technologies like AI, and pushing creative boundaries.

Over the past 25 years, across many technological shifts, Google has continued to reimagine and expand what Search can do. And now, with generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined. One example of this is AI Overviews, which was first launched in May, and gradually rolled out expanding availability to more countries and more languages in a deliberate and responsible way. AI Overviews is now available in Canada – helping users search the web in a whole new way.

Huge congratulations to the Silver and Bronze winners for the innovative and impactful ways that they’ve leveraged AI-powered tools to maximize results.Please keep an eye out for announcements in early spring 2025 for more details about the next awards cycle.

Photography by Uptown Media and videography by Plot